With the Procession

Chicago, 1895. The city is on the march, and everyone is trying to keep up. When Truesdale Marshall returns from Europe, his family sees a stranger dressed in foreign elegance, and wonders what happened to the boy they raised. But Truesdale sees something else in his rigid Chicago home: a world that hasn't moved in decades, headed nowhere his mother calls progress. At the novel's heart stands the magnificent Mrs. Granger Bates, a social queen who rose from a carpenter's daughter to command Chicago's elite, yet keeps a cramped room in her mansion filled with plain furniture from her girlhood. Opposing her is David Marshall, a wholesale grocer who has never given a thought to the 'procession' until he begins to ask what if it's going nowhere? Fuller writes with sharp precision about the choices between belonging and authenticity, between the comfort of old values and the seduction of new money. This is one of the first great American novels about city life, and it remains sharp enough to cut.