Upon reading further into AHoNF, it became clear to me that the early chapters, involving scene-setting and character-introducing, represent a weaker aspect of Howells’ craft. These chapters feel wooden and perfunctory because they were written only out of necessity. Once the plot structure has been established, and the players trotted out, Howells can proceed with the substance of his work, that which truly moves him, which is the questioning of the American capitalist ideal. That Dryfoos pere is so well-rendered in the scene when he and March first meet shows that Howells is certainly capable of creating realistic dialogue and three-dimensional characters, as long as it is in the service of his ideas; as much as he seems to fancy himself a novelist of manners, Howells is occasionally guilty of allowing the struts of his underlying philosophy to poke through the overlaying artifice of real life he has constructed, making him seem more political didact than novelist.
Clearly, March is the mouthpiece for Howells. Speaking of the elder Dryfoos,
‘he has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That’s the way I phlosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.’[Modern Library Classics edition, pp. 224-225]