“The future,” Cross replies, and shortly thereafter, rationalizing a yet more evil crime, he says, “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.”
To control the future, be it one’s own or an entire country’s, and to possess seemingly unlimited power to realize one’s whims—these are seductive goals for a certain type of person, and one needn’t disavow free-market capitalism to ask whether this is a type of person to be admired or emulated. Most of us are like Jake: We can think of a number, hit it, and be satisfied with the good things it provides. The husband and wife in Jonathan Dee’s icily frightening The Privileges, Adam and Cynthia Morey, would regard us with all the respect due to insect larvae.
Adam, who is making money hand over fist in private equity, embodies the objection the very rich have to those who object to the very rich: It isn’t about the money, it’s about what you can do with it. The unwashed and undereducated masses, maxing out their credit cards at Best Buy, look at the ruling class and mutter darkly about how money is the root of all evil. The rich know better: Radix malorum est cupiditas means greed is the root of all evil (“love of money,” in the original Greek). Greed equals Ebenezer Scrooge stacking his gold sovereigns, or Scrooge McDuck executing triple gainers into his pool of coins. Greed isn’t “following your dreams,” which children of every class are urged to do from the moment they can reason.
What you can do with money, in Adam’s mind, is make more of it; his wife seems to value it primarily insofar as it enables social dominance and the pursuit of novelty. Both pay lip service to the need to provide their children, April and Jonas, with everything, but the reader can’t help feeling—as he may have had occasion to in real life—that this is merely a convenient and palatable excuse for wealth. When one is as rich as Adam Morey, his children are de facto provided with everything, materially and educationally speaking. Precious little extra effort is required.
Jonathan Dee’s special brilliance is in depicting a new, and fairly widespread, conception of the ideal American family: It is competitive (don’t bother trying to keep up with these Joneses), but also irreproachable (Cynthia is heavily involved in charity, which has more to do with preempting criticism and ostentatiously wielding power than it does with a desire to be charitable). It gives its children wonderful opportunities and experiences (to say nothing of things), but few, if any, bothersome challenges. Christopher Hitchens was once asked in an interview: “What kind of world do you want your children to inherit?” His response—“Struggle”—would be unintelligible to the Moreys and, indeed, to most twenty-first-century Americans, rich or poor.
The book begins with a marvelously imagined chapter about the Moreys’ wedding in Pittsburgh, which tells us exactly what these children, born of and for privilege, will grow up to be. Neither is nervous or hesitant; neither seems to attach much gravitas to the day. Cynthia vanishes to a bar with her maid of honor, without a trifle of concern for the anxiety this causes her family. For Cynthia’s mother,
what’s worst . . . is her full awareness, even at a moment like this, of her daughter’s supreme, blithe competence. In another few minutes, with no word from her, they will have to proceed to the Athletic Club for the photo session . . . . Ruth knows, in her heart of hearts, that Cynthia will be there. Of course there will be no real disaster: instead there will be the vindication of that refusal to take any of it seriously, to treat respectfully the day that marked the end of motherhood. Till death do us part. Big joke.
The Moreys have joined together not in spirit so much as in the spirit of calculating partnership. Later in the book, when Cynthia is surrounded by men at a party, she drunkenly bludgeons them with their inferiority to her husband. It isn’t love the reader senses, but self-love. Adam and Cynthia are perfect for each other because they amplify and enable each other’s grotesque expectations. They make each other’s dreams come true; they never suspect how limited those dreams really are.
Adam becomes involved in insider trading, but the reader knows that no real disaster will come of this. Dee reminds us that hubris sometimes goes unpunished, albeit only in the sense grasped by the hubristic. The Moreys, in effect, get away with it: They never face the consequences of their cupidity; their willful, almost principled insularity; their contempt for and manipulation of those outside their familial orbit. Anyone disappointed by this outcome is blinkered by the very mentality that motivates these monsters.
The Moreys accomplish nothing that matters. They forge no real friendships. When Cynthia acts as surrogate mother to a troubled, abused classmate of her daughter, we sense it is mainly for the high of being hip, approachable. She treats actual family—her stepsister, her dying father’s girlfriend—with inhuman and nauseatingly credible disdain. Even the Moreys’ love for each other, which their otherwise perceptive son describes as “epic,” wavers between the mercenary and the masturbatory.
Their two children are the soundest case against them. April’s reptilian intelligence is deployed only in defense of hedonism. She tells her artistic brother, who, once he is old enough to choose, insists on personal austerity, that “life has given [him] the gift of possibility, and the real arrogance is wasting it so [he] can condescend to everyone else.” Jonas, the only admirable member of this horrid family, has developed morally not by imitating but by rejecting his parents’ behavior, by intuiting their deeper failure.
Jonas’s creative bent doesn’t read as shorthand for moral superiority. It is precisely because this rebellion is so predictable that the reader comes to admire it: He’s doing the best he can under the circumstances. It is as though Jonas, released at last from the moral and spiritual Skinner box of his upbringing, is squinting and blinking into a new light, letting his eyes adjust to it—and it is beautiful to behold.
Dee’s novel is grand in scope, tracking the Moreys from their marriage to their children’s young adulthood. His prose lingers on his subjects, if not lovingly, at least lyrically. But the strength of The Privileges lies in its understatement. There are no catastrophes. Adam doesn’t go to prison. April emerges mostly unscathed from a drug-fueled car crash. Jonas escapes from a frightening encounter with a disturbed “outsider” artist. Such modestly scaled intrusions of bad luck feel like real life, not like a potted plot.
Which brings us to Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic—one is tempted to call the novel, which takes its name from the fictitious bank imploding within its pages, a ripped-from-the-headlines sort of book. This is incorrect on two counts. One, much of it was written prior to what we call the Financial Crisis. (How rarely novelists understand, let alone predict, such seismic activity!) The other is that Union Atlantic, insofar as it is topical, feels less “ripped” than “surgically extracted” from recent history. It is careful, capable, and empathetic, not some carpetbagging run on other people’s tragedies.
Yet it is anything but understated. Haslett is, in the comparatively small-stakes sphere of contemporary fiction, as much of a risk-taker as his protagonist, the banker and former soldier Doug Fanning. Many of Haslett’s decisions feel like overreaching: the Dickensian plot contrivances, such as making Fanning’s meddling next-door neighbor the sister of the president of the New York Federal Reserve; or giving said neighbor two dogs which speak—please don’t stop reading—in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X; or naming a character “McTeague,” the kind of “joke” that exists solely so Terry Gross can acknowledge it in a radio interview.
When an author commits such elementary errors of judgment and the resulting book not only works but also whistles along at fiber-optic speed, he deserves to be fêted as a real talent. Union Atlantic is proof that the distinction between a beach read and a work of literary fiction was invented to benefit storytellers who can’t write and intellectuals who couldn’t tell a knock-knock joke in one try if there was instant tenure riding on it.
Haslett’s storytelling is grade-A. We meet his anti-hero, Doug, on the deck of the USS Vincennes (CG-49), which has shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing everyone on board. (Eight pages of taut, action-oriented prose in a book that has nothing to do with military themes!) We find Doug again roughly a decade later, in January 2001, buying a McMansion. He is a thriving young banker, and it is his monument to success and excess that raises the hackles of his neighbor, Charlotte Graves, a former high-school history teacher squeezed out of her job for being too “controversial.”
This attempt to paint Charlotte as an outsider or radical is worth pausing to consider, because it is Haslett’s most significant dereliction of authorial duty. Here is Charlotte tutoring Nate Fuller, the homosexual youth who will enter into a sexual affair with Doug Fanning:
“That’s precisely what’s become so endemic. That cheap, mindless relativism . . . . It’s an abandonment of the Enlightenment. All in the name of individualism . . . I was run out of my job on this sort of hogwash. The whole four-hundred-year effort sacrificed on the altar of the inoffensive. It’s unspeakable.”“Right,” Nate said . . .
“. . . You’re agreeing with me because you think that’s what I want. That’s the problem. Do you think I was the one who brought The Autobiography of Malcolm X into the classroom? . . . It was students, black students God forbid . . . who told me they’d stop coming to class if I didn’t assign it as a counterpoint to King and the nonviolent wing of the movement. And more power to them. They were right.”
Anyone who believes a teacher could be fired for bringing Malcolm X into the classroom must have napped through the dark ages of Howard Zinn and, ahem, “cheap, mindless relativism.” In his haste to demonstrate that Americans have become empty-headed and money-obsessed, Haslett glosses over the all-important fact that this happened in tandem with a disingenuous obsession with the underdog. Indeed, it couldn’t have happened any other way: a feigned concern for the poor in pocket paved the way for our financial ruin. Does “Community Reinvestment Act” ring any bells?
But Haslett needs a suitably manic and idealistic foil for the cynical, hard-headed Fanning, and Charlottes Graves fits the bill. She is a complex character, irritating, self-righteous, and sympathetic, like any real-life teacher worth her certificate. Her final goal in life is to pull the land out from under Doug’s house. It was bequeathed to the town by her father, and she is convinced the town had no right to sell it to Doug.
Haslett’s depiction of the lives of well-to-do young people should earn him high honors. He undertstands that they are well-educated and knowing without being wise or moral. Nate’s father is a suicide, but this is not offered as an excuse or explanation for Nate’s behavior; he is, like most teenagers, pleasure-seeking because pleasure feels good.
Where The Privileges is a character study, Union Atlantic is, to some degree, a ripping yarn—so, no spoilers. Suffice it to say that Charlotte Graves gets her day in court, despite Doug Fanning’s grisly manipulations of her young pupil, Nate Fuller. And it’s no spoiler to reveal that Doug is riding for a fall. Union Atlantic is, in ways that The Privileges is not, a morality tale. Or perhaps it’s a legality tale, since it’s fairly clear at the end that Fanning has changed not a jot.
For a truly moral, metaphysical, transformational tale, we must turn to Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed. This is not a book about finance; its doomed hero, Tim Farnsworth, a partner at a Manhattan law firm, is probably in the same tax bracket as Morey and Fanning, but he does nothing wrong to get there. In fact, the case that preoccupies him for much of the book is the defense of a convincted uxoricide whom we are led to believe is innocent. Farnsworth is a devoted husband but not much of a father; it’s hard to fault him for the latter, since Ferris does such a fine job of drawing Farnsworth’s sulky, inscrutable (dreadlocked, guitar-noodling) daughter.
The “unnamed” is Farnsworth’s chronic, unexplained illness, which compels him to walk to the point of exhaustion. This may sound like a preposterous conceit, but stranger things have happened, and Ferris is exhaustive in considering the possible causes and real-life implications of such a malady:
Once he ran with the goal to exhaust himself. Maybe there was no slowing down, but he could speed up. He could move his head, his limbs—hell, he could dance so long as he kept moving forward. Like a stutterer in song. He juked and huffed around casual city walkers until he was in New Jersey and his lungs hit a wall and he stopped. But his legs, he realized at once, had every intention of continuing.
There are heartbreaking scenes of Farnsworth handcuffed or strapped to a bed, scissoring his legs beneath the sheets, sweating and cursing like a madman. His selfish daughter thinks he’s faking it until she follows him one day; his Penelope-like wife, Jane, does everything in her power to accommodate him. The doorman at his office building reveals the moment he suspected Farnsworth’s condition, which is kept secret from his colleagues for as long as possible: He recalls the day Farnsworth knocked down a child and kept going, without even looking back.
Ferris, whose debut, Then We Came to the End, was unanimously and rightly praised, tackles the mind-body problem in a way that a more programmatic writer like Richard Powers—who has written novels about, for instance, Capgras delusion and the genetic basis of happiness—can only dream of.
The disease comes and goes without warning. We follow Farnsworth’s impatience with clueless doctors, but sympathize nonetheless with those doctors’ earnest desire to help him. We feel his guarded hope when bizarre treatment options are presented to him. In one devastating, cringe-making scene, he barges into a courtroom wearing a ridiculous piece of brain-scanning headgear, only to find midway through his opening arguments that his legs are on the move again.
It’s possible that Ferris made his fictional victim rich because this opened up more possibilities for treatment. Then again, because of Farnsworth’s unusual wealth, The Unnamed is a powerful exploration of how ill-equipped we are for the inevitable, regardless of our station in life. It’s one thing for a rich man to make peace with the fact that the Reaper might snatch him from an easy chair, a tumbler of Laphroaig 10 Year tumbling across the carpet. It’s another for him to learn the hard way that the body can revolt at any time, in any number of gruesome ways, and that this may have unexpected effects on the mind as well.
The marriage of Tim and Jane Farnsworth gives us an “in sickness” for Adam and Cynthia Morey’s “in health,” and ought to be required reading for newlyweds. These vows, taken to their traditional conclusion, mean that walking down the aisle might one day entail walking the plank, that the knot you tie may end up around your neck. Is this to disparage the institution? Of course not. But rarely in fiction does one come across a marriage so complex, tragic, and admirable as this one.
You’d have to take a putty knife to the barrel-bottom of despair to scrape up horrors worse than those Tim Farnsworth suffers: frostbite and mummified toes; madness; an attempted rape (while sleeping, exhausted, in a vacant lot in Newark) at the hands of someone or something out of The Hills Have Eyes. The indignities visited upon Milo Burke, the sad-sack office drone at the center of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, aren’t so terrible, but he lacks the money or strength of will or devoted wife he’d need to endure them.
Losers are Lipsyte’s speciality. His filthy-funny Home Land (2004) gave us Lewis Miner, who “did not pan out,” and who was nicknamed “Teabag” long before it was a term of opprobrium acceptable, if not compulsory, on cable news. Home Land, structured as a series of updates rejected by Miner’s high school alumni newsletter, was rejected, New York magazine reported, by just shy of three dozen publishers before its paperback-only release. It seems that the folks who select new fiction empathize with the Other, just not the Other that sat next to them in pre-calc and never had the good taste to pursue Gap Year self-reinvention in the south of France. Who knew?
Thanks to Home Land’s word-of-halitotic-mouth success, Lipsyte’s whining voice, vacillating between defeated and angry, can no longer be ignored. The Ask, like Home Land, is what the comments section of your average blog would be like were the Cheetos-dusted fingertips of American failure propelled by honesty, reflection, and humor rather than dumb fury.
Lewis Miner didn’t have much of a job—he wrote an internal newsletter for a soft-drinks corporation—but Milo Burke enjoys the relative security of a development office at a so-so university. He enjoys it, anyway, until he loses it on the daughter of a major donor (“her father had paid for our crappy observatory upstate”) for demanding that he get her into a class that is already fully booked. “My outburst,” he tells us, “was deemed hate speech, which called for my immediate dismissal. I could hardly argue with them. I think it probably was hate speech. I really fucking hated that girl.”
Burke is offered his job back, contingent on his wrangling an “ask,” or donor, Purdy Stuart, who’d been his friend in college before making it really, really big. Purdy is more interested in recruiting Burke to do the—extremely unpleasant, it turns out—work of delivering hush money to a bastard son, Don, who’s had his legs blown off in Iraq. Don, who is more deservingly bitter but less likeable than Milo Burke, is the sort of character who likely will be derided as “one-dimensional” or “insulting” by critics who themselves suspect many soldiers of being shell-shocked, paranoid “birthers.” This underscores the bubbing-magma subtext of The Ask, which is that modern life asks us to accept in silence an array of sickening conditions we could, at minimum, complain about.
Unlike many books lazily referred to as “provocative,” The Ask actually does provoke a great deal: the critical reception validates much of what Lipsyte and his surrogate are bitching about. Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Review of Books: “The Ask succeeds as a series of brilliant riffs and satirical set pieces, skewering progressive preschools, reality TV, Brooklyn hipsters, conceptual art, natural childbirth, self-righteous foodies, and politically correct office culture . . . . The targets are sometimes soft . . .”
Yes, they’re soft, practically marshmallow. Much of what is horrid in modern culture is soft, and it persists because people agree, inexplicably, bewilderingly, to leave the soft targets alone until they have expanded to the size of a Stay-Puft juggernaut bent on destroying the spirited and outraged among us. The Ask, and Lipsyte’s voice, are beyond upsetting and beyond, at times, disgusting. The book is, Schuesser says, “about what happens when the spinners of knowing, not-knowing riffs look around to find that everyone else has stopped listening and graduated to adulthood, whatever that is.”