No Vaccine for Agony From
Viral E-Mail
By
JANET MASLIN
THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE
By Helen Schulman
222 pages. Harper. $24.99.
The readers to whom Helen Schulman’s novel “This Beautiful Life” will
most appeal are those who already know everything about it. Ms. Schulman holds
a mirror up to the lives of moneyed, elite New York private-school families and
invites such people to nod in recognition. In terms of a less provincial
audience “This Beautiful Life” should please anyone who enjoys seeing the
destruction of a happy family framed as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The cover
art depicts a house of cards. What might happen to that house of cards by the
time Ms. Schulman’s story of a calamitous prep-school sex scandal is over?
The “beautiful life” on these pages is that of the four Bergamots, who
have moved from a college town, where they were thriving, to the Upper West
Side of Manhattan, where they only appear to be thriving. (Big difference.)
Lizzie, the mother, shares some common ground with heroines of Ms. Schulman’s
other novels, especially “A Day at the Beach,” her much
more powerful and inexorable evocation of the effects of 9/11 on a TriBeCa
couple.
Lizzie is married to a handsome, powerful, commanding guy. She is Jewish
and a worrier; he is neither. She is a former art historian who has sacrificed
her career on the altar of motherhood, even though she might not put it that
way. But Lizzie notices that “a lot of formers” belong to the Wildwood PTA.
Wildwood Upper and Lower are the schools that the two Bergamot children
attend. Jake, at the Upper School, is a naïve 15-year-old still trying to
figure out where he fits into its stratified social structure. The Upper School
is in Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, but it draws a large, spoiled,
party-hopping Park Avenue demographic.
In the same school’s Manhattan kindergarten, meanwhile, Jake’s feisty
little sister, Coco, is a former Chinese orphan who is now a privileged and socially
unstoppable New Yorker. The book does its heaviest foreshadowing about Jake via
a lavish mother-daughter sleepover birthday party that sends Lizzie and Coco to
the Plaza Hotel. “The mothers swapped sex stories while the little girls gave
each other makeovers, heavy on the eye makeup, until they looked like miniature
Russian whores,” Ms. Schulman writes, for this will be a story about disastrous
sexual precocity. And Central Park at dawn looks starkly divided between
nighttime and morning, because this book is also about stark questions of right
and wrong.
After the party Lizzie “wasn’t sure if she’d just spent the evening
giving her young daughter a fairy-tale night to remember or if she’d ruinously
inflated the kid’s expectations for life.” And Lizzie isn’t sure what Jake was
doing that night, but she is about to find out the hard way. “Last night, both
of Elizabeth Bergamot’s children had had parties to go to,” Ms. Schulman
writes, drawing back briefly from the book’s intense focus on quotidian detail.
“Bad mother Liz! She’d chaperoned the wrong one. She was going to mommy prison.
Literally, she was.”
It’s true. While Liz and Coco were playing Eloise, Jake was wandering through the landscape of a Jodi Picoult moral melodrama about a
fiery issue in the news. He went to a party at the Riverdale house of a rich,
unsupervised eighth-grade girl named Daisy Cavanaugh. He got drunk; he flirted;
he rejected Daisy. Then Daisy made a pornographic video that was supposed to
prove to Jake that she was old enough to have sex with him. She e-mailed it. He
reacted with confusion: “Was this pornography? Was it even sexy? He thought it
was sexy, but he wasn’t sure.” So Jake forwards the e-mail to a male friend to
get a second opinion. Following Jake’s ill-advised lead, the friend forwards it
too.
The video goes viral. Jake is demonized, Daisy humiliated. Wildwood
takes disciplinary action. Richard Bergamot, Lizzie’s unflappable husband, gets
hurt too. He was in the middle of a high-profile effort on the part of a
Columbia-like university to expand its campus without inflaming neighbors. He
was flying high. But his presence in these delicate negotiations suddenly
becomes a public relations liability. And all the Bergamots except for Coco
find themselves suddenly stuck at home, each suffering in his or her neatly
designated way.
As for Coco, Ms. Schulman parks her on the story’s sidelines until she
can appear to give the ultimate damning commentary on a society that encourages
its little girls to vamp around like music video stars or get made up like
Russian whores. But where, really, does the blame for this crisis lie? Do
e-mail and text messages create problems or just exacerbate those that already
exist? When did it become possible to wreak lasting damage with seemingly small
indiscretions?
“This Beautiful Life” is set several years ago, when a pornographic
teenage video was still something of a novelty. Given the time lag, hindsight
might be expected, but Ms. Schulman doesn’t rely heavily on that. Instead, more
effectively, she gives Jake time to read “The Great Gatsby” and to ponder an
eternal verity: Some people smash up the lives of others and retreat back into
money and carelessness, letting others take the blame and clean up the damage.
This book’s Daisy Cavanaugh is hardly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy
Buchanan. But Ms. Schulman does supply a magical, lighter-than-air young girl
who bewitches Jake in the Daisy Buchanan manner, even if her name is Audrey and
her heritage is Chinese. And although much of “This Beautiful Life” has a
mundane air of rehashed news and an inside-baseball view of New York’s insular
prep-school world, there are isolated moments when the writing takes flight.
This is Audrey,
sick of her own allure, disgusted by Jake’s affection, and providing some
measure of his fall from grace: “She took back her sweatshirt and tied it
around her tiny waist, like the sleeves were a black velvet ribbon and Audrey
herself was a package, a precious little gift. She slung that cool bag over her
shoulder and she started walking. She started walking away from Jake and all
the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into
the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future.” The prospect of such desolation
hangs over every character in this story. It will not be
Audrey’s alone.
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