Total Family Breakdown,
21st-Century Manhattan Style
By MARIA RUSSO
THIS BEAUTIFUL
LIFE
By Helen Schulman
222 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99.
Helen Schulman’s latest novel tells the story of
the Bergamots, a family of four whose expensive new Manhattan life comes
crashing down when 15-year-old Jake forwards to a friend a sexually explicit
video made for him, unsolicited, by a 13-year-old girl named Daisy Cavanaugh.
As the video, forwarded again and again, goes viral, the tabloid media go
bananas, linking Jake and Daisy in an ominous and humiliating celebrity. What
can the future hold for unformed, vulnerable kids who bumble their way into the
lowliest realm of the permanent record that is the Internet? (Or, in Daisy’s
case, reach it by simulating sex with a toy baseball bat.) Should their parents
be held responsible, or are they equally victimized by the seductions and traps
of digital life?
These are among the anxious, perhaps as yet
unanswerable questions that propel Schulman’s riveting narrative. To call “This
Beautiful Life” timely is almost an understatement, since real life regularly
generates plenty of clueless but weirdly understandable behavior like that of
Schulman’s characters. Yet as much as this book fiercely inhabits our shared
online reality, it operates most powerfully on a deeper level, posing an
enduring question about American values — is it worth leaving a perfectly good
life to grab a chance for something more?
In the immediate aftermath of the video’s release,
Jake is suspended from his Riverdale private school, spending long days at home
in a self-loathing funk. Richard, his father, is forced to take a leave of
absence from his new job in the administration at a Columbia-like university,
where he is spearheading a project to claim “blighted” uptown blocks for an
extended campus. Liz, Jake’s mother, who hasn’t worked much since finishing her
art history Ph.D., is plunged by the family’s debacle into her own
Internet-enabled dysfunction, obsessively following the blog of an
ex-boyfriend, endlessly watching Daisy’s video, going down the rabbit hole of
Internet porn. Liz accidentally leaves Daisy’s video open, where it’s seen by
the baby of the family, irrepressible Coco, adopted from China, who promptly
re-enacts Daisy’s wild sexual dance at her pricey kindergarten. It’s a total
family breakdown, 21st-century Manhattan style.
“Nothing goes away now,” Richard’s boss tells him.
“Forgetting is over.” That’s hard for an old-school go-getter like Richard to
understand: “There should be a service to suck this kind of stuff out; he’ll
look into that.” Even more foreign is the privacy-allergic generational mindset
in which the video was created and disseminated. As he visits a lawyer to try
to fix the mess, Richard concedes that he “doubts his son has ever thought
about confidentiality as a concept.” And yet Schulman is no Internet-age
Cassandra. As in her previous novel, “A Day at the Beach,” in which the events of 9/11 set in motion another wealthy
Manhattan family’s crisis, the book’s tragedy seems to have been in progress
long before the precipitating events occur.
The dark heart of the story resides not in the
lawless online ether but in the Bergamots’ status as strivers, outsiders to a
ruthless world of money and privilege they aren’t emotionally equipped to
navigate. Schulman smartly sets the novel in 2003, before rougher times hit
even the high fliers, and her mockery of crass, restless New York City culture
at the dawn of “this new moneyed century” is perfect. Liz, who grew up in the
“hard, unyielding, concrete universe” of Co-op City, the Bronx, is unable to
make real friends among the skinny, Botoxed Manhattan moms, with their drivers
and decorators and art consultants, their “long, shiny, blown-out streaked
hair” and skin of “pure leather.” Richard, who had a “simple and predictable
and hard” upbringing in California, longs for advice about managing the
family’s mess from his own dead father, an uneducated postal worker who had a
“wisdom” that “golden boy” Richard, with his scholarship to Princeton, his
Stanford M.B.A. and Ph.D., and his tireless drive for success, realizes he
lacks.
Sensitive Jake, for his part, pines for a girl,
Chinese-born, adopted Audrey, who is out of his league, the girlfriend of a
“tall and blond” guy whom “you could kind of imagine in a suit someday.” Jake
is overmatched by the city kids, most of whom are older because their parents
held them back to get them “into a first-tier kindergarten.” They exchange
clever jibes and spend weekend nights walking up and down Park Avenue, dropping
into “ad hoc parties” in parent-free apartments. The boys face a confusing
pressure to hook up with any girl who offers. When Jake is readmitted to school
after the video debacle, he’s horrified to find himself embraced as an outlaw
hero.
Richard and Liz were content back in Ithaca, where
the compact pleasantness of daily rounds with her kids in “the cocoon of her
car” made Liz feel “practically winged.” But they take for granted the appeal
of ever upward mobility, ever more wealth, and the contradictory principles guiding
their choices are largely unexamined. Richard has vowed to live a life of
“public service — public service with money.” Liz has let her own career as an
art historian slide as she enjoys the “luxury of time” (albeit defensively; she
never imagined she’d be “dependent on a man for money”). Yet Liz is not, she
ruefully admits, a better mother for having nothing else going.
Schulman somehow makes all these characters
lovable, even when their least attractive qualities are on display. Perhaps
most fascinating is “plump, prettyish” Daisy Cavanaugh, hovering throughout as
both specter and spectacle, removed from school but ever present via her video.
Her rich, neglectful parents’ enormous Riverdale house has “three glassy
levels” that “seemed to rise out at some new angle to better capture a view of
the Hudson.” Sad, needy, uncherished, she is nonetheless bizarrely empowered, a
twisted update on that other Daisy in the novel’s most obvious predecessor.
Schulman has Jake read “The Great Gatsby” while
he’s suspended from school, and he’s upset by the passage in which Fitzgerald
calls Tom and Daisy Buchanan “careless people.” It should by rights apply to
the Cavanaughs, and yet Jake knows he too has “smashed up things.” But it’s his
unrequited crush, Audrey, who stands for what comes to seem truly out of Jake’s
reach: a kind of purity. She decides to step away from “all the idiot boys,”
away from the casually cruel social scene in which Jake and Daisy have lost
their bearings. Her mystique has nothing to do with money or glamour: “He’d
heard her parents were, like, old hippie social workers who had lived in
Northampton or something, until they took her home from China.”
In an earlier era, a misstep in the sexual realm by
a simple but aspiring guy like Jake would have ended bloodily, but “This
Beautiful Life” presents a more ambiguous picture, befitting the new threats of
the Internet age, when not necessarily homicide but social or career death seem
to loom just a click away. Jake’s action in forwarding the video leads to
consequences that are, if not truly tragic, immensely sad. Perhaps he’s best
seen as a casualty not just of the Internet but of a time in which parents are
unsure how to guide libidinous teenagers, whose natural tenderness is under
assault as sexual mores change at a furious pace. Schulman hints that the most
shocking thing about the video is that, for all its power to unravel the
fragile Bergamots, in the grander scheme of things it’s not such a big deal.
Daisy’s willingness to perform so vulnerably for Jake, although misguided, taps
into a kind of desperate brio that our culture rewards. The epilogue gives us a
glimpse of an older Daisy, and she’s not where we might imagine her to have
landed. What if Daisy is an example to us all, here in pitiless postmodern
America? Forgetting is over, but no one remembers that much either.
Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário