Total Family Breakdown, 21st-Century Manhattan Style
Illustration by office of Paul Sahre
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?
THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE
By Helen Schulman
222 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99.
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.
Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
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