The Nation's Pulse/A Wonderful Novel (Seriously!)
Podhoretz, John
THE NATION'S PULSE A WONDERFUL NOVEL (SERIOUSLY!) H ow are we to explain the fact that one of the few truly distinguished novels of our time has escaped the notice of the literary establishment?...
...That would never do...
...One wonderful thing about worthy books is that they manage to live second lives when they are passed over at first...
...She got her satisfaction from simply being involved with the lives of the people she helped...
...So unimportant does it seem that the afternoon on which it occurred is recalled in family lore only because of a clever prank played by the children on their governess, Miss Georgina...
...She had too much of everything: clothes, food, people to wait on her, material possessions...
...In the last decade there have only been two such books, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...A walking monument to the cliches of civics classes, he is not above giving a little lecture to a baffled and embarrassed black teenager with whom he is sharing a subway platform on the importance of always trying to do your best...
...In the first, Alan takes a stroll through Wall Street, a self-satisfied journey that reveals everything we need to know about this kind, pompous, dimwitted man and a good deal about the supposedly gentlemanly (but utterly bloodthirsty) business style that dominated the street then and dominates it now...
...the truth is that Gail Godwin's A Southern Family is not eviscerating, nor is Reynolds Price's Kate Maiden coruscating either in a laudatory or literal sense...
...She didn't look for recognition, and in fact didn't particularly like to be thanked...
...Carl wants to be a fireman...
...a new edition, a committed publisher who will not let it die, a readership that clamors for it sufficiently that someone sees to its reprinting...
...Take some of the serious bestsellers of the last few years...
...Its wealth, both inherited and self-made, has not led, as in so many other cases, to sloth and noblesse oblige...
...that for every moment of pleasure she consumed, someone, somewhere, was suffering...
...But mostly, they are the children of their mother, Peggy, Buttenwieser's finest creation...
...Though the youth flees from him at the first sight of opportunity, the incident is a happy one for Alan: "He would never know the result of his advice, but at least he'd done his bit...
...They sink from view and presently become available by the dozens in every second-hand bookshop in America...
...What is forgotten is that Peggy's momentary collapse was witnessed by the five-year-old Joan...
...Her return to New York from Bennington is fraught with tension and leads her to an explosion of conflicting emotions about her life...
...these well-wrought but lifeless bestsellers never take hold of the nation's consciousness...
...And like Dreiser, he reaches a level of intensity and feeling in his most intimate scenes that elevates the reader into a state of high, almost noble sentiment...
...There are, in this novel, two scenes of New York that deserve comparison with Edith Wharton...
...novels that are "coruscating" or "devastating" or "eviscerating" hardly sound like the kind of fare designed to instruct, or uplift, or entertain, or even merely scandalize...
...Her father, Alan, is a lawyer for whom the term "civic-minded" was invented, fund-raiser for a hundred organizations by John Podhoretz and member of a hundred commissions, the kind of man whom the mayor of New York looks to when he needs somebody to "keep 'em honest...
...If every citizen would put his shoulder to the wheel, they could really move this city ahead...
...For his part, the teenage Carl was deemed a brilliant pianist at the age of nine by no less an authority than Rudolf Serkin and studies with New York's foremost master teacher, the terrifying Madame Tamarovna...
...Carl is indeed outstanding, but he is so suffused with the famiTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 33 "Do you think anyone would forbid it...
...And so on and so forth...
...Alan's ease and optimism lead him to believe that his own good intentions will inevitably lead to good results...
...Oh I'd lead my life, all right...
...her brother Gerald runs the family's investment bank, Altman and Sons...
...The truth is that mother and daughter are startlingly similar, except that the self-abnegating strength in Peggy has-been twisted and perverted .into a parasitical self-loathing in Joan...
...Carl constructs for Joan a little fantasy about declaring his intention to give up the piano and becoming a fireman instead: For Peggy Gutheim, it was important that things fit, that they run well...
...They do credit to their parents...
...Everyone in her society is worried sick about Joan, who seems alarmingly pale and thin and simply will not eat...
...Carl knows better, even if he is not up to proving it to his mother...
...The years of serious attention paid to writers like Godwin and Price may wear us down sufficiently to compel our attention at last...
...The set piece of the book is a dinner party in Mrs...
...Beyond that, Buttenwieser inexplicably fails to develop the fascinating character of Phil, the only one of the children to fulfill the wishes of his parents to their fullest and the only one who never really manages to evoke or maintain our sympathy...
...She had that special knack of bringing out what others had to offer...
...They'd find absolutely the best fireman teacher in New York and pay him a fortune to come to the house every Saturday morning to teach me how to slide down poles...
...Buttenwieser provides a most vivid, sensual picture of the particular joys of wealth...
...The materfamilias, Peggy, is an Altman by birth...
...She is the quintessential socially responsible New York matron...
...It is precisely the kind of novel that many of us have been craving for a very long time...
...The accident frees him from a frightening piano recital for which he fears he will never be able to prepare himself...
...resent-day writers who can be justifiably compared to great American writers like Dreiser and Wharton are almost non-existent, and at its best moments Their Pride and Joy flirts with greatness...
...The Gutheim children seem stable and directed...
...The family (except for Carl, who is not yet born) is at the idyllic summer home of Mrs...
...The novel proceeds through a succession of dinner parties, benefits, trips to the opera, visits to relatives, Christmas celebrations, New Year's Eve bashes...
...That was what counted...
...Joan, everybody's favorite, wants very much to help those less fortunate than herself and after her return from Bennington works well and devotedly with crippled children at a Lower East Side settlement house...
...We may buy their latest novels in large quantities, and finally grant their authors the financial success they crave...
...The smooth functioning of her life was important, not so much as an end in itself, but because it released her to her main occupation in the world, which was to be of help...
...Buttenwieser does not dwell on the incident: in fact, my description here gives it a larger place in the narrative than he does...
...If The Bonfire of the Vanities, the other distinguished novel of 1987, is an explosive and satirical look at life among the well-heeled, Their Pride and Joy is an emotionally implosive and generous study of some of the same people a generation earlier...
...Peggy's mother, Mrs...
...Her mission in life is to "contribute...
...Anything to purge herself...
...Their concern drives her to distraction...
...At the same time, she brims with life: Whatever she felt, she showed in her eyes...
...Better by far," Peggy muses to herself, "to forge ahead and if one feels obliged to look back, why not remember the best times...
...Everyone around would be filled with pleasure and warmth...
...If the shattering of his wrist is the form that Carl's "sad little rebellion" finally takes, Joan's rebellion is far more frightening and ultimately suicidal...
...The good life for her was the useful life...
...The cycle of critical hysteria and audience disappointment grows ever more poisonous as the years pass...
...She is a force of nature, a spectacularly self-possessed and self-controlled woman who manages almost always to get her way and, like all benign tyrants, considers this definitive proof that the universe is well ordered:ly's thirst for excellence and achievement that he can never match his own standards...
...But as he neared the threshold of his career, the ice he was standing on became thinner and thinner...
...At moments like these, his temperament is closer to Theodore Dreiser's, an author whose_greatness lies in his talent for making us see the redeeming qualities in the worst of his characters and the glaring imperfections in his best...
...people loved to be with her...
...The incident that seems so minor to Peggy is a miscarriage...
...Do some physical work, ride a horse...
...John Podhoretz, a frequent contributor, is writing a book-length cultural postmortem of the Reagan years...
...The glorious aesthetic of the Altman house is matched by the cornucopious luxury of the Gutheim apartment, whose enormous refrigerator is so lavish Peggy must make excuses for owning it: " 'It was the only way I could think of that we wouldn't be forever running out of something or other,' she would explain to astonished visitors...
...She spent her days running herself ragged, rushing around town taking care of half the city...
...Of course they wouldn't...
...From this and a few other indications, we understand that Carl is wrong in his own assessment of his gifts...
...They'd tell everyone in New York I was going to be the greatest fireman of all time, because God forbid I should just be a good fireman...
...With a delicate clinician's touch, Buttenwieser charts Joan's steady decline...
...She ought to get up and do something strenuous...
...What these mildly threatening adjectives do promise the 1980s reader is a distinctly unliterary charge, a sort of 'Delacorte Press, $18.95...
...What books are we to read...
...At the age of 15 he already feels himself a talentless failure as a pianist: "Through a judicious selection of repertoire, he could pass himself off to a sympathetic audience as a prodigy...
...For Joan, as for Peggy, intense self-reflection is a sign of self-indulgence and weakness...
...And all she asked was an orderly world so she could do her best...
...Joan asked her mother while she lay on the floor unconscious...
...a world where things fit and each element had its proper place...
...What a rare thing it is these days to come upon a novel so good that it leads one to cavil on such a lofty plane...
...Buttenwieser, a psychoanalyst by profession, has devised a portrait of a close, happy, and loving family whose closeness, happiness, and love inadvertently and tragically prove destructive of one of its children...
...We see its poignant toll on Carl, the only child with real gifts and thus triply burdened by the expectations of mother, father, and grandmother...
...She was taking more than her share...
...She loved nothing better than to laugh...
...As befits its author's profession, it is written almost as a case study of a childhood trauma that, left unresolved, is directly responsible for the ensuing disaster...
...She gets engaged to her picture-perfect but uncomprehending boyfriend and simultaneously engages in a sleazy affair with a Lower East Side tough...
...In later years, Buttenwieser tells us, "if [Joan] remembered anything, [it was] that her mother needed no help from anyone, certainly not from her...
...Note well that last sentence, which gives a clue to the particularly masterful way Buttenwieser tells his story...
...She herself was not a great wit, but she brought out the humor in others and made people feel happy...
...B ut now we have a novel, Their Pride and Joy, which makes a conscious and largely successful effort to recapture some of the narrative energy and social exactitude of the best and liveliest American novels...
...Altman in the middle of World War II...
...They'd say, how marvelous...
...It was dubbed "interesting but flawed" in the few pieces that did take note of it, which is hardly the sort of praise to capture the fancy of other critics or the American fiction audience...
...Peggy Gutheim believes that she allows her children to choose their own destinies...
...The action begins when Joan, who is twenty, is found in a dead faint on the campus of Bennington College and is sent home so that her condition can be evaluated...
...The memory that Peggy is seeking to limit here specifically is of a little-discussed family incident with which Buttenwieser begins the book...
...Phil, a law student and do-gooder-in-training, is a dream of an oldest son...
...She put herself at the service of an astonishing number of people and organizations, large and small...
...If they ever come to hear of it, Tom Wolfe's adoring and enthusiastic audience will find a great deal to cheer about in Buttenwieser's novel as well...
...It is a mark of Buttenwieser's subtlety as a novelist that the thematic glue of the novel becomes clear only on reflection...
...Every Sunday, it seems, some novel or collection of short stories is deemed worthy of our most devoted attention...
...Altman's mansion, a revelatory description of family tensions and disappointments that may even outdo similar scenes in Wharton's work...
...The novel is called Their Pride and Joy,' it is by Paul Buttenwieser, it was published late last autumn, and you should not be ashamed if you have not heard of it or its author...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988...
...Nevertheless, it is the key to Joan's ultimate decline...
...he probably could be a first-class pianist...
...The current stream of fashionable adjectives would have been considered quite unappealing to previous generations...
...In any crowd she would be at the center, her large mouth wide with surprise, just on the verge, at any moment, of pouring forth cascades of the most infectious laughter, accompanied by streams of helpless tears...
...Upon reflection, it was to be expected that so exceptional a work would come and go with little celebration...
...Since Buttenwieser is free of Wharton's cold-eyed attitude toward his characters, his portraiture is happily unmarred by unnecessary barbs and slings and inappropriate shifts into parody...
...By 'running out,' Peggy of course meant that someone might not find exactly what he wanted to eat at any given moment...
...Their Pride and Joy is the story of the last few months in the life of Joan Gutheim, daughter of the marriage between two of New York City's distinguished German-Jewish families...
...but as the novel is set in 1960, the closest any doctor comes to that diagnosis is a rumination on the possibility that Joan might be suffering from one of those newly diagnosed and unnamed eating disorders...
...Their Pride and Joy, the story of a tragedy in a rich German-Jewish family in New York the last few months of the year 1960, was greeted upon its publication with the sorts of respectable and respectful reviews that succeed in burying a book...
...The reader has the benefit of current medical knowledge, and almost immediately recognizes Joan's ailment as anorexia nervosa...
...The little girl, seeing her mother in a faint on the floor, "thought she had had a heart attack and died...
...Frieda Altman, owns a house stuffed with works by Ingres and Corot and Fragonard, an elegant and sumptuous mansion that is a riot of art and flowers and sunlight...
...Although Carl is not responsible for the accident, it is so close to wish-fulfillment that we wonder (as does Carl) whether he actually willed it in some way...
...In the final analysis, however, it is not a great novel because of its formal imperfections...
...What is ailing her...
...What am I supposed to do...
...Such books do not even promise to be "must" reading, the kind of novel one has to have read to be up on things...
...Their Pride and Joy, however, will not fall so easily into obscurity...
...It will happen to Their Pride and Joy...
...I'd go stark raving mad...
...Carl never does get up the courage to confront his parents head-on...
...The rejection of Their Pride and Joy is especially surprising in light of the overheated critical atmosphere these days...
...Instead, he must find his escape by breaking his wrist...
...Buttenwieser only lets us know through Joan's own half-crazed sensibility: If only she wasn't plagued by the vaguest sense of guilt, a feeling that it wasn't right to be enjoying all of this...
...To say that Buttenwieser's subtle, urbane style is unfashionable is putting it mildly...
...They'd run out and buy me a library of books about fire and water and pumps and ladder climbing and get me a little fire engine of my own to pedal around in and probably get me a Dalmatian...
...Their Pride and Joy is a novel about vicious clashes of the will among well-behaved and well-meaning people...
...The painters would be in the next morning to redo my room in red...
...Remarkably good-natured, Alan takes great pleasure merely in walking the streets and being greeted by people of his acquaintance...
...There appears to be little wrong, and almost all right, with the Gutheim family...
...The two key strands of plot—Joan's ruinous affair with the Lower East Side tough and a disastrous hostile takeover by Peggy's brother Gerald that ends up destroying Alan's greatest personal ambition—are never quite convincing enough to stand on their own and are rendered with a hesitancy and sketchiness that are all the more glaring for their proximity to material handled with a master's assurance...
...How those second lives come to pass is mysterious...
...It would have been a challenge for Buttenwieser, who understands with such clarity the troubles of Carl and Joan, to explain why Phil is so free of their doubts...
...For Their Pride and Joy is literally exceptional, with preoccupations and concerns radically different from those that excite the interest of the present-day literary world...
...At different points it echoes Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, and does so, moreover, with considerable distinction...
...She felt too full, as though she had overeaten...
...Whom are we to believe...
...Having exhausted the meaning of formerly grand words like "brilliant" and "triumphant," today's critics show their enthusiasm for the latest books and authors with new and mysterious terms of praise...
...the portrait of a neighborhood in the earliest stages of its now total decay is captivating...
...Nonetheless, the stultifying sameness of recent American novels casts its inevitable pall...
...The inevitable and appropriate response to the cascades of praise heaped upon book after book is disappointment and cynicism on the part of the literate American...
...In the second, Carl wanders guiltily around Times Square, hoping to catch a glimpse of some female flesh in a used magazine store...
...Buttenwieser describes the pre-feminist Peggy thus: Peggy had no job, no career as such, but she made it her business to help wherever she could...
...He is ambitious and 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 good-looking, self-confident and possessed of the wicked and hilarious wit of the truly arrogant...
...Alan, who "found the world on the whole hospitable, and always fascinating," sees his own great sociability in Phil, his passion for music in Carl, and his great zest for life in Joan...
...sensory stimulation...
...Memory is only finite, after all—and Peggy Gutheim's memory was more finite than some—why fill it up with sadness, especially when there is so much to be grateful for...
...She is, her best friend fears, "a piece of porcelain about to shatter of its own fragility...
...And that promise is indeed valuable to the literate audience of the 1980s, which is more afflicted than any previous generation by demands for its attention from causes both political and social, and arts both popular and lively...
...And yet there is, at the center of this bustling, exciting, and enviable world, a nameless disease eating away at the household...
...It happens, somehow...
...And yet his own sense of burden, that he is carrying the dreams of his parents on his thin shoulders, is made painfully clear as well...
...more fainting spells, an increasing but evanescent paranoia, and painful quarrels with her mother that are meant to demonstrate Joan's knowledge of her mother's manipulations but conclude only with Joan in a frustrated rage and Peggy in a self-justifying morass...
...When she recovered her voice, Peggy simply told her daughter not to worry...
...He, if no one else, began to see cracks forming...
...Action, not introspection, is the religion of the Gutheims...
...She would drink in everything that was going on, and then she would respond vividly, generously...
...at that moment she ingests the spiritual parasite that finally drains the life from her...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
