"Strand, you're a lucky man. You do not have to deal with thieves. I, on the other hand, deal almost exclusively with thieves, week in, week out. Week in, week out. It isn't love that makes the world go round, as they say, it is greed...naked, overpowering, criminal greed. I tell you Strand, if the laws of the land were ever enforced, three quarters of our most respected citizens would be in our country's jails."
This is one of the many witheringly cynical diatribes given by the character Russell Hazen in Irwin Shaw's Bread Upon the Waters, published in 1981. Although the book contains no vigilantes, beach bums, or "Rabbits", as promised in my blog title, it still has much late'70's/ early 80's malaise, which is a running theme in many of the books that I treasure from that era.
As you can see from the cover, it has some of those "grown-up" things I mentioned in my last post, namely a limousine and a stern looking guy in a suit.
I bought this book when I was in 9th grade or so. That would have made me thirteen or fourteen, I guess. As I have mentioned before, at that age I was obsessed with acquiring books for grown-ups. I remember being turned on to Irwin Shaw after buying the paperback of his novel Evening in Byzantium at my beloved American Book and News. Sadly, I don't have it anymore, but I remember the cover vividly...a dreamy watercolor of an exotic-looking waterfront city at dusk (Byzantium?) and the tantalizing plot line that concerned a movie producer who is overseas to promote his latest movie, and he ends up in various business/romantic entanglements. Super grown-up stuff about the movie biz, and in an exotic locale! I remember thinking that the cover looked like what I imagined Monaco would look like....azure blue water, sailboats galore, and the lights in all the waterfront hotels twinkling away. I imagined all kinds of "grown-up" stuff taking place in each of those twinkling hotel rooms, each no bigger than a pinhole on the cover of the book. Activities involving scotch, tuxedos, and illicit affairs with women wearing dresses with scandalously low necklines.
Also, Mr. Shaw was very famous for the 70's best-seller "Rich Man, Poor Man", which was later turned into a wildly successful mini-series for TV, starring Nick Nolte. I believe it is considered the first "mini-series" ever.
Alas, I never read Evening in Byzantium, but I did like having it on my shelf. I thought it made me look sophisticated. (especially for a skinny 13 year-old living in a suburb of Cleveland). I so badly wanted my own twinkling waterfront hotel room overseas where I could conduct grown-up business.
I did, however, read a couple of Irwin Shaw short story collections in high school (Tip on a Dead Jockey and Love on a Dark Street). I remember the stories having a lot of very mannered and lofty dialogue, usually involving guys "just back from the war". I seem to remember some of the stories had to do with criminal capers and so forth.
This brings me to Bread Upon the Waters. I believe I bought it during my peak period of buying "grown-up" books. I was buying the damn things faster than I could read them.
I remember reading the first few pages, wherein the lead character, Allen Strand, is walking along a busy NYC street near Central Park. The writing was so vivid, detailing the sights and sounds of the bustling city, all the way down to describing Allen's silvering hair flapping in the breeze. It really made me want to go to New York.
Confession time: I read the first few pages of Bread Upon the Waters, and didn't pick it up again for about 32 YEARS. Readers of this blog will soon find that that is a common theme here: me getting all excited about buying these books as a teenager, starting them, and not finishing them until years later. I didn't do that with all the books I bought, but with a fair amount of them. Part of the reason I am doing this blog is to share thoughts about the time period(s) that these books were written in, and what it is like re-visiting them decades later to see if the authors captured the cultural mores of the time, or if they were waaayyy off the mark. Also, to see if the authors' themes were truly universal and timeless or not. In other words, do the books hold up? Plus, it is fun to kind of compare how I have changed and/or matured in the intervening decades. (or not), and if the "grown-up world" I now occupy is at all similar to the ones captured in the books I read.
About the book: The story revolves around Allen Strand and his family. He is a 50 year-old history teacher at a New York City public school, and his wife teaches music out of their charming brownstone. They have three children, a girl about 17, a boy about 19 or 20, and another girl in her early-mid 20's. They have a perfectly genteel life: everyone in the household is well-mannered, well-spoken, and well-read, and they all seem to love each other well enough. Their cozy existence is turned upside-down when the youngest daughter intervenes during a mugging she sees occurring on the street. The middle-aged business man she saves from the attackers turns out to be Russell Hazen, a Manhattan attorney specializing in international law. Hazen is almost like a Bond villain - wealthy, connected, powerful, cultured, articulate, mysterious. He is so thankful to the Strand family after the youngest daughter saves him that he begins bestowing gift after gift after gift on the family. At first, it is things like weekends at his Long Island house, ball games at Yankee Stadium, and the like. Then he uses his vast network of connections to wealthy and powerful people to gradually help all of the family members supposedly achieve their hopes and dreams.
This all sounds like a fairy tale...a dream come true for the family. But Shaw masterfully gives us an excruciating, slow-burn account of how the Strand family is gradually torn asunder by the supposed benevolence of Russell Hazen. It is like a 475-page train wreck: tragic, but you can't look away. Hazen's gifts of wealth and opportunity turns most of the family into selfish narcissists. It is obvious that Shaw's message here is that wealth and influence can be corrupting. I also like the theme of how wealthy folks think they can "own" people, just like they own homes, yachts, cars, etc. There are a few scenes where Hazen goes on a drinking binge and shows his shockingly cruel side, berating his personal assistant in front of Strand one evening. Of course, it turns out that Hazen has skeletons in the closet when it comes to his own family, and those details are revealed at various times in the book. There is a chilling scene where Hazen's ex-wife appears out of nowhere while Hazen is entertaining the Strand family during a lavish meal. She cuts him down to size with her withering invective, then proceeds to tear into the family, and warn them about being involved with Hazen. It is very chilling stuff.
I won't give any spoilers, but the book creates a fair amount of unease and suspense. You can't help but wonder when the other shoe is going to drop; when/if a tragedy will befall a family member, or if maybe Hazen himself will snap and reveal himself to be a nefarious, mustache-twirling villain with ulterior motives. Shaw is not interested in that kind of gimmicky melodrama. Some fairly tragic events do indeed happen, but for the most part Shaw has crafted a story about a bunch of flawed people, each coming of age in their own way at the dawn of a new decade that would itself become, in many ways, synonymous with greed and materialism. After all, it was only a few short years later that Tom Wolfe graced our bookstores with Bonfire of the Vanities, the monumental novel that is perhaps the final word on all the excesses of the 80's. At about the same time, Gordon Gekko was on screen at the local multiplex pontificating about greed being "good", and having the audience in thrall at a character summarizing the zeitgeist so chillingly well.
On that note, Bread Upon the Waters serves as a vivid glimpse into New York City, circa early 80's. That was an extremely violent, crime-ridden time for the city, and I like how Shaw uses a mugging as a catalyst to set the story in motion. Also, the story serves as a wistful reminder of how much the value of real estate has changed in Manhattan. That the Strands can easily afford a brownstone on teacher's salaries almost makes this read like it is from another century. Well, technically it is: the book was written in 1981.
In the time frame the book was written, Manhattan had yet to reach its new "guilded age". I believe that this book and Mr. Wolfe's "Bonfire" are great companion pieces, in that they both capture the increasing polarization of the rich and poor in NYC, and how the brazen behavior of the wealthy can set off shock waves that effect those around them in the lower classes. Would that Shaw were alive today to see Manhattan, with its astronomical rents, barely-surviving working poor, and billionaire hedge-fund managers.
Prescient flourishes abound in the book, such as Allen Strand's oldest daughter having a job in the then-nascent world of "computers", and talking about how much money can be made in that field.
Reading this book in 2014 made me very wistful. All of the characters, including a young Hispanic boy from a broken home that Strand takes under his wing, are articulate and well-read. As mentioned, the Strand family is extremely well-mannered and polite in their dealings with each other and with those around them. And of course, Hazen's blustery screeds practically sound Dickensian. I was wondering, "Did people really speak and act like that back then?". They certainly didn't in the middle-class suburb of Parma, Ohio. I've been trying to reconcile if the writing was too stilted and mannered at times, or if society has really coarsened that much in the 30-plus years since this book was written. Perhaps a bit of both.
This book seems like it is also a lament for the death of a simpler, purer way of life. Before Hazen entered their life and showered them with gifts and opportunities, the Strand's were happy with the simple pleasure of each other's company. Once they realized they could basically have whatever they wanted courtesy of Russell Hazen, their baser desires took over.
What's the old Cyndi Lauper song? Oh yeah..."Money Changes Everything".
No comments:
Post a Comment