Book review: This Beautiful Life

By LEE RANDALL
Published on Saturday 11 February 2012 00:00

EVERYONE’S done it. Everyone has hit “Send” on an email only to be assailed with second thoughts intense enough to inspire the forceful and repeated application of head to desk, to the tune of, “No, no, no, no!”

Imagine, then, that you’re a 15-year-old-boy, and receive an email containing a sexually explicit video from a classmate who fancies you. A few nights earlier, at a party she threw while her parents were away, you spurned her.

This is her awkward, inappropriate way of showing you what you’ve missed. Turned on and terrified in equal measure, unable to quite believe your eyes, you hit forward, firing the hot potato off to your best friend. Before you can say “jailbait”, the video goes viral.

That’s the set-up of This Beautiful Life, the fifth novel from American author Helen Schulman, who teaches writing at The New School in New York and whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Vogue and Time.

In emotive and assured prose, tackling the story of what happens next from the viewpoints of the teenager, Jake Bergamot, and parents, Liz and Richard, Schulman delivers an “issue” novel that’s equally sharp social satire, skewering the lives and values of the upwardly mobile, and the phenomenon that is internet celebrity. Against that backdrop, in microcosm, she depicts the unravelling of one specific family. The Bergamots are white, well-educated, and privileged. Liz has a PhD in Art History, and used to teach. Richard has worked in industry and academia, and has accepted the position of senior executive vice chancellor at a fictional Manhattan university, where he’s at the head of a major redevelopment project. Having left their cosy, idyllic-sounding life in Ithaca, New York, they’ve been plunged into a world of wealth. Liz, especially, can’t really believe her luck, or quite fit in.

Their children – Jake has a wee sister, Coco, adopted in China – attend private schools where the mums at the school gates (when, that is, they don’t send their nannies) are mainly “formers” – bank managers, surgeons, corporate lawyers, microbiologists, having given up work to spend their days as consorts to men “who earned too much money for their wives to justify being away from the kids the long hours their former careers required”.

Schulman’s touch is so delicate it could easily be overlooked. What better describes a fifteen-and-a-half-year old’s position between boy and man than: “Last Friday, Jake got half a set of car keys in the morning over his Lucky Charms”.

Forty-something Liz feels “too old and specific now to make new friends,” and doesn’t reach out to old friends because, “She was afraid that there was both far too much to catch up and way too little to say.” When Richard and Liz have a silent fight – it’s all in the eyes – he thinks, “This was marriage, pragmatically compressed into emotional haiku.”

This is the kind of novel Jane Austen would be writing if she were alive in the 21st century: full of acid and unsparing – even of her protagonists – but also funny. And as happens in the best of Austen, you wind up rooting for Schulman’s characters, and hoping against hope that they will find happy endings.

• This Beautiful Life

by Helen Schulman, Atlantic, 768pp, £40

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.