Weighing the value of relative morality
By Roxana Robinson |
January 17, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CAN you examine the moral life of someone without morals? Does someone without morals have a moral life? And is the amoral life worth living? Jonathan Dee's intelligent new novel, "The Privileges," asks these questions in a contemporary morality tale. Dee is graceful, articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny.
"A wedding!" the novel begins buoyantly. "The first of a generation ..." Adam and Cynthia are getting married during a heat wave in Pittsburgh.
The guests are snobbish about the location, "because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event ... The strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel profoundly unready." This sets the tone: these kids are disdainful of the world around them, but unready and unwilling to change it.
Dee's lively, shimmering prose illuminates wonderfully observed dystopian moments -- the bride and her maid of honor, AWOL at a bar; the wedding planner's stoned son sent out to buy fans. Dee is at once funny, subversive and sympathetic. In fact, the strange harmonies of his authorial voice, which combines ravishing language, a bleak view of humanity and his innate good nature, provide much of the novel's interest.
The bride and groom are a charmed couple: arrestingly good-looking, effortlessly successful and deeply in love, sort of; or, anyway, made for each other. Adam (not a genius) has lofty feelings, imagining that Cynthia is "like one of those horse whisperers," one who works only on him. Cynthia is more pragmatic about the match: Adam makes her laugh and he's good in bed.
"And he needs me much too badly" to ever mess things up, she tells her maid of honor. A few years later, Adam's on Wall Street and Cynthia's looking after April and Jonas. Things have stalled, somehow: Adam doesn't get promoted, and joins a small firm. Cynthia's restless, and calls an acquaintance for a job. The interview goes badly. When Cynthia realizes she won't get an offer, she writes an earthy command across her resume and slides it across the desk. Actually, Cynthia's greatest talent may lie in insults. She's rude to everyone, plus the wife of Adam's boss.
At a fancy party, Cynthia gets drunk. "It was both thrilling and a little sad," Adam thinks, "to see her out there dancing like her old self, drunk and luminous, because it took a crazy setting like this ... to bring it out of her again. Maybe life needed to better resemble the fantasy."
The notion that she would be happier if life more resembled fantasy transforms Adam. When he witnesses an elegant act of larceny, he conceives a scheme for insider trading, then persuades the thief to become his partner. This provides the moral fulcrum of the novel: Adam's unexpected plunge into criminality, driven not by greed but by a screwy kind of altruism.
Ethics aren't much of an issue. "In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam's conception of his professional life that he wasn't stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it."
Adam's satisfied by this flimsy equivocation; Cynthia finds his actions heroic. Both of them lack a moral compass.
At the core of this intelligent and ambitious book are questions about values. Dee's primary message -- that the family is essential to society, that we abandon it at our peril -- is persuasive. Less so is the notion that uxorious idealism, not greed, might lie behind insider trading. But part of Dee's appeal, as well as elegant writing, is sympathy for his characters, and his generous tendency to endow them, no matter how foolish or contemptible, with a certain nobility.
"A wedding!" the novel begins buoyantly. "The first of a generation ..." Adam and Cynthia are getting married during a heat wave in Pittsburgh.
The guests are snobbish about the location, "because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event ... The strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel profoundly unready." This sets the tone: these kids are disdainful of the world around them, but unready and unwilling to change it.
Dee's lively, shimmering prose illuminates wonderfully observed dystopian moments -- the bride and her maid of honor, AWOL at a bar; the wedding planner's stoned son sent out to buy fans. Dee is at once funny, subversive and sympathetic. In fact, the strange harmonies of his authorial voice, which combines ravishing language, a bleak view of humanity and his innate good nature, provide much of the novel's interest.
The bride and groom are a charmed couple: arrestingly good-looking, effortlessly successful and deeply in love, sort of; or, anyway, made for each other. Adam (not a genius) has lofty feelings, imagining that Cynthia is "like one of those horse whisperers," one who works only on him. Cynthia is more pragmatic about the match: Adam makes her laugh and he's good in bed.
"And he needs me much too badly" to ever mess things up, she tells her maid of honor. A few years later, Adam's on Wall Street and Cynthia's looking after April and Jonas. Things have stalled, somehow: Adam doesn't get promoted, and joins a small firm. Cynthia's restless, and calls an acquaintance for a job. The interview goes badly. When Cynthia realizes she won't get an offer, she writes an earthy command across her resume and slides it across the desk. Actually, Cynthia's greatest talent may lie in insults. She's rude to everyone, plus the wife of Adam's boss.
At a fancy party, Cynthia gets drunk. "It was both thrilling and a little sad," Adam thinks, "to see her out there dancing like her old self, drunk and luminous, because it took a crazy setting like this ... to bring it out of her again. Maybe life needed to better resemble the fantasy."
The notion that she would be happier if life more resembled fantasy transforms Adam. When he witnesses an elegant act of larceny, he conceives a scheme for insider trading, then persuades the thief to become his partner. This provides the moral fulcrum of the novel: Adam's unexpected plunge into criminality, driven not by greed but by a screwy kind of altruism.
Ethics aren't much of an issue. "In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam's conception of his professional life that he wasn't stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it."
Adam's satisfied by this flimsy equivocation; Cynthia finds his actions heroic. Both of them lack a moral compass.
At the core of this intelligent and ambitious book are questions about values. Dee's primary message -- that the family is essential to society, that we abandon it at our peril -- is persuasive. Less so is the notion that uxorious idealism, not greed, might lie behind insider trading. But part of Dee's appeal, as well as elegant writing, is sympathy for his characters, and his generous tendency to endow them, no matter how foolish or contemptible, with a certain nobility.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
