But I don't want it

This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman (HarperCollins, 2011)


Meet the Bergamots. First Liz(zie), a trained art historian who became increasingly mom-first, and now, in NYC, mom-only. Then Richard, whose career in academia seems on an unstoppable upward trajectory. And Jake, the teen son. Finally Coco, the spirited kindergartener. They are transitioning, with varying degrees of success, from life in upstate Ithaca to Manhattan.

And then there's a night with two parties. Liz takes Coco to a sleepover at the Plaza, where she (and the other moms) get totally wasted. Yay. And Jake goes to a party with his friends, gets sad when he sees the object of his affection with her boyfriend, gets drunk, and draws the advances of the young hostess. He allows her attention, until he suddenly doesn't. And handles it like most boys would, which is to say like a jerk.

And there you have it. A Saturday morning with two hungover Bergamots. Except then Jake's make-out partner creates an awfully graphic web video to prove that she's old enough for him. And then all hell breaks loose.

Listening to Slate folks discuss it (here), I was intrigued by their final conversation, a debate over why and how the single click of the "forward" button untethered everything. It's hard to say for sure whether all the fissures of Liz's dissatisfaction and Richard's growing impatience would have been evident had the plot been presented in any other way. The first page (plus) is a description of the video, and it looms over everything that follows, leaving the reader waiting in some amount of anxiety. As a result, I saw how while nothing was broken, neither was it particularly strong. But that's just me.

I grew less enchanted with the book as it went on. The characters just kept so firmly to their established patterns, wearing out some weird groove that made me more and more frustrated. And then, suddenly, Schulman wraps up. She flashes forward several years, so we know what shakes down from the crisis. And ends with a coda chapter, the teen ingenue all grown up, or more grown up. But it's weird, because we've never really met her before. And now, we're not quite sure who she is, or what to think about what she unleashed when she hit record on her webcam.