This Beautiful Life by Helen SchulmanMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of years from now, when futuristic anthropologists are in search of the long gone 21st century American man, this book may be of service. For better or for worse, This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman offers a crystalline glimpse of the postmodern American family and its tragic struggle to stay afloat amid a sea of moral ambiguities, fractured family dynamics and compromising technologies.
The story centers on Liz and Richard Bergamot and their two children, fifteen-year-old Jake and six-year-old Coco. Having recently moved from Ithaca to New York City, following Richard’s promotion to an executive position at prestigious university, the Bergamots soon find that their new life in the city is a bit more complicated than the peaceful existence they enjoyed in sleepy Ithaca.
Shortly after ingratiating himself to a group of teens at his new private high school, Jake Bergamot attends a party hosted by the very wealthy, and grossly under-supervised, Daisy. Jake encounters thirteen-year-old Daisy at the party, and, following a brief “hook up,” rebuffs her eager advances in front of their friends, claiming she is “too young.” Later that night, the hurt and publicly humiliated Daisy, seeking vindication and starved for affection, sends Jake an obscene and sexually explicit video of herself via email, which he then impulsively forwards to a friend.
That momentary action is the catalyst for all the thorny events that follow. The video spreads like a vindictive cancer through the teens’ school, then across the country, then the world, and before Jake knows it, Daisy is infamous and he is both condemned as a misogynist and heralded as a hero, depending on whom he encounters. What ensues is a shameful media frenzy, threats of litigation, and the undoing of a once-stable, once-happy family. (There may be spoilers ahead).
My reaction to the novel is almost as complex as the moral questions the book raises. The book induced a range of emotions in me, from sadness to disgust, empathy to anger. In the midst of the myriad concerns I have about this book and its execution, I have to first acknowledge Helen Schulman’s literary talent, as well as her astuteness when it comes to capturing the 21st century, postmodern American family. Whether she is describing current teenage colloquialisms, recent parenting trends, secondary school culture, or the effect of emerging technologies on our social interactions, everything about this novel accurately reflects secular society today.
Concerns I have about the novel include the graphic way it depicts the sexual escapades of children (which, despite any noble intentions on the part of the author, I see as modified form of exploitation) as well as the novel’s suggestion that motherhood, given time, will inevitably whittle a sophisticated female mind down to a pad of useless putty. And, as a Christian, I didn’t much agree with what I perceived to be atheistic presuppositions on the part of the author, although, I did find those presuppositions interesting to contemplate, and I appreciated the transparency with which they were presented.
I say that this is a postmodern book because it reflects postmodern values and problems. The characters are largely autonomous beings, grasping in vain for meaning, beauty and morality in an otherwise cold and indifferent universe. God is absent – his name reduced to a mere turn of phrase - and in his absence the characters are charged with the responsibility to independently sort through the moral ambiguities with which they are confronted. With only their emotions and a vague notion of the relativistic nature of things to aid them in this task, these characters erratically bounce like pinballs between self-loathing and righteous condemnation of others.
Schulman’s characters live in a world where everyone is basically good-hearted - just mistake-prone -and it’s nearly impossible to distinguish what is right from what is wrong, what is acceptable from what is inappropriate, what is edifying from what is degrading, what is empowering from what is exploitative. One such example is Richard Bergamot’s schizophrenic reaction to Daisy’s explicit video. Following his son’s egregious cyber-mistake, Richard steals a private moment to reflect on how he might have prevented this viral nightmare as Jake’s father. While watching the video – never pausing to consider whether this is something he ought not watch in the first place - he makes an attempt to evaluate Daisy’s audacious and sexually precocious behavior, and ultimately fails miserably. He begins by noting the video’s “dismal raunch, its tawdriness…its sexual immaturity and unknowingness,” and, within moments, considers it “brave,” “powerful,” “potent,” and “self-immolating.” He’s saddened and dismayed by what he sees, and yet, “it speaks to him,” and “he feels touched by it.” He pities Daisy’s loneliness and her desperation, and then at once wonders why he, unlike Daisy, is incapable of being so completely naked and vulnerable with even those closest to him. Was Daisy wasting herself on Jake, he wonders, or was there something admirable about her craving for “this kind of union, an erasure of boundaries, a blending of souls, so much so that she was willing to risk all? Richard does not even genuinely know himself.” And, after much mental gymnastics, he doesn’t figure it out. Is the video ugly or beautiful, is it reprehensible or admirable?
Richard is not unaware of his inability to come to any kind of moral conclusion about Daisy’s video. In a moment of longing, he picks up the phone to call his father, a man whom Richard considers much wiser than himself, a man whose credo regarding the opposite sex was redolent of simpler times: “You always treat girls honorably, and with respect.” The phone rings and no one answers. Richard’s father has been dead for some years, and, yet, Richard waits expectantly for a moment before hanging up. To the postmodern man, God is dead and man is on his own. But we sure do wish he were there sometimes.
Liz Bergamot also gets stuck in the mire of moral ambiguity. As a result of Daisy’s startling video, Liz, perhaps in the hope of better understanding Daisy’s motivations and the 21st century’s sex culture in general, allows herself to become swallowed up by the world of internet pornography,. Even as she confronts sexuality that she calls “tireless, addictive, violent,” “another beast all together,” “frightening,” and “not so legal,” she is still unable to decidedly condemn it as morally wrong. The closest she comes to a conclusion is, “this is not what people who love each other do together.” But then she amends her earlier estimation with, “Although maybe it was,” and that’s the end of that.
In a similar moment of moral confusion, Liz asks her husband if shame is simply a social construct that adapts to evolving societal norms. When pondering people with rare sexual fetishes, she muses, “…is what they do shameful, or just weird? If there’s a lot of them, maybe it’s not so weird at all.” Her son, Jake, has a similar conversation with his friends after the internet dissemination of Daisy’s lewd video. The boys wonder if the internet, and its ability unite those with even the most bizarre and abhorrent sexual proclivities, is erasing the boundary between the shameful and the acceptable. Noting the fact that Daisy’s sex video is just one of many on the internet, they ask, “What’s the shame in that? If everyone suddenly goes public?”
“If everyone does it, will anyone care?”
“A couple weeks later, do we even care?”
And finally, “If you take away the disgrace factor, won’t all girls be Daisies?” In unison, they flippantly express a desire for this to be the case, and laugh. According to this view, nothing is inherently shameful. Rather, it’s our subjective and ever-evolving perceptions that make it so. The internet and its Pandora’s box of private desires made public gets to decide. That’s a frightening world to live in.
Perhaps the most depressing moment in the entire novel comes during a conversation between Liz and her six-year-old daughter, Coco. Following a disturbing incident that reveals the ways in which the innocent Coco has been negatively influenced by the family’s involvement in Jake and Daisy’s internet debacle, Liz tries to explain to Coco why the kind of dancing that Daisy does in the video is not something Coco should want to emulate. When Coco asks if “ladies dance like that all the time,” Liz replies, “I guess they do, but they shouldn’t have to. There’s more to ladies than that. More than their, I don’t know what to call it, their sexual attractiveness to men, men they don’t know.”
When Coco says she doesn’t understand, Liz replies, “I don’t understand either.”
Coco ventures, “It’s inappropriate,” to which Liz responds, “Yes, it is. The girl, she didn’t respect herself. We women, we always have to respect ourselves, do you know what I’m saying?”
And that is the summation of Liz’s maternal advice when it comes to navigating the murky waters of human sexuality: it’s all about respecting ourselves. That’s the closest she comes to any kind of moral conclusion about the explicit and illegal video that has torn her family to shreds. Forget any objective and transcendent moral standard of sexual ethics that may exist. Forget respecting the other person. Forget the difficulty that comes with defining what it even means to “respect ourselves” in our relativistic age. Daisy never once said she felt disrespected; in fact, she seemed to glory in the attention the video garnered. And she turns out all right in the end. Does that, then, make it all okay? The characters are ultimately silent. Helen Schulman remains silent. Is postmodern culture able to offer a satisfying answer? Somehow I doubt it.
We pay the price for our inability to offer a satisfying answer. In what I found to be the most poignant and heart wrenching moment in the novel, Liz turns to her husband in the midst of an argument and cries out desperately, “This beautiful life, I can’t manage it.” The family’s happiness prior to moving to New York City proved to be a fragile structure built on a faulty foundation; it revealed its crushing vulnerability in the midst of trials. It’s no surprise that the book’s cover features an image of a perfectly constructed house of cards, just waiting to be blown over at the slightest provocation. Is Helen Schulman critiquing postmodernism’s irrational faith in Love, Beauty and Goodness, even though it has nothing transcendent to stand on and its illusion could crumble at any moment, or is she simply describing the way so many Americans live today, in the shadows of moral relativism?
This Beautiful Life raises many questions, and yet offers no definitive answers. I shouldn’t be surprised as that, too, is a mark of Postmodernism. And, while I find myself at odds with the novel’s view of motherhood and human sexuality, I must concede that it offers a fascinating and poignant meditation on the state of secular society. Atheists’ messages boards are flooded with people wondering why some of us are so desperate to believe that an immanent God exists. This book and its angst-filled, morally confused characters, should give them a clue.
His oath, His covenant, His blood, support me in the whelming flood.
When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my Hope and Stay.
On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
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