More Book Reviews
These by the New York Times
This Beautiful Life Helen Schulman’s latest novel tells the story of the Bergamots, a family of four whose expensive new Manhattan life comes crashing down when 15-year-old Jake forwards to a friend a sexually explicit video made for him, unsolicited, by a 13-year-old girl named Daisy Cavanaugh. As the video, forwarded again and again, goes viral, the tabloid media go bananas, linking Jake and Daisy in an ominous and humiliating celebrity. What can the future hold for unformed, vulnerable kids who bumble their way into the lowliest realm of the permanent record that is the Internet? (Or, in Daisy’s case, reach it by simulating sex with a toy baseball bat.) Should their parents be held responsible, or are they equally victimized by the seductions and traps of digital life?
These are among the anxious, perhaps as yet unanswerable questions that propel Schulman’s riveting narrative. To call “This Beautiful Life” timely is almost an understatement, since real life regularly generates plenty of clueless but weirdly understandable behavior like that of Schulman’s characters. Yet as much as this book fiercely inhabits our shared online reality, it operates most powerfully on a deeper level, posing an enduring question about American values — is it worth leaving a perfectly good life to grab a chance for something more?
In the immediate aftermath of the video’s release, Jake is suspended from his Riverdale private school, spending long days at home in a self-loathing funk. Richard, his father, is forced to take a leave of absence from his new job in the administration at a Columbia-like university, where he is spearheading a project to claim “blighted” uptown blocks for an extended campus. Liz, Jake’s mother, who hasn’t worked much since finishing her art history Ph.D., is plunged by the family’s debacle into her own Internet-enabled dysfunction, obsessively following the blog of an ex-boyfriend, endlessly watching Daisy’s video, going down the rabbit hole of Internet porn. Liz accidentally leaves Daisy’s video open, where it’s seen by the baby of the family, irrepressible Coco, adopted from China, who promptly re-enacts Daisy’s wild sexual dance at her pricey kindergarten. It’s a total family breakdown, 21st-century Manhattan style
Read more New York Times review here.
The Family Fang The little boy and girl sing plaintively for a crowd. In front of them an open guitar case bears a handwritten note reading: “Our dog needs an operation. Please help us save him.” The audience members show sympathy for these two sad kids until, out of the blue, a man starts heckling. “You’re terrible!” he shouts. Suddenly, the scene turns contentious, split between cries of “Keep playing, children” and “Don’t quit your day job.”
Then the man who started the ruckus tells the little girl, “I hope your dog dies.” The girl angrily smashes her guitar. But when the audience is dispersed, the man and girl are still together, because he is her father. She is Annie Fang, born to a pair of performance artists who like to use their kids as human props for the nerviest, most chaos-inducing stunts that these adults can devise. The parents, Caleb and Camille Fang, refer to the children, Annie and Buster, as “Child A” and “Child B.”
Read more here.
This Beautiful Life Helen Schulman’s latest novel tells the story of the Bergamots, a family of four whose expensive new Manhattan life comes crashing down when 15-year-old Jake forwards to a friend a sexually explicit video made for him, unsolicited, by a 13-year-old girl named Daisy Cavanaugh. As the video, forwarded again and again, goes viral, the tabloid media go bananas, linking Jake and Daisy in an ominous and humiliating celebrity. What can the future hold for unformed, vulnerable kids who bumble their way into the lowliest realm of the permanent record that is the Internet? (Or, in Daisy’s case, reach it by simulating sex with a toy baseball bat.) Should their parents be held responsible, or are they equally victimized by the seductions and traps of digital life?
In the immediate aftermath of the video’s release, Jake is suspended from his Riverdale private school, spending long days at home in a self-loathing funk. Richard, his father, is forced to take a leave of absence from his new job in the administration at a Columbia-like university, where he is spearheading a project to claim “blighted” uptown blocks for an extended campus. Liz, Jake’s mother, who hasn’t worked much since finishing her art history Ph.D., is plunged by the family’s debacle into her own Internet-enabled dysfunction, obsessively following the blog of an ex-boyfriend, endlessly watching Daisy’s video, going down the rabbit hole of Internet porn. Liz accidentally leaves Daisy’s video open, where it’s seen by the baby of the family, irrepressible Coco, adopted from China, who promptly re-enacts Daisy’s wild sexual dance at her pricey kindergarten. It’s a total family breakdown, 21st-century Manhattan style
Read more New York Times review here.
The Family Fang The little boy and girl sing plaintively for a crowd. In front of them an open guitar case bears a handwritten note reading: “Our dog needs an operation. Please help us save him.” The audience members show sympathy for these two sad kids until, out of the blue, a man starts heckling. “You’re terrible!” he shouts. Suddenly, the scene turns contentious, split between cries of “Keep playing, children” and “Don’t quit your day job.”
Then the man who started the ruckus tells the little girl, “I hope your dog dies.” The girl angrily smashes her guitar. But when the audience is dispersed, the man and girl are still together, because he is her father. She is Annie Fang, born to a pair of performance artists who like to use their kids as human props for the nerviest, most chaos-inducing stunts that these adults can devise. The parents, Caleb and Camille Fang, refer to the children, Annie and Buster, as “Child A” and “Child B.”
Read more here.
