Survival of the Strongest

Occupy Wall Street sympathies make it hard for me to romanticize the insanely rich these days, but I’m still willing to be seduced. Thus I approached Burning Down the House, Jane Mendelsohn’s novel about the fall of a New York real estate baron and his unhappy family, with the ambivalence I reserve for guilty pleasures (Vogue, schadenfreude). Are the rich different from you and me? Certainly each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That I find myself thinking of Donald Trump rather than Anna Karenina or Gatsby these days is pre-existing bias, one that could be set aside by good writing, memorable characters, and the evocation of a fully realized world. After all, money, family, and the interplay of personal world with public are the traditional stuff of which novels are made. The book flap invites the reader to “enter the lavish universe of the Zane family from a wedding in an English manor house to the trans-global world of luxury hotels, while promising the contemporary equivalent of Greek tragedy against a back drop of financial crisis, human trafficking, and financial crisis.” Taken together, the hypedup jacket copy and the title, with its allusions to Agamemnon and Talking Heads, suggest an unstable mix of glitz and gravitas, but it is unfair to hold a writer responsible for marketing decisions, and Mendelsohn, who wrote I was Amelia Earhart (1996) (widely acclaimed, thoroughly engaging), is a lyrical stylist, so I anticipated hours of reading pleasure and a novel I would not be able to put aside until I finished.

Burning Down the House gets off to a promising start. In a remote Russian village, a ten-year-old girl is sold into sexual slavery by her unwitting parents, dazzled by the recruiter who speaks their language and holds out the promise of a better life for their daughter, perhaps a job in a restaurant. Within weeks, the girl is living in the back of a spa in a New Jersey strip mall.

She is used by men from all walks of life and given drugs by the woman with black hair. A customer who says he loves her gives her extra cash each week.

With a few deft sentences, Mendelsohn compresses years of hell and the girl’s eventual escape to New York, where she will reinvent herself and become Neva. “She is stoic like a river. She is sensuous like a river. She does not need people like a river.”

Next we are transported via speeding black limousine with tinted windows to an English manor house for Jonathan Zane’s wedding. We’re in the company of his perennially unhappy sister Alex, who for reasons never explained, thinks that it is too late for her to have a life of her own outside the hermetically sealed Zane Zone. Meanwhile, feckless Jonathan, heir apparent and weakest link, has been caught in bed with the nanny of his two young half brothers. This is no excuse to call off a lavish destination wedding, it turns out, but the occasion for hiring a new nanny. A Slavic girl this time. Will Jonathan make a play for Neva, the new nanny, who is “beautiful but not pretty”? No, Jonathan will find other ways to bring disgrace his family. Neva herself is drawn to Steve, the Zane family’s patriarch, but who can blame her? Mendelsohn endows him with the manufactured charisma of an Ayn Rand ubermensch at twilight. “I may be a crony capitalist but that is only because there is nothing left to be,” he tells his adopted daughter, 17-year-old Poppy, who is “brave but not strong.” How arch of Steve. Surely there are other choices (ski bum? philanthropist?). It was at this point that my faith in Mendelsohn started to wobble. I was entering the Valley of the Unreliable Omniscient Narrator, where I could no longer tell the difference between author’s intent and effect. Pathos or bathos? Such a thin line between self...