by Sara Nelson
Had I been more on top of my game, I might patiently have explained to my friend that a book is not a historical if it takes place in the same era in which it’s written. Anita Shreve’s Fortune’s Rocks—about a young woman at the turn of the nineteenth century—is a historical, since it was published in the 1990s (though it’s not a particularly good one because all of Shreve’s late-nineteenth-century characters have the political agendas of late-twentieth-century ones). Ian McEwan’s Atonement, about Britain during the Second World War and published in 2002, is a (much better) historical. Jane Austen’s books, which were written about and in the same nineteenth-century period, are not, technically speaking, historicals. And neither, of course, is Fear of Flying, which is in fact the definition of contemporaneous. In her groundbreaking book, Jong put her finger directly on the tumultuous sex-role-changing era in which she was living.
It’s tempting to dismiss Susanna’s comments as the simple ignorance of youth or to give in to my favorite pastime: lamenting the lack of education among recent college graduates. (While enjoyable, that isn’t really fair, as most students today are not totally responsible for their own literary ignorance. Dissing them is sort of like blaming the victim. If I’d had the opportunity to get four credits for, say, the Semiotics of Seinfeld at an accredited institute of higher learning, I too might have chosen that over the complete works of Shakespeare.) But it may be that she simply misspoke, and said “historical” when she really just meant “old books” or “books written about times other than my own.”
Take a look at my first appendix again. You’ll see plenty of old books there, books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I did finally read this year. There were also some bona fide historicals, like Restoration, by Rose Tremain, about seventeenth-century England, on the list. But somehow, they’re rarely what I reach for first. Like Susanna, I usually don’t feel compelled to read about “olden times,” preferring to focus on books about “the way we live now,” as Trollope once put it. Historical novels all too often read to me like costume dramas or, even worse, foreign movies with subtitles. They’re too “arty,” they don’t seem “real” because the characters speak in a language I don’t immediately recognize and understand.
So I was dubious when a friend suggested I read Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin. Like Susanna, I immediately felt as though I were getting a history assignment from my eleventh-grade teacher. (The way-too-vague jacket didn’t help, either.) But my friend was insistent. “It’s not about history,” she insisted, and then delivered her knowing punch line: “It’s actually about clothes.”
Slammerkin is a first novel by thirty-something Donoghue, who is the daughter of Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue. (No offense, Emma, but to us middlebrow Yanks, that could work against you, not for you.) It has all the earmarks of the dreaded you-know-what: it was written in the 1990s (published in 2000), it takes place in eighteenth-century England, and people dress and talk like characters in a Merchant-Ivory film.
It’s also a bawdy, funny, captivating read. And my friend was right: it’s all about clothes.
“Slammerkin,” apparently, is an old English word that can mean either “a loose dress” or “a loose woman,” both of which make plenty of appearances in the novel. Mary Saunders is cast out of her working-class London home in 1748 because of her innate love of fashion: she gave her honor in exchange for a traveling salesman’s red ribbon. Now “ruined,” she has no choice but to become a prostitute along the Dials, sometimes turning as many as a dozen sleazy, perfunctory tricks a night. But Mary has another skill, no less sensually described: “Thread seemed to obey [her]; cloth lay down obediently at her touch.” She soon lands a job as an apprentice seamstress to an old friend of her estranged mother, a position that eventually leads to disaster. In the end, the culture condemns her for the one thing she cannot help: she is a woman who loves fashion.
As a woman who loves fashion, I could identify, because if there’s one thing I care about as much as my books in the bedside piles and on the cherry shelves, it’s the stuff hanging in my closet(s). One of the things I’ve neglected to tell you is that when in the middle of the night I’ve pulled all manner of books off the shelves, I often head for the closet to do the same with my clothes. Has this great Calvin Klein suit survived my ten-pound weight gain? Who knew that this old black tunic would come back into style? As surely as I spend many late-night hours asking the world’s most important question: What should I read next? I also face the equally pressing one: What shall I wear tomorrow? Like choosing a book, choosing an outfit is, for me, a conscious, deliberate act, one that makes some statement to the world and to myself about how I’m feeling that day. And if my clothes-aholism hasn’t brought me to wrack and ruin the way Mary’s did, it has provided me with more than a couple of anxious moments, usually just as the truck backs up to my building to deliver my gigantic MasterCard bill.
Donoghue clearly understands the way some women love clothes. Slammerkin is filled with luscious passages of the heroine surrounded by brocades and linens and velvets, touching sections of Mary choosing just the right slammerkin for her stroll through the Dials, and myriad scenes in which women bond with their wardrobes. The fabrics and dresses and accessories are so plentiful and so center-stage here that they become characters, as surely as they would a couple of centuries later in Sex and the City, which, by the way, addresses many of the very same themes. The lust for beauty, the price of attraction, the way vanity can be your downfall: you can watch them play out on an HBO series or you can read about them in Slammerkin. The fact that the book takes place in another century is almost beside the point.
So I loved Slammerkin and only wish every historical writer could get completely inside her, um, material the way Donoghue does. I agree with the London Financial Times reviewer who said the story never gets “weighted down by its time,” and with the jacket copy that brags, “Donoghue wears her learning as lightly and as jauntily as the strolling girls did their slammerkins.” It has a lightness despite its serious consequences, and it never becomes didactic or moralistic, like, say, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, a 1996 novel that may have been inspired by the same historical crime. When I read that much-praised book, I felt as though I were reading about issues and symbols rather than people. I was not a fan.
Like Susanna, I—and most readers—want to read about people who seem real to us, people and situations that in some ways reflect our life. But Susanna misses the point when she suggests that books written before, say, 1990 can’t do that. A good historical is good because it both takes you away from your own circumscribed world and puts you in the center of it: it shows you that despite the funny clothes, and the unusual language, and the long-gone venues, people are all pretty much the same. The issues that occupy us—issues like jealousy, vanity, and lust, for example—don’t change, even if the societies in which we play them out do.
Mary Saunders may have lived in an era when an openly sexual woman was scorned and the punishment for vanity was, literally, death. We may live in a more open-minded society (or maybe not, but that’s another story). But a lot of us live by the same rules Mary learned on the the eighteenth-century London streets—“Clothes make the woman. Clothes are the greatest lie ever told.”
Hmm. Now that’s starting to sound like an idea that even Susanna might get. After all, we do all work at a fashion magazine.
“Try this,” I think I’ll tell her on Monday, as I drop the hardcover on her desk. “Don’t think of it as homework,” I’ll say. “Think of it as InStyle, the eighteenth-century version.”
October 10
Afterlife with Father
It wasn’t the Kennedy assassination or, God knows, September 11, but I can remember very clearly the first thing I did after reading The New York Times one day in November 1986: I picked up the phone and called my father. “Did you see the news about this big insider-trading scandal?” I asked him. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I always thought those junk
-bond guys were lousy crooks!”
A businessman with his own small furniture-manufacturing company, my father, Charles, had never worked on Wall Street, but he was an individual investor, and the stock market was one of our pet topics. As early as grade school, after my mother would drill all four of us kids on spelling words at dinner, my father and I would retire to the living room, where I’d drink Tab and he’d drink Scotch and he’d harangue me—his prized sapphire ring on his amazing long left hand rhythmically tapping the coffee table—about price/earnings ratios and buying on margin.
And I was a willing student. I was interested in math, but even more, I was fascinated by my father, who I literally believed ruled the world. My family still laughs about the time I went to third grade and told everyone that he was now the “president”; he’d been chosen to run a local business association, but in my adoring little-girl way, I’d extrapolated a bit. I thought he had been elected to run the country. While I eventually settled into a slightly more realistic worldview about him, I still continued to look forward to those long evenings when, home from school on vacation, we’d sit—by now I’d join him in the Scotch—and dissect the latest business news. There was something kind of back-room-of-smoky-bar forbidden about our conversations, and I was plenty aware that the fact that he was talking business with me, his younger daughter, was unusual. It made me feel “chosen” and grown-up.
So when I read about the arrest of Ivan Boesky, the star arbitrageur of the 1980s who’d been arrested for insider trading and a host of other crimes, it was only natural that I’d call Charles. And in the months that followed—as more and more brokers, lawyers, and “arbs” were arrested, tried, and sentenced—my father and I reinstated our regular discussions, this time by phone. Was what Michael Milken did worse than what Boesky did? we’d argue. What about that handsome Martin Siegel, the investment banker who got off with a far lighter sentence? Mostly, we’d debate the ins and outs of the cases (as far as either of us could understand them: they were very complicated) and discuss the specifics of the insider-trading laws. While we agreed that what most of these guys had done was unconscionable, criminal and just plain “lousy”—my father’s favorite word—neither of us was completely convinced that the laws against insider trading, per se, were really enforceable. Isn’t it natural, we’d wonder, to want to share information with your family and friends and to protect them from losing their fortunes?
Given all that interest, you would think that I would have been first in line at the bookstore back in 1991 to buy Den of Thieves, the meticulous account by Wall Street Journal reporter James B. Stewart of the Boesky/Siegel/Levine/Milken cases that led to the late-eighties stock market crash and subsequent recession. But for me, the publication of the book illustrated another aspect of Reading Rule #2: Timing, timing, timing. In this case, bad timing. My father had died just the year before, and while I remained a news-hound, some of the thrill had gone out of my Wall Street obsession. There was no one I enjoyed chewing over the business news with, at least not in the same way. So while I must have bought the book—there it was last week, sitting on the cherry shelves—it wasn’t until now, when I was coming off yet another birthday and similar but much, much bigger corporate and insider-trading scandals were dominating the news, that I thought to read it.
You know the old expression “The more things change, the more they stay the same”? Well, that’s what I’d say about the revelations in Den of Thieves, but I’d add one thing: They stay the same, only bigger and badder. Lying on my living room couch all Sunday afternoon as Charley and his best friend Luke played nearby, I found myself chuckling disbelievingly over some of the statistics. Dennis Levine, the first inside trader arrested in the scandal in 1986, had made $12.6 million in illegal profits. In 1984, junk bond king Michael Milken made a total of $23 million. The next year, that handsome Martin Siegel received a $3 million bonus. These are big numbers, obviously, and far more than Charles or I ever had in our collective piggy banks, but by today’s standards they seemed like a pittance. I was overcome with a desire to pick up the phone again and call Charles to compare the Den of Thieves story with the alleged corruption at WorldCom, Enron, and Martha Stewart. I could almost hear his reaction: “Hey, Saroo, what’d you think? Would Milken’s $23 million just about pay for [convicted Tyco honcho] Dennis Koslowski’s annual supply of dental floss?”
Oh, Dad, if only I could talk to you about how little and how much things have changed. There’s no more World Trade Center, for one thing, which was the scene of some of the crimes discussed in this book. There’s also no more Kidder, Peabody, a firm that figured prominently here. Michael Milken has survived both jail and cancer, but he’s still a very, very rich man respected for his philanthropy. I know my father would think it as weird as I do to be talking about the late eighties crash that resulted from all these scandals while the TV in the next room is blaring about the recession we’re in right now, the one that has caused middle managers to have to forgo retirement while forty-year-old CEOs put their tens of millions into Florida homes that can’t be repossessed. If he were here, we’d have a good gallows-humor-type chuckle over the ever-thus nature of the world. I’d tell him about Stewart’s assertion, toward the end of the book, that the Milken et al. scandals have “led many to question whether justice was served, and whether future scandals will be deterred.” I can just see you slamming your ring on the table over that one.
But if the message of Den of Thieves is depressing, the experience of reading it now turned out to be anything but, because for three straight nights I lay awake channeling my relationship with my late adored dad. (If reading Patrimony reminded me of him, Den of Thieves came closer to bringing him back.) “Didja notice,” I could imagine myself saying, “that none of the bad guys in this story are women?” (I had a habit, especially in those days, of using just about anything to further my argument that women are, in fact, better human beings than most men.) “Yeah,” I can hear him reply. “But what worries me is that so many of the guys are Jewish.” (Like a lot of post-WWII Jews, my parents constantly worried that the Christian world looks for a way to blame us for everything.) I’d tell him that I thought it was interesting that John Mulheren, one of Boesky’s chums, was tight with no greater a working-class hero than his New Jersey neighbor Bruce Springsteen. “Who the hell is that?” he’d say. Pretty soon, I figured, we’d be off the subject of business and the stock market and Den of Thieves altogether. “Have you heard any good jokes lately?” he’d ask, before launching into the kind of vaguely off-color story he loved.
So I guess you could say I had a great week reading Den of Thieves, but only partly because it is, as a friend of mine put it the other day, “the paradigm of a business book.” Some people would say it is an almost mythic morality tale about corruption, punishment, and redemption. But what it made me feel was nostalgic and wistful and sentimental. It reminded me yet again that what’s in a book is only part of what matters; in the right circumstances and with the right history, just about any book can take you where you need to go, even if you could never have found that place on a map.
My mother has told me that ever since her mother died, she regularly dreams that the two of them are sitting around talking about the routine events of their lives. This doesn’t make her sad, she says; in fact, she usually wakes up refreshed and happy, having felt that she and her mother had a “nice visit.” Moralistic and heavy and complicated as it is, Den of Thieves did for me what my mother’s dreams do for her: it transported me to a dreamlike world, one that I don’t get to visit very often anymore. It’s a world where a girl and her father sit up long into the night, drinking and arguing and talking about life.
October 24
No Business Like Our Business
When I was in college, and for a few years after, I hung around with a lot of aspiring actors, directors, and playwrights, what we used to call drama folk. Our catchphrase in those days, whenever anybody would mount a production or tak
e a part—let’s say, somebody was going to play Hamlet or, this being the eighties, write a Sam Shepardish play—was “the definitive performance has been done.” What this meant was that you were risking your creative life to try to re-enact something that had already been done to perfection; there wasn’t much chance that any college kid was going to outdo Sir Laurence Olivier, for example, or write a piece that was weirder or more touching than any of Sam’s.
That sentence came back to me, loud and clear, this week as I opened books that had come to me at the magazine for possible excerpt or review. On one day, I received two debut novels about the publishing business—one by a guy named Adam Davies, who’d written The Frog Prince, about his experiences as an editorial assistant at a book publisher, and the other, Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom, the story of a Korean-American junior fashion editor who’s up for a promotion at a Vogue-like place just as her mother arrives in town vowing to find her a nice Korean-American husband. A few weeks earlier, I had received, through nefarious and thus undivulgeable methods, a partial manuscript of a novel whose sale had just made waves throughout the fashion magazine business: The Devil Wears Prada, it’s called, and it’s a none-too-nice roman à clef by Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant to Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue. This one, in particular, was the subject of a lot of speculation and discussion around the office; although they’d probably have to carry it around in plain brown wrappers, virtually all the staffers in the fashion and beauty end of magazine publishing said they would read the book when it was published.
I’ve read all three, and while they each have various amusing and/or entertaining things about them, they don’t measure up to what I think of as “the original.” That book was written by Calvin Trillin and published in 1980. It’s called Floater.