The boy can be a part of it, though, because he is young and unformed and will never have belonged anywhere but here. And Jack will be a good father—not because he is one already, but because he has decided to be. And he is the kind of man who lives by his decisions. He is a strange man and a lonely man, and a stubborn man, but he is also good. He is also the kind of man who picks up litter on the side of the road when he is walking, and goes to the nursing home once a month to visit the woman who raised him. He is the kind of man who asks his son’s babysitter to marry him because he is responsible for her baby.
And the baby will have Eliot, who is such a good, sweet, quiet boy. It gives Rosita an ache at the back of her throat to think that she is leaving him, but already he is growing up. In the last six months Eliot’s cheeks have become thinner and a stubborn hint of manhood has begun to steel itself inside him—she can smell it in his perspiration and hear it in the voice he uses when he corrects her English. He would leave her soon enough himself. She has seen the teenagers her cousin used to care for. They come by at Christmas with presents and sit on the sofa smiling too widely and speaking too slowly, bringing the glasses of supermarket eggnog she serves them back and forth too often from their lips. Rosita does not want to stay here to become an obligation to him. Or an embarrassment to her own son. This is not what she came to America for. She came with her own plans and dreams, and these mean too much for her to drop them and enter someone else’s.
So she will go back to her own country and with the money she has saved working here she can begin, again, to try to find Roberto. She will have a good-sized bribe to offer now; she knows, after all, where to go looking. His father, who is not a kind or forgiving man, was one of the FARC fighters leading the training that day outside Marquetalia. This she has never explained to Eliot with his many questions. She can only pray, if she is right about it, that she will be able to track him down and buy her son back—that her son will still be living.
Rosita swings her duffel bag over her shoulder and lifts the bundle of sheets. She stops at the bassinet and looks at the baby. He is still lying as she left him, his tiny face barely outlined in the gray light—round cheek, round forehead, round swells of his eyes under his delicate closed eyelids. You be good, she thinks fiercely. You love this man and this family and this house. You be strong and brave and smart. Maybe, when she is back at home in her country, she will write to her boy, to explain herself while he is still young enough to forgive her.
Downstairs, Rosita passes through the front hall, the dining room with its unhappy-looking portraits of dead people and huge glossy table, the brown room where she and Jack once made love. It seems now like something that happened in another lifetime. For such a strong man, Jack was so unsure and trembling—not like any other man she has ever been with. It made her want to console him and care for him, it made her feel strong and capable.
Swinging through the door to the kitchen, Rosita hears a jangling of tags. Brutus. She freezes in place—she has forgotten about him. It is not that she is afraid, exactly; she has never been afraid of him. But she was also never afraid of Caesar. Respectful, wary, and cautious, yes, but never frightened. She is suddenly aware of the bandage on her neck, the faint smart of the dissolving stitches. No barking, she wills, please, no barking. If he begins barking and Jack comes down—Rosita cannot finish the thought. It is not that it will make her change her mind, or that she is afraid Jack will be angry or will try to stop her, just that suddenly there will be so much to be said. And this is a house that depends on the unspoken.
Brutus trots across the kitchen to her and sniffs at her legs, moving in a slow circle around her. Rosita stands absolutely still until he seems satisfied and sits down on the floor looking up at her. She takes a few cautious steps across the room and puts the bundle of sheets on the washing machine. Then she turns to the door, which the dog has parked himself in front of, and approaches slowly. He stares at her with his yellowy brown eyes and Rosita realizes that he has begun whining. He is probably sad that he has lost his brother and is now alone, the single member of his species. Empathy for him rises in Rosita for a moment. But as quickly, its warm tendrils stiffen inside her—here she is, walking off into the night away from her sleeping infant. Roberto is beyond her reach and she is tired and on her own and heading off into the world without anything in her stomach. She hates this dog in front of her for being scared and sorrowful and shut up in this house, when all the comforts and grace of good fortune lie around him in decaying abundance.
She stands still, staring into his eyes until he stops whining and lies down, dropping his head and shoulders with a last desperate sigh and licking his foreleg. Then she walks around him and lets herself out into the fresh almost-morning air, redolent of money—space and tended grass and herbs planted in beds of rich soil. Damp, perfectly cut flagstones. There is a cardinal on a branch outside the kitchen window that flies off as the door clicks shut behind her. Rosita adjusts the bag on her shoulder and starts up over the lawn toward the road, breathing deeply of everything she is leaving.
THE HAZARDS
OF GOOD
BREEDING
Jessica Shattuck
READING GROUP GUIDE
THE AUTHOR ON HER WORK
A few summers ago, I was visiting friends at their summer house—a rambling, pedigreed old house on the Massachusetts shore. It was a bright, beautiful, hot July day and it was absolutely quiet—people were napping, or reading on the big old front porch, or lying out on the dock below, listening to the slap of waves. I decided to take a walk.
From this quiet corner of the world I ventured down a dirt road, which turned to pavement, and which brought me to the next town over—home to a whole different New England beach scene. Here the houses were chockablock, lining the street across from the water, their windows decorated with flags and cardboard cutouts of sea shells, their decks full of coolers of beer and collapsible beach chairs. There were people playing radios and games of football, lots of movement, activity, and noise. It was less than a mile away from the house I had come from but it felt like an altogether different, and in many ways more vibrant, world.
There was a melancholy that came with the peace and quiet of the secluded place I was visiting and, in contrast, a frenetic, contagious energy in this less exclusive, more modern place I had walked to. And the contrast was interesting to me. The Waspy old New England house seemed like part of an obsolete story, a vestige of a onetime American dream. This crowded strip of row houses seemed closer to the heart of the new America—a place where people long to be Hollywood celebrities, not members of old families, where the immigrant success story trumps lineage any day.
It made me think of people caught between these two worlds—by choice, by inertia, or by circumstance—people living in an America much larger than the one they were raised to inhabit. And with that came Faith Dunlap, a woman stunted by her lifelong adherence to other people’s sense of right and wrong, and her ex-husband, Jack, an arrogant man, resistant to change and isolated by his own stubbornness. And then their children, Caroline and Eliot, both struggling to break out of the claustrophobic and increasingly irrelevant social order their family lives by.
Of course, at the time what happened was more immediate. I imagined Caroline Dunlap, a young woman in some ways like myself at her age, and in other ways not at all, coming home to a house much like the one I had left on that hot summer day. And then her mother, Faith, packing her suitcase—a fragile but resilient woman completely unlike my mother, but yet so familiar to me it was as if I’d known her my whole life. And then Eliot, Rock, and finally Jack Dunlap, who I was a little bit afraid of, but who I knew I would have to give a voice. And the book took off from there. I wrote the first hundred pages at a racing clip and then had to stop and unravel where it was all going: what exactly Eliot was up to, what Jack was going to do, how Caroline and Faith would be affected by the outsiders they had taken up with. I came to love my characters, for a
ll their flaws, and I miss them now that I’m done writing the book.
I think of The Hazards of Good Breeding as being about individuals and families and love and frustration more than I think of it as being specifically about WASPs. The Dunlaps, like so many people out there, have hemmed themselves in with their own traditions, sense of propriety, and social insularity—and they are each struggling, in their own ways, to realize essential connections between their lives and the lives of others outside the narrow slice of the world they inhabit. Whether they succeed or not is up to each reader to decide for him- or herself.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How does Caroline Dunlap change over the course of the novel? How might her choices for postcollege life have taken a new direction?
2. Jack Dunlap is an inscrutable man to all who know him. How does Shattuck manage to elicit our sympathy for him?
3. The Hazards of Good Breeding is a comedy of manners with dark undercurrents. How do these come to the surface over the course of the novel? What do they reveal about the Dunlaps’ world?
4. Why is Faith Dunlap attracted to Jean Pierre?
5. The novel is very much about people’s public front versus their interior worlds. How does the theme of role-playing manifest itself throughout the novel?
6. The Hazards of Good Breeding is told from five different perspectives. How does this shifting point of view (first we see through Caroline’s eyes, then Eliot’s, then Rock’s, etc.) affect our reading of the book and our understanding of the events that unfold?
7. What does Paul Revere’s ride embody for Eliot Dunlap?
8. Is Jack in love with Rosita?
9. Describe the role of humor in Shattuck’s society portrait. Given that this is in some ways a story about a fragmented family at a moment of crisis, why didn’t she choose a more sober tone?
10. What does Caroline realize from her experiences with Stefan?
11. Caroline is initially dismissive of Rock Coughlin. What accounts for her change of heart by the novel’s end?
12. How does Shattuck’s story relate to a larger portrait of contemporary America?
13. How does The Hazards of Good Breeding fit into the American literary tradition of authors like John Cheever and John Updike? What other writers’ work does Shattuck’s novel call to mind?
14. What are the “hazards of good breeding” in this book?
MORE NORTON BOOKS WITH READING GROUP GUIDES AVAILABLE
Diana Abu-Jaber Arabian Jazz
Rabih Alameddine I, the Divine
Robert Alter Genesis*
Christine Balint The Salt Letters*
Brad Barkley Money, Love
Andrea Barrett Servants of the Map
Ship Fever
The Voyage of the Narwhal
Charles Baxter Shadow Play
Frederick Busch Harry and Catherine
Abigail De Witt Lili
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jack Driscoll Lucky Man, Lucky Woman
Paula Fox The Widow’s Children
Judith Freeman The Chinchilla Farm
Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique
Helon Habila Waiting for an Angel
Sara Hall Drawn to the Rhythm
Patricia Highsmith Stranger on a Train*
Suspension of Mercy*
Hannah Hinchman A Trail Through Leaves*
Linda Hogan Power
Dara Horn In the Image
Janette Turner Hospital The Last Magician
Helen Humphreys The Lost Garden
Erica Jong Fanny
Shylock’s Daughter
James Lasdun The Horned Man
Don Lee Yellow
Lisa Michaels Grand Ambition
Lydia Minatoya The Strangeness of Beauty
Patrick O’Brian The Yellow Admiral*
Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea
Josh Russell Yellow Jack
Kerri Sakamoto The Electrical Field
May Sarton Journal of a Solitude*
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Anya
Buffalo Afternoon
Frances Sherwood The Book of Splendor
Vindication
Gustaf Sobin The Fly-Truffler
In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star
Ted Solotaroff Truth Comes in Blows
Jean Christopher Spaugh Something Blue
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland The Making of a Poem
Barry Unsworth Losing Nelson
Morality Play
Sacred Hunger
Brad Watson The Heaven of Mercury
* * *
*Available only on the Norton Web site: www.wwnorton.com/guides
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE HEARTFELT THANKS to Eric Simonoff for his guidance and wisdom, and to Jill Bialosky for her capable direction and understanding. To Bill Buford for his support and Cressida Leyshon for her kindness and advocacy, to Binnie Kirshenbaum and Helen Schulman for their generous encouragement and advice, to Karen Schwartz, Gordon Haber, and Rebecca Donner for their readings and moral support, and to Verlyn Klinkenborg for getting me started on the right foot.
I am also deeply grateful to my father and mother for their values and their belief in my imagination, to my whole family for their enthusiasm and encouragement, and to my husband for his gift of insight, his sense of humor, and his faith in my work. And I am forever indebted to my friends, especially the girls of Lowell House, for sharing their stories and their jokes, and their unfailing recognition of the meaningful and the absurd.
MORE PRAISE FOR THE HAZARDS OF GOOD BREEDING
“Reading Jessica Shattuck’s pitch-perfect novel is like spying on the children and grandchildren of John Cheever’s Wapshots.”
—Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times
“A witty and promising first novel. . . . [Shattuck’s] descriptive brio can leave the reader punchy with surprise and admiration.”
—Jennifer Egan, New York Times Book Review
“[A] stunning debut novel, Cambridge native Shattuck renders the sad, comic decline of the Dunlap family, mirroring the demise of the Boston Brahmins themselves.”
—Greg Lalas, Boston Magazine
“[With a] keen understanding of human nature and frailty [Shattuck] often displays a magnetic use of detail that not only makes her scenes come visually alive but also illuminates character.”
—David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
“The Hazards of Good Breeding showcases Shattuck’s sophisticated eye and her talent for turning arch observation into words.”
—Dan Santow, Chicago Tribune
“Shattuck is an observant and graceful writer, and contrives elegant and touching scenes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Quiet . . . funny and moving.”
—Kristine Huntley, Booklist
“[Shattuck] has a real gift for crafting beautiful small moments.”
—Leah Greenblatt, Seattle Weekly
“[The Hazards of Good Breeding] is at once a funny send-up of blue bloods in debauched decline and a profoundly compassionate contemplation of the burdens of inheritance.”
—Donna Seaman, Ruminator Review
“Shattuck’s prose is graceful and unforced, full of unexpected and casually tossed insights, and, like Lorrie Moore, her humor acts both as scourge and salve, to skewer and to deflect.”
—Nicola Smith, Valley News
“A loopy, tightly wound WASP family in Concord, Massachusetts, unravels with the introduction of alien elements in a generously portrayed and richly appointed debut. . . . Shattuck has done wonders bringing to luminous life her patriotic diorama.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Wickedly funny.”
—New York Observer
“An excellent novel. . . . The author avoids contrivance in presenting sensitive issues experienced by totally credible, thoughtful people and comes up with a new understanding of American life every bit as affecting as Richard Yates’s magnificent Revolutionary R
oad.”
—Ann Beattie
“Jessica Shattuck has written a thoughtful and elegant first novel, full of insight and humor. It is set in a rarefied world, one that she knows intimately and reveals perceptively; one which, for all its flaws and eccentricities, she loves.”
—Roxana Robinson
“With great skill and wisdom Jessica Shattuck weaves an intricate domestic web that highlights the most vulnerable threads in a myriad of relationships: parents, children, friends, and lovers. The Hazards of Good Breeding is all that the title promises and more. It is a terrific debut by a talented writer.”
—Jill McCorkle
“With her sharp eye for detail and witty, winning prose, Jessica Shattuck takes the familiar story of a high-WASP family’s demise and turns it on its head. There are at least fifteen certifiable pleasures in every paragraph of this charming, intelligent, and exceedingly well-crafted debut.”
—Helen Shulman
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Jessica Shattuck
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 2004
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Manufacturing by Quebecor World, Fairfield
Book design by Mary A. Wirth
Production manager: Amanda Morrison
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
The Hazards of Good Breeding Page 28