March 20, 2013 - The New Yorker
People lie about reading books as often and casually as they lie about having sex—less about who, what, or how good than about how much. Remember George Bush’s annual competition with Karl Rove? In 2006, the year Iraq descended into civil war, Bush supposedly read ninety-five books to Rove’s hundred and ten. Most readers try to make their exaggerations more credible than this, but the honest will admit that the Internet, social media, T.V., and the flood of information to which we subject ourselves every day, if not every minute, have seriously cut into not just book reading but book readiness. Add small children, and the nineteenth-century novel threatens to disappear from your life.
A couple of months ago, to find out if I was still capable, I set out to read Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now.” Trollope kept a log of his literary production, making sure to write two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes of his three-hour workday, and he was so efficiently prolific that if he finished one novel before the day’s clock had run out he would start another. Trollope began “The Way We Live Now” on May 1, 1873 (he was fifty-eight; this was the thirty-second of his forty-seven novels), and he wrote its thousand pages, or four hundred and twenty-five thousand words, in twenty-nine weeks—longer than it took me to read those pages, but not dramatically longer. Trollope, hugely popular through most of his career, wrote in an age of unthinkable attention spans.
“The Way We Live Now” is one of the last examples of the three-volume serialized Victorian novel. If the genre seems nearly as alien to contemporary American readers as the Renaissance epic poem, the world that Trollope portrays is not so remote. Trollope’s London is a satirical distortion of the city that he found upon returning from eighteen months of overseas travel: the luxurious center of a vast empire floating on limitless credit, a society defined entirely by commercial interest, a hothouse of financial speculation and status competition, a place where relationships have become purely transactional. In his autobiography, Trollope described this London in the harsh language of a moralist: “If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.”
The mysterious figure looming at the center of “The Way We Live Now” is Augustus Melmotte, a financier (the term had just been coined) of obscure origins—French? Irish-American? Jewish?—and unsavory reputation. No one knows how Melmotte made his fortune—there are rumors of jail time in Germany and fraud in France—but he’s rich, unimaginably rich, maybe the richest man in the world, and that’s enough for almost everyone in London society to swallow their blue-blood prejudices and distaste for his upstart manners. City investors beg to buy shares of Melmotte’s newly incorporated South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a murky project for a rail line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz that has all the signs of being a fraud. A lucky few are given seats on the company’s board; young aristocrats chase after the hand and income of Melmotte’s unlovely but unexpectedly tough-minded daughter, Marie; socialites trade favors to score scarce tickets to his sumptuous dinner in honor of the emperor of China; the Conservative and Liberal Parties vie to put Melmotte forward as their parliamentary candidate for Westminster (the Tories win). Whether or not he’s a fraudster doesn’t matter, as long as the music keeps playing.
“The Way We Live Now” is one of the last examples of the three-volume serialized Victorian novel. If the genre seems nearly as alien to contemporary American readers as the Renaissance epic poem, the world that Trollope portrays is not so remote. Trollope’s London is a satirical distortion of the city that he found upon returning from eighteen months of overseas travel: the luxurious center of a vast empire floating on limitless credit, a society defined entirely by commercial interest, a hothouse of financial speculation and status competition, a place where relationships have become purely transactional. In his autobiography, Trollope described this London in the harsh language of a moralist: “If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.”
The mysterious figure looming at the center of “The Way We Live Now” is Augustus Melmotte, a financier (the term had just been coined) of obscure origins—French? Irish-American? Jewish?—and unsavory reputation. No one knows how Melmotte made his fortune—there are rumors of jail time in Germany and fraud in France—but he’s rich, unimaginably rich, maybe the richest man in the world, and that’s enough for almost everyone in London society to swallow their blue-blood prejudices and distaste for his upstart manners. City investors beg to buy shares of Melmotte’s newly incorporated South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a murky project for a rail line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz that has all the signs of being a fraud. A lucky few are given seats on the company’s board; young aristocrats chase after the hand and income of Melmotte’s unlovely but unexpectedly tough-minded daughter, Marie; socialites trade favors to score scarce tickets to his sumptuous dinner in honor of the emperor of China; the Conservative and Liberal Parties vie to put Melmotte forward as their parliamentary candidate for Westminster (the Tories win). Whether or not he’s a fraudster doesn’t matter, as long as the music keeps playing.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/when-the-money-gets-too-big-trollopes-london.html#ixzz2OdKz8kM2
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