It is not essential to love or even admire characters to be engaged in a novel. But it is a marvelous reading experience when characters represent figures who in real life have earned disdain, yet on the page have earned at least curiosity and at best a bit of empathy as they try to fit in their world.
Such is the case in debut novel Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead. The first-world problems of a Manhattan banker and his family during the weekend of the oldest daughter's wedding would seem the least likely subject for care or concern. Even if she is in her third trimester. But the more the reader learns about Winn Van Meter and his family, both his children and those who came before him, the more his situation is apparent. He thinks he is the ultimate insider, yet it is revealed that family things he grew up believing may not be so. He is trying to hold together a view of the world that upholds certain standards, doing his bit as a part of the establishment, yet he doesn't fit in as firmly has he had believed.
At the same time, his youngest daughter could use a little understanding. She's not getting it, mainly because Winn is trying to uphold perceived standards about what is and is not proper. And in trying to uphold those standards, his conduct is far from becoming.
As the novel opens, every day for Winn is "a platform for accomplishment". His professional position appears secure, apart from the young sharks that anyone his age would face, and in Connecticut he has efficiently loaded the big car to take stuff, lots of stuff, to his wife and daughters already at their island summer home on Waskeke Island. But what's on Winn's mind? One of his daughter's bridesmaids. He's like Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty, wanting that youth in a daughter's friend in an entirely inappropriate way.
That turning back the clock is important to Winn is shown in his ferry ride to the island:
He wished that the ferry could take him back into a world where the girls were still children ...
It's not the girls' childhood he wants back, though, it's the peace and quiet:
Waskeke was the great refuge of his life, where his family was most sturdy and harmonious. To have all these people, these wedding guests, invading his private domain rankled him, though he could scarcely have forbidden Daphne from marrying on the island. She would have argued that the island was her island, too, and she would have said Waskeke's pleasures should be shared
.
Ah, this is a family that doesn't share. And it shows in their fractures. The youngest daughter, Livia, fell in love, hard, with the son of one of the families Winn believes he is in the circle of. He dumped her, she aborted the baby and now the boy's parents, the Fenns, may be the key to Winn getting into the private golf club on the island. That goal appears more important to him than his oldest daughter, Daphne, having a successful wedding and Livia having her heart healed. Winn continually brings it up in conversation until even his faithful wife Biddy tells him to can it. Winn thinks Livia's actions or the fact that he slept with Fee Fenn before Jack Fenn met her may be in his way. Why can't they all let bygones be bygones? Yet it is Winn who remembers why others should hold grudges.
The importance of these social clubs to Winn is shown through his memories of his distant father, who belonged to many clubs. Winn kept Fenn from joining a Harvard club when they were both undergraduates, and Winn thinks that may be yet another reason the Fenns are keeping him from joining that golf club now. Livia, who is studying marine biology, has different ideas about the university club's symbol, a snake swallowing itself. Livia's
father loved that stupid snake swallowing its own tail. He said it was about self-sufficiency, renewal, and rebirth, shedding skins but persisting, having no beginning and no end. She thought it was about going nowhere, about finding no better option than to devour yourself.
This reveals both characters. Winn is stuck in the past, a past that may never have existed. Livia has not gotten over losing the boy she loved.
In an interesting subplot, that boy is following in his father's footsteps to join the army as a soldier. His father "won" the Vietnam lottery and voluntarily joined up instead of going to Canada or trying to get into the guard, as other fortunate sons were able to do. Winn and the other guys at college don't understand this decision.
The discussion about who should serve in Vietnam and who should not have to be bothered with such a burden is an important discussion that has been ignored in this post-draft age of war for more than a decade. It's the poor who still serve disproportionately in the service of rich men's goals. The discussion is one I can see Romney taking part in as one character says:
Deferments exist for a reason— a good reason— and you should take advantage. Think of your mother. ... It’s to keep men like you from getting cut down before their time. There’s no sense in it. It’s a waste.
OK then, we know where the rest of us fit in. Losing us is not a waste.
But there is still the wedding. It is starting to feel like "a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done". Whether it's Agatha the bombshell bridesmaid, the groom's wayward brothers, heartbroken Livia or patriarch Winn, some or all of them will take what they think is theirs and just not do it in proper form. This is after Livia's need for parental love became clear, and the bluntness with which Winn let her down is jaw-dropping. When she called from college needing love and help after causing a scene, Winn let loose:
"You were way out of line. out of line. It's bad enough that you go around acting like a floozy, but then you throw your dignity right out the window and the whole family's with it. it's not becoming. It's not adult. People won't respect you. ...
"Everything's always worse for you, isn't it? As though that's an excuse. You can't keep your knees together, and now we see you can't keep your mouth shut either. You need to think about other people for once. The Ophidian is something I respect, and you chose that place, of all places, to drag this family through the mud. I can forgive many things, Livia, but I'm not sure this is one of them." ...
He wanted to shout at her that he had wanted a son who would be a member of the Ophidian, not a daughter who got knocked up by one.
Getting into a private club and having a son? That's the best Winn can aspire to? I feel rather sorry for the poor chap that his world is so small. Such a far cry from the way he thinks things are:
When (Winn) was young, he would bring his girlfriends out to the tower just after sunset, and, standing at its base with the island at his feet, he had felt he was at the center of the compass, the horizon a perfect circle drawn by the revolving beam.
For balance, the reader has the view froom Dominique, a Coptic Egyptian who has known the family since she and Daphne were school girls:
Dominique had almost forgotten how these families worked, how they were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors' servants. She was surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back."...
Years had to pass before Dominique could see the strain they placed on themselves or, rather, what their grand goal was. They wanted to be aristocrats in a country that was not supposed to have an aristocracy, that was, in fact, founded partly as a protest against hereditary power. That was what Dominique could not understand: why devote so much energy to imitating a system that was supposed to be defunct? Any hereditary aristocracy was stupid, and Americans didn't even have rules for theirs, not really. Lots of the kids Dominique knew at Deerfield came from families dedicated to perpetuating some moldy, half-understood code of conduct passed along by generations of imposters. But, she supposed, people who believe themselves to be well bred wouldn't want to give up their invented castes because then they might be left with nothing, no one to appreciate their special clubs, their family trees, their tricky manners, their threadbare wealth.
One of the delights in reading
Seating Arrangements was seeing Shipstead's talent in naming her characters. The main family are Van Meters, keeping track of what is consumed in the power of their world. The main character is named Winnifred, a stuffy name that even beats out Charles Emerson Winchester III, but he is known as Winn. However, is he winning? His wife has the staid name of Biddy, yet there is more to her than even he knows. The oldest daughter is Daphne, in mythology the nymph who was chased by Apollo who became a laurel bush. The name also means a flowering shrub, and this character certainly flowers during her pregnancy. "Selkie" daughter Livia, if short for Olivia, means the olive tree that represents peace and harmony, things that Livia is seeking. It also could derive from the Latin word "lividus" that means blue or envious, and that is certainly Livia's state. The son-in-law is named Greyson -- a grey son indeed. His family name is Duff, not a vibrant word. The wisest bridesmaid is Dominique, who doesn't dominate but who does not realize her own quiet strength and power. Phoebe Fenn, known as "Fee" -- what is the cost of Winn's wanting so badly to join that private golf club?
One of the big takeaways from Seating Arrangements is that I'm very glad to not be part of the Van Meter circle. I don't want to be like the people that Winn wants to be liked by, and I don't want to fall into the kinds of traps in which he fell about the need to be so well-regarded by others. But I do want to be the kind of person who can read about characters representing people far outside my circle, and wish for better for them as well as for myself and mine.
The rich are different from you and me, as Fitzgerald is supposed to have said to Hemingway. It's not, as Hemingway is supposed to have replied, that they have money. It's what they think the money replaces. After reading novels such as Seating Arrangements and Fitzgerald's masterful The Great Gatsby, I'm glad to not be them. The occasional, fascinated peak into their world confirms this feeling.
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