Suburbia's Soured Dreams
Adam Lively
Sunday Times
23 Jan, 2005
HUMAN CAPITAL. By Stephen Amidon. Viking Pounds 12.99 pp375
From Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road and John Updike's Rabbit series to American Beauty and Desperate Housewives, the soured dream of American suburbiavhas attracted writers for both page and screen. (We have nothing like the samevrich tradition in this country which may say something about the patrician bias of British literary culture.) Human Capital, Stephen Amidon's impressive sixth novel, situates itself firmly in this territory, exploring with considerable psychological and moral penetration the prototypical suburban dichotomies of public contentment/private anguish, material affluence/spiritual desertification, and taking us on a compelling journey from niggling unease to melodramatic implosion.
The story opens with Drew Hagel, an estate agent down on his commissions and flustered by the impatience of his creditors. His financial salvation, he thinks, will be Quint Manning, a local millionaire who has the reputation of playing complex financial instruments like a violin, and into whose top-drawer investment fund Drew has sunk his last cent, confident of a 40% payoff. The only seemingly small fly in the ointment is that his daughter has recently broken off a romance with Manning's spoilt, ne'er-do-well, boozing son, Jamie.
It is a measure of the dexterity with which Amidon takes us on his voyage that, by the end, without the reader sensing any abrupt change of focus, Hagel has become a minor, merely pathetic piece of collateral damage in a much deeper tragedy. Shannon, his daughter, has switched her affections from Jamie to somebody from the wrong side of the tracks, a dreamer called Ian whose life has been one of per-petually being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the end of the book, Ian is to be in the wrong place again, one last, terrible time.
This youthful triangle becomes the centre of the story, a generation adrift because their parents, too, have lost their moorings in a suburban sea of affluence and anxious anomie. With forensic, acid skill, Amidon builds up a picture of a community bound together only by mutual suspicion, and by a collective fear of the demons that may lurk out there beyond the picket fence, outside the realm of power and money.
Shannon, Jamie and Ian, too, are given life above all by richly tapestried context, by the subtly drawn characters who aid and abet them: Carrie, for example, Quint's disillusioned wife, perpetually caught in the crossfire of father and son, and Ian's uncle and guardian David, whose keep-your-head-down stoicism fails to bring the peace that he dreams of and that it deserves. The dysfunctional American family -celebrated to outrageous comic effect in The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle -is here given a classical literary treatment, one for which the well-worn term "tragic" is for once appropriate.
Like many good stories, this one hinges on a single, seemingly happenstance incident, a chance in a million whose ramifications gradually take on the weight of inevitability. And, like many good stories, it poses the reviewer with the dilemma that to reveal this central incident would spoil the book. Suffice it to say that, as Amidon gradually unravels the implications of this event, the pictures he has equally patiently constructed of the main characters are overturned. Jamie, hitherto the one who has had life handed to him on a plate only to throw it back like a petulant toddler, becomes as much a victim as Ian. Good characters act badly because they find themselves in situations where no choice could possibly be the right one. And as with all good dramatists, Amidon's characters become both the creators of their circumstances, and simultaneously their victims.
One could argue that the book's epilogue, which returns to the characters a few months after the final act of the tragedy and finds seeds of redemption and hope, sprinkles it with an unnecessary sugar-coating. One could also point out that - with its echoes in particular of The Ice Storm and American Beauty -Human Capital is not wholly original, either in its tone or even some of its principal episodes.
But Amidon's absorbing novel is distinguished above all by its taut, compelling plot, one hinged by intriguing moral ambiguities.
2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/ booksfirstbuy
Copyright (C) The Sunday Times, 2005
Adam Lively
Sunday Times
23 Jan, 2005
HUMAN CAPITAL. By Stephen Amidon. Viking Pounds 12.99 pp375
From Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road and John Updike's Rabbit series to American Beauty and Desperate Housewives, the soured dream of American suburbiavhas attracted writers for both page and screen. (We have nothing like the samevrich tradition in this country which may say something about the patrician bias of British literary culture.) Human Capital, Stephen Amidon's impressive sixth novel, situates itself firmly in this territory, exploring with considerable psychological and moral penetration the prototypical suburban dichotomies of public contentment/private anguish, material affluence/spiritual desertification, and taking us on a compelling journey from niggling unease to melodramatic implosion.
The story opens with Drew Hagel, an estate agent down on his commissions and flustered by the impatience of his creditors. His financial salvation, he thinks, will be Quint Manning, a local millionaire who has the reputation of playing complex financial instruments like a violin, and into whose top-drawer investment fund Drew has sunk his last cent, confident of a 40% payoff. The only seemingly small fly in the ointment is that his daughter has recently broken off a romance with Manning's spoilt, ne'er-do-well, boozing son, Jamie.
It is a measure of the dexterity with which Amidon takes us on his voyage that, by the end, without the reader sensing any abrupt change of focus, Hagel has become a minor, merely pathetic piece of collateral damage in a much deeper tragedy. Shannon, his daughter, has switched her affections from Jamie to somebody from the wrong side of the tracks, a dreamer called Ian whose life has been one of per-petually being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the end of the book, Ian is to be in the wrong place again, one last, terrible time.
This youthful triangle becomes the centre of the story, a generation adrift because their parents, too, have lost their moorings in a suburban sea of affluence and anxious anomie. With forensic, acid skill, Amidon builds up a picture of a community bound together only by mutual suspicion, and by a collective fear of the demons that may lurk out there beyond the picket fence, outside the realm of power and money.
Shannon, Jamie and Ian, too, are given life above all by richly tapestried context, by the subtly drawn characters who aid and abet them: Carrie, for example, Quint's disillusioned wife, perpetually caught in the crossfire of father and son, and Ian's uncle and guardian David, whose keep-your-head-down stoicism fails to bring the peace that he dreams of and that it deserves. The dysfunctional American family -celebrated to outrageous comic effect in The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle -is here given a classical literary treatment, one for which the well-worn term "tragic" is for once appropriate.
Like many good stories, this one hinges on a single, seemingly happenstance incident, a chance in a million whose ramifications gradually take on the weight of inevitability. And, like many good stories, it poses the reviewer with the dilemma that to reveal this central incident would spoil the book. Suffice it to say that, as Amidon gradually unravels the implications of this event, the pictures he has equally patiently constructed of the main characters are overturned. Jamie, hitherto the one who has had life handed to him on a plate only to throw it back like a petulant toddler, becomes as much a victim as Ian. Good characters act badly because they find themselves in situations where no choice could possibly be the right one. And as with all good dramatists, Amidon's characters become both the creators of their circumstances, and simultaneously their victims.
One could argue that the book's epilogue, which returns to the characters a few months after the final act of the tragedy and finds seeds of redemption and hope, sprinkles it with an unnecessary sugar-coating. One could also point out that - with its echoes in particular of The Ice Storm and American Beauty -Human Capital is not wholly original, either in its tone or even some of its principal episodes.
But Amidon's absorbing novel is distinguished above all by its taut, compelling plot, one hinged by intriguing moral ambiguities.
2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/ booksfirstbuy
Copyright (C) The Sunday Times, 2005