While perusing the "100 Notable Books of 2011" in The New York Times' Holiday Gift Guide last week and guiltily realizing that I had only read a handful of the chosen titles I came across a description of Helen Schulman's novel "This Beautiful Life." Schulman's best-seller relates the saga of a 15-year-old boy whose life unravels after he receives, and mistakenly forwards to a friend, a sexually provocative video made by a younger girl. As one who is often resistant to technology and overly anxious about the perils of online interactions, I decided to delve into Schulman's story.
Maria Russo of The Times titled her July review of Schulman's novel "Total Family Breakdown: 21st-Century Manhattan Style," and aptly so. In her latest work, Schulman, who is also a writing professor at the New School and the author of several novels including "The Revisionist" and "Out of Time," crafts a poignant narrative about a way in which lives can be ruined in our modern, technology-saturated world. Fitting this 21st-century context, the events of Schulman's novel occur in the sphere of the World Wide Web, a setting portrayed by Schulman as mysterious and threatening.
What happens, Schulman asks, when a promiscuous home video goes viral and is disseminated to millions of viewers worldwide? Protagonist Jake, the teenager who receives the video, endures humiliation, suspension from school and a troubled relationship with sexuality throughout his internet scandal.
His father's job and his parents' marriage are both affected by the incident, examples of the devastation one mistake can cause. The most troubling scene, however, occurs when Jake's six-year-old sister Coco catches a glimpse of the explicit video and mimics the provocative dance herself.
While each of Schulman's characters is captivating and ever-evolving during the novel, Jake's mother Liz emerges as the most spellbinding figure. Although her horrified maternal reaction to the incident is expected, her subsequent Internet addiction and obsession with the blog of a former love interest are unanticipated consequences of her son's actions. Liz's struggles with her identity as an art history scholar turned housewife paired with the disturbing happenings of the novel further enrich her character.
A timely anxiety about the blurred standards of privacy and legality in the cyber era pervade the novel. Schulman certainly succeeds in alarming her readers and drawing them into a sense of unease about our fundamentally web-reliant world. Schulman sets the book in 2003, however, a time before many of the technological developments we know today came to fruition, and this renders her message all the more haunting.
And yet, while "This Beautiful Life" certainly serves as a disquieting warning of the hazards of online communication, one cannot simply write it off as a cautionary tale. Schulman also interweaves into the novel greater ideas about modernity in general, beyond the scope of the internet. The story begins just after Jake's family moves to New York City from the quaint college town of Ithaca, N.Y., and this progression to an urban lifestyle reflects the novel's ideas of modernity and adaptation.
Not only does Jake become enraptured in the fast-paced world of Manhattan preparatory school privilege, but his father toils to make his mark as a high-up executive at a New York City university. Schulman's story deals as much with the themes of rapid changes, challenging adjustments and family tensions as it does with the menaces of technology.
Schulman's depiction of modernity, in fact, appears most strikingly at the beginning of the novel, when Liz and Coco attend a mother-daughter sleepover at the Plaza Hotel. The attendees of the event enjoy a lavish meal, receive professional makeovers and sleep in an expensive hotel room, demonstrating the decadence of their new lifestyle.
Liz, clearly uncomfortable during this experience, ponders how the six-year-old girls, caked in makeup, look like "miniature Russian whores." From the outset, Schulman indicates that her story will deal as much with the themes of rapid change and familial disruption as with the dangers of technology.
Another strength in Schulman's novel lies in the parallels she draws between her characters and those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." She cleverly names the video maker Daisy and houses her in a large, lavish glass residence overlooking the Hudson River. Jake, much like Nick from Fitzgerald's classic, nervously navigates his new surroundings, and his peers possess many of the same spoiled, shallow characteristics as their West Egg literary predecessors. Although the novel is largely concerned with technology, Schulman makes it clear that human struggles with transforming trends and shifting values are timeless.
In "This Beautiful Life," Schulman paints an eerie and evocative picture not only of an adolescent's devastation, but also of a family's difficulty to integrate into the modern, urban world they inhabit. Readers quickly become sucked into the whirlwind of the family's new life in Manhattan and the issues that arise after Jake fatefully clicks his "forward" button, creating a viral sensation.
