The Way We Live Now in Brooklyn

So, although I kept dozing off throughout the last 15% of The Way We Live Now (a couple of times at 8:30 or so this morning, on the couch, jet lag having once again turned me into what for me passes as a very early riser; a couple of times in a drowsy, sunny patch of grass this afternoon in Prospect Park, the individual blades casting lovable shadows on the text), I finished it tonight, while Dawn played Dragon Age and Paul watched Dawn play Dragon Age. Since this has taken so long to read, and since I haven't been blogging every day like I did with the other books I read, I'm worried I'll forget a lot of what interested me about this book, and yet I don't feel up to trying to remember every single thing that interested me. Maybe I'll do a follow-up entry based on my Kindle notes, but for now I'll throw out a few thoughts that are fresh in my mind.

One thing I'm worried about is that, because the novel is so long and chock-full of characters--more so even than Vanity Fair and David Copperfield, I think--I might forget the names of the characters, or confuse Croll with Cohenlupe or something like that. Trollope is also always pointing out little echoing relationships between characters: "how could she berate Ruby for running after Sir Felix when she herself was running after Paul Montague?" etc etc. So I think I will arrange all the characters in categories, mostly based on relationships:

• Characters Throwing Themselves at People Who Don't Love Them Back. This happens all over the place in The Way We Live Now. The big three are probably Roger Carbury, who keeps pursuing his cousin Hetta even though she refused his proposal of marriage and shows no interest in marrying him, and who irrationally feels betrayed when his [distant relative by marriage? and] friend Paul Montague reveals that he, Paul, loves Hetta, not having known when he first met her that Roger had secretly called dibs (Roger does technically call dibs before Paul does, but Paul thinks dibs don't count if the girl doesn't like you); Mrs Hurtle, the American "wild cat" who crosses the Atlantic to convince Paul that he should still marry her after he breaks off their engagement by letter, and who tries all manner of tricks to win him away from Hetta, from dressing with a chic simplicity she knows he will appreciate, to entertaining him with her mellifluous voice at dinner and a movie, to convincing her to take her on a beach vacation, to promising to horsewhip him using her particularly American horsewhipping skills; and Ruby Ruggles, the lower-class farm girl who runs away from her grandfather and her meal-and-pollard-selling fiance John Crumb in order to go on a series of music-hall dates with Felix. Of course, there's also Marie Melmotte, headstrong daughter of the spectacularly rich and fraudulent financier, who goes against her father's wishes and throws herself at the beautiful but completely useless Sir Felix Carbury, and goes so far as to orchestrate an elaborate elopement with him to New York, which he is too lazy and useless to execute (but she makes it as far as Liverpool before her dad catches her.) At least within the span of time covered by the novel, Marie and Ruby get some (extremely listless) encouragement from Felix--he's never going to marry Ruby, though--whereas Roger and Mrs Hurtle just rage and rage against Paul Montague ("leave Hetta alone!" "Marry me!") to not much effect. Also, I'm pretty sure there's a moment where Roger is criticizing Mrs Hurtle for running after Paul and realizes he's doing the same thing to Hetta, and where Mrs Hurtle criticizes Ruby for running after Felix and realizes she's doing the same thing to Paul. Nesting!
• Characters at Whom Other Characters Throw Themselves, & Who May or May Not Reject Those Advances. Hetta (pursued by Roger, loves Paul); Paul (pursued by Mrs Hurtle, loves Hetta); Felix (pursued by Marie and Ruby; wants Marie's money, wants to hang around with/sleep with Ruby, loves neither). The only one of these characters who has never given any encouragement to her pursuer is Hetta, which makes Roger Carbury kind of a weirdo for being so angry at Paul; but he also really loves her and is sad, so poor Roger. Paul totally pursued and got engaged to Mrs Hurtle before he freaked out about her former life and then fell in love with a different girl. Felix is a disaster. Interestingly, both of Felix's admirers are technically engaged to other men who meet with their families' approval: Marie to Lord Nidderdale (kind of a crumb), Ruby to John Crumb (not a crumb at all, according to Trollope.)
• Characters Looking to Make Mercenary Marriages. Felix Carbury, but most of his motivation comes from his mother, Lady Carbury, who also keeps trying to get Hetta to marry her cousin Roger long after it's appropriate to give that advice; Lord Nidderdale, whose father wants him to marry Marie for her money, and who is happy to oblige if the terms are lucrative enough ("the governors have this all worked out"); Georgiana Longstaffe, who has a fit when her family has to give up their London house because it will get in the way of her husband-shopping, & who grudgingly consents to go to stay with the Melmottes, at whose home she meets & gets engaged to wealthy Jewish financier Breghert. All of these characters are pretty nakedly honest about their mercenary motives--Felix vaguely reassures Marie that he loves her to her face, but after their failed elopement tells everyone he didn't care for her at all; Nidderdale is nice to Marie, but both of them agree their engagement is a financial transaction initiated by their fathers; Georgiana tries to negotiate with Breghert for a guaranteed house in London before they get married--and none of these marriages actually work out. I guess we can also add weirdo Fisker's pursuit of Marie, but at least they both have money (?).
• Characters Looking to Get Something Out of the Melmottes. Lady Carbury, Sir Felix, Lord Nidderdale, occasionally some Longestaffes all hope to get something out of a family member marrying Marie. Miles Grendall and his father Lord Alfred seem to be weird Melmotte hangers-on who get salaries (or maybe just Miles does? he's his secretary) and sit on the Board of the Railway. Mr Longestaffe seems to get money from Melmotte somehow, and has Melmotte visit the Longestaffe family estate at Caversham in order to get his advice about financial stuff, to the horror of the whole Longestaffe family; also the Melmottes rent the Longestaffe house in London and buy another Longestaffe property, Pickering (there's all this business about Dolly Longestaffe, the oldest son, having to sign off on the sale, which is maybe something you can do even with entailed property? which relates to all that stuff from Woman in White about robbing your children! and in the end Dolly's refusal to sign off on something about Pickering--like giving Melmotte the deed without him having to pay, crazy!--results in Melmotte totally committing forgery which is his downfall!) Also Fisker, Montague's American business partner, who shows up and proposes the railway idea to Melmotte. Fisker actually does seem to get quite a lot out of Melmotte! Also the Conservative Party, and whoever wants him to give a dinner to the Emperor of China, and also the Catholics for some reason.
• Vaguely European Characters Connected with Finance, Who May or May Not Be Jewish. Melmotte, of course! He is supposedly French, although it is suggested at the end that his dad might have been a crazy Irish-American forger from NYC named Melmudy or something hilarious. Melmotte's antecedents are the vaguest ever! I need to go back and check, but I think that when Melmotte was running for Parliament, and secretly giving money to both Catholics and Anglicans, and everyone was debating whether he himself was a Catholic or an Anglican, it was suggested that he had been born Jewish. But the Irish-American thing would suggest he WAS Catholic, isn't that interesting? So maybe everyone just assumes financiers are Jewish, because it is the nineteenth century. Or MAYBE the point is that no one knows where Melmotte came from, and that rumors are flying everywhere. Equally murky is the provenance of his wife Madame Melmotte and his daughter Marie, who is not Madame Melmotte's daughter (and whose mother was probably never married to Melmotte.) They both speak French to each other all the time.
  Also the following three German and/or Jewish and/or Eastern European guys: Cohenlupe, a rich crony of Melmotte who has been in Parliament for a while and seems pretty established, but who totally books it when Melmotte's finances are looking shaky; the aforementioned Breghert, a Jewish widow and father of grown-up kids who is a partner in a very wealthy financial firm, who reacts to Georgiana's family's (and Georgiana's) anti-Semitism with some sadness at their lack of social progress and also some contempt (very interesting to see the arguments both Georgiana and Breghert make about why it's okay to marry a Jew; Georgiana's are stupider, but point to a Lady Julia who ran off with a Goldscheiner (sp?) and now is accepted in society); and Croll, Melmotte's clerk, who speaks in a comical German accent ("vat," etc.) Croll and Breghert both find out about Melmotte's final forgery attempt and stop it, which leads to Melmotte's death, basically. But they are good guys, esp. Breghert. Croll ends up with Madame Melmotte, who (erroneously) thinks he can help her get money her husband settled on Marie, and seduces him with Curacao. Oh! ALSO. Vossner, the guy who procures food and drink and runs stuff for the Beargarden, and somehow cheats all the members and leaves town.
• Useless Fops at the Beargarden. Sir Felix (totally useless!); Dolly Longestaffe (even more useless!); Miles Grendall (has a job with Melmotte but is poor and cheats at cards); Lord Nidderdale (slightly less useless?); Lord Grasslough (kind of a jerk?); Paul Montague (too good for the Beargarden.) Beargarden morality is peculiar, but can be explained by extreme laziness & vague gentility: no one wants any trouble, and no one except Felix really cares whether anyone cheats at cards, or whether anyone pays their gambling debts. It's funny to see Felix get all morally indignant about this stuff because he happens to win at cards for a while and ends up with a bunch of useless IOUs from Miles Grendall.
• Boring Clergymen. There are all these different clergymen in the book and I can't keep them straight. One is the bishop of whatever area of Sussex Roger Carbury lives in (Carbury? some larger area?) He is a nice Anglican and doesn't care about doctrine, just about being nice. Victorian novelists, in my experience, love talking about how clergy don't care about doctrine. Sometimes they're being critical of the clergy  for not being religious enough (George Eliot? hard to tell. Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South? kind of hard to tell, since as a Unitarian she probably admires the dad for refusing to reassert those articles or whatever, but also she sees how annoying the practical consequences of his decision are), but I'm pretty sure Trollope thinks the bishop is agreeable and good, if hypocritical. Then there's the Catholic priest, Father Barham, who was raised a gentleman and went to Oxford and then converted to Catholicism, and Roger Carbury feels bad for him because it's sad for a gentleman to live in poverty and cut off from other gentlemen (as you surely are when you hang out with a bunch of horrible lousy old Catholics). But Father Barham is insufferable because he's really into Catholicism and feels duty-bound to convert everyone. Then there's the clergyman who goes to Germany with Felix--the Reverend Septimus Blake. He is described as "a brand snatched from the burning of Rome." I do not understand what this means. Was he a Catholic who turned Anglican?
• Literary Guys. At the beginning, Lady Carbury writes to three editors hoping they will say nice things about her amazing-sounding nonfiction work, Criminal Queens. The editors are Mr Alf, who edits the entertainingly nasty periodical The Evening Pulpit and who runs for Parliament against Melmotte; Mr Broune, who edits the more popular, mainstream, conciliatory, cautiously-pro-Melmotte Morning Breakfast-Table, and who falls in love with Lady Carbury (and therefore says nice things about her books in his paper); and Mr Booker, who believes in mutually-helpful puff pieces. Lady Carbury aspires to be literary and writes reviews and a novel (The Wheel of Fortune) in addition to Criminal Queens, but when she finally marries Mr Broune she realizes that being a literary wife is better than being a literary writer. This is infuriating, but also reminds me of the huge revelation I had when reading Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? a few years ago: we always think about how women had it rough "in the old days" because they couldn't have jobs of their own; but I hadn't really thought about how for women choosing a husband meant not only choosing a sexual partner and a life partner and a social class, but also basically choosing a profession. If you fall in love with a clergyman, you'd better love teaching Sunday school, or you'd better not marry the man you love. So stressful to add career as another criterion for choosing a partner: not only do you want your husband to be successful at his career, but you want it to be one you wouldn't mind kind of doing. I was talking to a friend about this, though, and realized that I think women do this today when choosing partners, probably more than men do: women may have internalized the idea that a husband's career defines him, her, and their lifestyle, and can possibly light up her life in a way she never expected. I don't know if a lot of men think that way: "Oh man she's a business lady, she will totally take me on sophisticated trips to Paris!" Thoughts?
• Characters Who Are Not Entirely Horrible. In order of least-horribleness: 1) Hetta? Not much bad stuff to say about her. Pretty devoted and nice; possibly too uncynically committed to true love? But Trollope seems to think that is fine. 2) Roger Carbury: it's annoying how mean he is to Paul about how Hetta belongs to him etc etc but he is a good guy. 3) John Crumb. He is a simple soul and Ruby should marry him because he is a decent guy and also can give her vittles and also they are in the same class. Also he thrashes Sir Felix, which everyone can get behind, even though this honest-lower-class-guy-thrashing-a-fop kind of makes me uncomfortable. Obvs Roger is the perfect kind of upper-class guy because he hangs out with the lower-class guys and is a traditional squire and makes hay, but of course is totally into the hierarchy with all the gentleman stuff. 4) Paul Montague? He is less idealistic and sympathetic in this book than in the miniseries but still a pretty well-meaning guy, who gets tangled up in a bad situation. 5) Mrs Hurtle. Despite the horsewhipping, she helps out Ruby and lets Mrs Pipkin's children have pudding, which leads Mrs P (and Trollope) to admit she is a nice lady. 6) Ruby? She's Ok. 7) Marie? She is pretty OK too. I think Trollope kind of admires her pluck.

THE END