Persuasion Privileges
25th January 2010
If you seek fiction that makes you think, read The Privileges by Jonathan Dee.
I did not like the book opening. F. Scott Fitzgerald, that nemesis of modern novelists and his theme of aspiration without virtue, haunts this novel as it opens with a wedding and characters grasping for Gatsby’s lawn. The Privileges opens like Dee’s assault on Mount Fitzgerald, the mark of a limited writer.
But, the book then began to address the same existential question that Cormac McCarthy addressed in The Road. Where McCarthy stripped away everything to reveal character and virtue, Dee bequeaths everything to reveal character and virtue. The Privileges is The Road, just traveled in style. What happens when the world gives you everything? How do you live your life when you have everything?
While this seems like a fantasy question, it is something more and more of us face. What are the moral consequences of peace and prosperity? Dee gets us there with financial masters of the universe who get everything yet you don’t need Everything to achieve Ease or Comfort. Most of us live in an economy that provides material needs, but gives nothing to our quest for virtue, ethics, or character. If you think the meaning of life would become more clear if you owned a jet rather than a car, you need to stop smoking weed whether real or metaphoric.
If you visit Amazon and read the reviews on The Privileges you will find several of the same comments that plague readers of The Great Gatsby – all these wealthy, over privileged people who don’t know how to live. That is a problem. This book requires a different kind of thinking and if you don’t like that kind of thinking then you probably won’t want to read The Privileges. It is a strong work of fiction, so it is ironic and does not say what it means. If you cannot break past the obvious trappings of setting, scene, and time you will miss the metaphor.
Now, since I blog on all things persuasion let me be a pedantic prole and note just one instance.
It involves the outcomes of dissonance reduction. Adam, the primary protagonist of the novel, talks with Devon, his petty, junior partner in an illegal insider trading scheme that has earned great riches. Devon claims that Adam does this just for the thrill, that he is just a player without a conscience. Before Adam replies, he thinks about this observation and Jonathan Dee, the writer, makes those thoughts available to us.
Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fortitude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the noblest thing he had ever done in his life. It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it. (page 144)
How does a man who rips off millions of dollars through illegal trading over many years get through the day? Dissonance reduction. “Hey, I’m providing for my family, baby, and I do what it takes without letting them know about it or worry about it. Look at how beautiful and happy my wife and children are, baby. And they live in the cocoon I built for them without them even knowing it exists. I am great. I am noble. And I tell no one of this because I am humble.”
Of course this is just fiction and the boring fiction of people who have everything and aren’t happy, and the whole thing with dissonance is just that bad boy rationalization everyone does when they try to justify themselves when they get caught . . . except what goes on before they are caught and what if they never get caught and what if peace and prosperity actually makes virtue more difficult and does any of this connect with those of us who don’t have a jet, but only a car or a bike or are just sitting around wondering what to do next?