High low

a few more thoughts on status & plot

Hello dahlings,

Dashing off an unplanned follow-up to my previous newsletter on why we love stories about messy rich people, because I can’t stop thinking about it in light of the last two novels I read.

In one corner today, we have bonafide literary masterpiece The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker-Prize-winning novel of 1980s decadence. In the other: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a commercial mega-hit with over 750K ratings on Goodreads in less than two years—also about 1980s decadence.

These books similarly defy the correlative narrative dynamics of the choice plot vs. no-choice plot dichotomy (stories in which characters make things happen vs. things happen to characters). Both are choice-plot novels about messy rich people that, as their respective critical acclaim and popularity attest, somehow do not seem to trigger the usual moral heartburn. Clearly these are books people want to read, but, in spite of the stratospheric wealth and privilege they not only feature but outright aggrandize, they also manage to be books people want to be seen reading.

My question is why. What exactly is it that exempts these ultra-deluxe novels from progressive moralistic equivocation and disdain?

Again I think what’s going on here has more to do with plot than character, but before we get into either I want to start with Northrop Frye’s Theory of Modes. Frye classifies stories by the hero’s “power of action” into five of them: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic. I’m going to excerpt the full taxonomy because it’s brilliant, but, as you might have guessed, I’m primarily interested in the high and low mimetic here:

1. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. [. . .]

2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. [. . .] Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives.

3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.

4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and realistic fiction. “High” and “low” have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic [ . . . ]

5. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

The Line of Beauty is a low mimetic, high society novel. Specifically, its hero, Nick Guest, falls into a grand literary tradition that includes the likes of Lily Bart and Gatsby and I have a tendency to impudently metonymize with “the scholarship kid at boarding school (also: me), whose ego compensates for socioeconomic insecurity by pulling moral-intellectual rank.”

In more genuinely archetypal terms: Nick follows a long line of low-mimetic heroes on the cusp of the ironic who imperfectly penetrate a social milieu above their socioeconomic class—in Nick’s case, through the Feddens and their marvelous house in Notting Hill, where at the height of his social ascendence he dances with Margaret Thatcher herself.

I want to carefully parse the heroic degree of Frye’s modes vs. the shifting social relations and power dynamics that are a function of plot—what we might refer to as the heroic socioeconomic trajectory. In Frye’s taxonomy, the hero is—stative verb; “the scholarship kid at boarding school,” well, implicitly gets a scholarship and goes to boarding school and penetrates a new social milieu. These verbs are all dynamic. Nick is neither superior nor inferior to the Feddens as a human being—it’s a realistic novel and all the characters are flawed—and Nick never achieves true socioeconomic parity with them, though the precise status differential varies considerably as the novel’s plot unfolds.

Malibu Rising, meanwhile, is a high mimetic comedy; it is an Aristophanic novel in which, to paraphrase Frye, a central figure constructs her own society in the face of strong opposition, eventually achieving a heroic triumph. Nina Riva might seem like a low-mimetic heroine at first blush—Reid takes great pains to make her moral perfection relatable or even into a kind of flaw—but make no mistake: Nina is Mother Theresa as a swimsuit model. While her socioeconomic status oscillates wildly with developments in the plot, Nina is steadfastly superior.

Perhaps it feels like I’m ragging on Malibu Rising a bit, and I won’t pretend it enthralled me the way The Line of Beauty did. But I also want to clarify my personal lack of interest here is very different from the sort of structural boredom we find in extreme no-choice plot novels like A Little Life. “It’s not me, it’s A Little Life,” if you will, but “it’s not Malibu Rising, it’s me.” I’m not Reid’s target reader. Still, I respect what she does, and that she’s really good at it. I’ll go so far as to say Malibu Rising and The Line of Beauty are of approximately analogous quality in their respective modes and genres—and I think this comes across in the parallel cleverness of how they manage to insulate their excesses from moralistic scrutiny without compromising their aesthetic integrity.

The general thrust of this cleverness is an alchemical mix of high and low, rich and markedly less so, not unlike a café au lait, or pairing an Hermès bag with a dress from Target. The wealth and privilege that the protagonist—and reader—enjoy is “cut” by way of contrast, specifically via their socioeconomic trajectory in the plot.

The beginning of The Line of Beauty finds Nick in a new situation of social in-betweenness, neither and both an insider and outsider. He’s just taken a First at Oxford—above Toby Fedden’s Second—but is a recent addition to his friend’s family’s posh household and circle. This set up allows Hollinghurst to glamour the reader alongside Nick with either the comfort of an ally or even a small sense of relieved superiority to him in his early social anxieties.

As Nick’s status, sophistication, and assets grow, the reader never fails to root for him: no matter how high he rises socioeconomically, the Feddens are always higher. Even at the apex of his privilege, when he’s riding high with Wani, when he’s in exquisite shape while Toby’s put on weight, Nick is still gay in the 1980s—and, as the novel’s ending makes abundantly clear, still fundamentally a Guest (it’s such a cheeky and ingenious choice of surname).

The first half of Malibu Rising, meanwhile, oscillates between Nina’s luxurious, messy life on a single day in the present (1983) and her epic familial backstory, starting with her parents’ courtship. Her hardships escalate as the backstory catches up to the present (that is: a decadent party) in the middle of the novel, peaking during the three years she parents her siblings while still a teenager herself.

We’re inclined to forgive Nina her wealth and even her beauty in the deeply American-mythic sense that she’s earned it. This is a “bootstraps” narrative if there ever was one, which speaks to the novel’s choice plot in spite of Nina’s traumatic backstory. Even when her options are limited, Nina never loses agency. If there was a shred of doubt as to whether she had a choice with regard to caring for her siblings, it’s obliterated by the counter example of her father, who makes precisely the opposite one. Her backstory not only eschews inevitability, it functions as a direct foil to her choice. Hollinghurst notably takes a similar approach with the AIDS crisis. Nick speaks to how careful he is, and even interiorly maintains remarkable self-possession.

Overall, though, Nina’s socioeconomic trajectory mirrors Nick’s more in the sense it inverts it. In the simplest terms: his is low, high, low, while hers is high, low, high.

I think the reason we see opposite trajectories similarly neutralizing moralistic aversion returns us to Frye and the high vs. low mimetic mode. Low-mimetic novels can overcome the moral squeamishness of privileged environments through a relatively low-status protagonist because, as he is no better or worse than his rich environment, this aligns us to an underdog who is unfairly at a disadvantage. Conversely, the high-mimetic protagonist is so innately superior that all she has to do for a pass is prove her mettle.

Wishing you (especially the moms!) an extra-opulent Sunday, guilt-free—

ANJ

P.S. Last year I sent a Mother’s Day newsletter far more “on theme” if you’re looking to luxuriate in uselessness a bit longer: