rev. of Growing Up Rich by Anne Bernays
"Easy writing's curst hard reading," says Sheridan the witty playwright, and one reads Anne Bernays' prose so effortlessly and with such speed that he is inclined to think it is his own accomplishment and not the author's. But the art is there, leading us on, deftly sorting the German Jews from the Russian Jews by the brand names they use, the food they eat, their virtues and their follies, and separating both from the rest of the world by their uneasy Jewish bond. The book is in that sense a Jewish novel, but Anne Bernays is addressing a large audience, telling secrets that are not ultimately damaging, exaggerating for the sake of her satire but not making grotesques, and bringing everything to a cosy end.
The story concerns Sarah Agard Stern, a young girl, half-Jewish, growing up in the Truman years. Sally, as she is called by everyone, loses her mother and her step-father in an airplane crash and finds herself and her spoiled brother Roger willed to a Boston University professor named Sam London. Her life changes from German Jewish elegance, New York ambience, marzipan, original Degas and Calder to Russian Jewish intellect, Brookline, knishes and a cot on the porch. It is at first to Sally worse than being stolen by the gypsies, but she gets used to it, then finds it comfortable and decides to remain there rather than move in with her real father and his new wife. Her decision involves little tension for herself or for the reader. It would take a burnt out Graham Greene character looking for martyrdom through boredom to live with her father and his garrulous wife, Lorna. And what one might think of as the normal call of blood has been weakened by her father's need to make scenes in restaurants, to
keep himself drunk and to live with the vapid, tennis playing Lorna and her oral run-on paragraphs.
Putting the Jewishness aside, thematic as it is, the story is a Bildungsroman of a young girl growing up. Personally I found this aspect of the book more convincing and enjoyable than other things I have read about ex-prom queens and zipper obsessed teenagers. Sally does manage to get her hands under the covers at night, but her more constant preoccupation is with food. There are almost as many spreads and dinners in the novel as one finds in Dickens, and they are catalogued by the plump Sally with some tenderness or regret when they fall short of expectation. This hunger is the black beast that Sally has not tamed by the end of the novel, but the reader feels secure enough about Sally to know that as her sexual desire normally grows, she will make the necessary other adjustments to give it fair chance to find expression. After all, anyone who at fifteen is able to call a drunk a drunk and a bore a bore is not going to end up sitting like a dumpling on a chair while the others are dancing.
I chatted with Anne Bernays after a reading she gave, and she told me that no, the work is not autobiography in the sense that she ever lived in Brookline or that her parents died in an airplane crash, but it is in essence true. She mentioned that it was her editor who forced onto Sally the definite decision to stay with Sam London where she as author had not so formally resolved that. This may be a concession to the Molly Picon matinee crowd, but it has done no great damage. She added also that she is currently working on a sequel to the book. This does not dishearten me either or make me feel that she is taking the Rover boys to Addis Ababa. One grows fond of Sally, or at least I have, and wants to see her involved in something more than a crush, to see her laid and settling in to the normal patterns of adulthood and/or adultery. There is not so much of the wit and feeling in books like this around that we should masochistically deny ourselves.
Growing Up Rich is not fattening and it doesn't dull the mind. Read and enjoy.
