By Susan Richards Shreve, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979, 294 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, Dec. 13, 2020
My guess is I’ll never read the autobiography of Alan Arkin.
I was aware of that when I bought it at the public library in Rapid City, S.D. I was working as city editor of the Rapid City Journal, and once a week – Tuesdays, maybe? No, I’m confusing it with Taco Tuesday at Taco John’s – the library put its already inexpensive sale books on half-price specials.
Because I am congenitally unable to pass up buying a book when the prices are that low, I many times walked away with a book I’m sure I had no intention of reading. (The Covid-19 pandemic cannot last long enough for me to get around to Arkin.)
One of those likely-never-reads was “Children of Power,” which caught my eye with its vivid green dust cover that had the title printed in 2½-inch-high underlined letters diagonally across the front. You read that right. Diagonally.
The pandemic did last long enough for me to pick it up recently. Inside I found that the “Children” of the title are the late-teen offspring of Washington, D.C., elites, and through the seven days of Christmas week in 1954, the kids act like their over-educated, overfed, overpaid parents: foolishly.
Well, what do you expect? It was the time of the black star of recklessness, Joe McCarthy, and, in fact, McCarthy himself is a pivotal character in how this Shakespearean tragedy unfolds, a sort of “Romeo and Romeo and Juliet and Blanche the Virgin.”
Natty Taylor, the headstrong daughter of head of the Federal Communications Commission, is in love with Filip DeAngelis, a gleaming star athlete and son of the widowed Rosa, who is a reporter at one of D.C.’s many dailies of that era. But like many such idolized jocks, Filip is infected with the entitlement virus, so he dallies with Natty and ends up, clumsily, in the clutches of the pliable Blanche the Virgin, whose nickname puts the “moron” in “oxymoron.”
“Children” is a bowl of linguine; every relationship is twisted, nothing is easy to pin down, every commitment is as slippery as marinara. Sam Taylor, the FCC guy, has disliked Joe McCarthy since they were both kids in Wisconsin, but now that McCarthy has been disgraced – it happened in an instant on June 9, 1954, with the words, “Have you no sense of decency?” – Sam welcomes him into the Taylor home, a merciful gesture that drags Sam’s reputation down. Rosa pledges to dig up dirt on Sam and splatter it onto her paper’s front page. The Taylors’ marriage is shaky; Ellen sleeps in a separate bedroom from Sam, who abruptly starts drinking heavily and is rumored to be consorting with a homosexual. (Hey, in the ’50s, just talking to a gay person was considered immoral, unethical and, if you worked for the government, probably treasonous.)
The adults, as you can see are a mess, so the kids really can’t help it; chaos is in their DNA.
The worst of the teens is Carter Harold, who, along with lunkheaded Dick Carr, creates The Syndicate, a conspiracy of punks of privilege. Carter’s announced goal is to get Sam Taylor to resign from the FCC, but his real goal is to bed down Paulette Estinet, an exotic exchange student from France, and Carter has this knotty problem: He has been sleeping with Eliza Barnes, sister of Will Barnes, the straightest of straight arrows, who is in love with Natty Taylor.
Fresh mozzarella for your linguine?
It’s all allegory. The Syndicate, comprising dopey, easily led kids, represents the clueless nation that for a while was hypnotized by McCarthy’s foaming-at-the-mouth shouting about communists until a Boston lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, undressed him on national TV. Things unravel for The Syndicate with Carter Harold’s plot to fake-kidnap Natty and keep her until her dad agrees to resign. (Yeah, I know, but it was 1954. Kidnapping was a crime then, too, but far less serious than homosexuality.)
Someone dies, but I won’t reveal the name as – who knows? – maybe you crave vintage pasta or also are avoiding the Arkin book. And the climactic scene is basic Capulet-Montague schtick, with – you knew this, right? – a twist.
As a writer, Shreve is uneven. The dialogue is choppy, and some of her transitions are jarring rather than the desired smooth. On the other hand, her sentences are clean, her metaphors work without strain, and she deftly gets inside her characters’ thoughts, especially those of the principled but imperfect Natty – one of her legs is deformed – who could have ended up a boring prig but has just enough sass to make her likable: Since Natty was a child, she had wanted to make mistakes, dozens of small ones to maintain a sense of balance and require that Sam Taylor make adjustments.
Refreshingly (for me, anyway, as I am exhausted by 21st century novelists whose plots are practically invisible, happening only inside characters’ minds), Shreve’s people are always in motion, as if she were playing speed chess against a computer. And we’re talking wacky here, wacky plans, wacky rationalizations, wacky dialogue. Hey, they’re kids, they’re parents, they’re in Washington, Disneyland for Dummies.
Hmmmm … sounds as if the movie adaptation should have a role for Alan Arkin.