The world of winners - McCrae’s Party and the Grand Venice Ball
Here we are right in the middle of the novel and the Party of Andre McCrae - Leila’s and Wayne’s gallery dealer, in New York at Seventy-fourth and Fifth. We are probably looking forward to entering in the world of the winners/millionaires once again in the closing chapter. It is where the Grand Venice Ball begins and the novel ends. Perhaps there is an added value of this non-accidental narrative architectonics - the book is on an alert about this issue, the narrator is bitterly ironic and the woman artist is struggling to differentiate herself from the glittering names and the world of winners. Leila, who boasts of being a winner finds herself on the side of the losers in the world where there is no other criteria but money. And the biting sarcasm targets the usual bunch of mock-heroes, hanging always at Andre’s parties:
There is always a smattering of royalty, a hint of Hollywood, a major media celebrity who mounts the news, a press lord or two, a Wall Street tycoon or two, a real estate baron or two - all appropriately wived in women who come (like certain designer dresses) only in sizes two to eight. Double digits are out. 75/X
A neat structural parallelism could be run in-between the two events. The Grand Ball where ‘all the mythical figures’ are to be seen stepping down from their boats - ‘Lacroix rustling Givenchy, Ungaro fluttering past Lagerfeld, Rhodes glittering near Valentino, Ferre flitting past Saint Laurent’ (p.328/XX) is just the predictable grander follow-up of McCrae’s party. Even the descriptive stylistics is in a way an extension of what we know about those glittering people and places from the art dealer’s party. What seems quite obvious to the sane mind of Leila now is the grim truth about their harried, married, nervous faces. The big money-makers seem ‘so nail-bitingly tense, so frantic, so fearful’. E. Jong is eager to draw another parallel: in-between hers and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s treatment of this issue. Back in the twenties the rich used to have fun while nowadays being rich seems like a job. Jong is all the time conscious that her woman artist doesn’t belong to this club, that the rich are different from ‘you and me’. Yet Jong’s concern about enjoying oneself is crucially connected with the word ‘idle’ and then expressed in her rhetorical question ‘Where did the adjective ‘idle’ go?’ 329/XX
Idleness is positively gone, but idleness is whereabouts artists live in, although idleness no longer couples with richness. Richness also means one of those ‘marriage-is-a-business marriages’ so dear to the hearts of New York’s New Money Elite. Such a couple ‘own things together rather than fuck. This is their form of sex’. Such an ideal couple are the McCraes - Andre and Sally, who are extensively ridiculed within their own setting as hosts to the Party.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998