The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope's social satire The Way We Live Now (#897) was listed on some prominent person's all time favorite book list in a way that piqued my interest.  What better time than a "Safer at Home" period to read an eight hundred page literary classic?

In a very tongue-in-cheek way, Trollope regales the reader with a tale centered around a financial wizard lately arrived on the 1870s London scene with apparent barrels of money to support a lavish life style for himself, his wife and his daughter.  No one seems to be able to put a finger on exactly where all that money came from, but rumors abound that Augustus Melmotte has been chased by the law out of Paris and Vienna at the very least.  His target in England are the idle rich with not much else to do with their time then to drink and gamble away their fortunes.  Why shouldn't some of that money make its way into Melmotte's pockets?

A stock venture is proposed to fund a railroad in the New World and prominent Englishmen are duly appointed to its Board in London.  The financial wheeling and dealing is worthy of Bernie Madoff himself with results not so very different.  At the same time Melmotte is dangling the hand of his daughter, rumored to be worth a considerable fortune, as a matrimonial prize for the highest bidder.  Marie is not the most cooperative potential bride-to-be out there, and she is not alone.

It all makes for an entertaining tale.  If that seems to be too much effort for you, The Way We Live Now was apparently made into an Exxon Masterpiece Theater production in the early 2000s.  If I can hunt it down, I will definitely watch it myself.  The paperback edition of the novel I read was reissued in conjunction with that Masterpiece Theater release, complete with a thirty plus page scholarly introduction.  I normally read everything right down to the footnotes, but my eyes crossed as all the juice was sucked right out of the plot before I had even read a single page of the novel itself!  It reminded me of my junior year in high school when we were assigned to read The Scarlet Letter.  I had already read it by then, but our teacher who was currently getting his graduate degrees in English Literature at Harvard marched into our classroom and announced on the very first day, "The minister did it."  Way to ruin the only reason some of my classmates would have somewhat willingly plowed through the book - to find out who got Hester in trouble!  I never forgave him for that, and vowed when I was a teacher (or reviewer!) to never do that to a potential reader.  So my recommendation here is: Skip the intro and get right to the good stuff!