|
The Author on Her Work
A few summers ago, I was visiting friends at their summer house—a rambling,
pedigreed old house on the Massachusetts shore. It was a bright, beautiful, hot
July day and it was absolutely quiet—people were napping, or reading on the
big old front porch, or lying out on the dock below, listening to the slap of
waves. I decided to take a walk.
From this quiet corner of the world I ventured down a dirt road, which turned to
pavement, and which brought me to the next town over—home to a whole
different New England beach scene. Here the houses were chock-a-block, lining
the street across from the water, their windows decorated with flags and
cardboard cutouts of sea shells, their decks full of coolers of beer and
collapsible beach chairs. There were people playing radios and games of football,
lots of movement, activity, and noise. It was less than a mile away from the house
I had come from but it felt like an altogether different, and in many ways more
vibrant, world.
There was a melancholy that came with the peace and quiet of the secluded place I
as visiting and, in contrast, a frenetic, contagious energy in this less
exclusive, more modern place I had walked to. And the contrast was interesting to
me. The Waspy old New England house seemed like part of an obsolete story, a
vestige of a one-time American dream. This crowded strip of row houses seemed
closer to the heart of the new America—a place where people long to be
Hollywood celebrities, not members of old families, where the immigrant success
story trumps lineage any day.
It made me think of people caught between these two worlds—by choice, by
inertia, or by circumstance—people living in an America much larger than the
one they were raised to inhabit. And with that came Faith Dunlap, a woman
stunted by her life—long adherence to other people's sense of right and wrong,
and her ex-husband Jack, an arrogant man, resistant to change and isolated by his
own stubbornness. And then their children, Caroline and Eliot, both struggling to
break out of the claustrophobic and increasingly irrelevant social order their
family lives by.
Of course, at the time what happened was more immediate. I imagined Caroline
Dunlap, a young woman in some ways like myself at her age, and in other ways not
at all, coming home to a house much like the one I had left on that hot summer
day. And then her mother, Faith, packing her suitcase—a fragile, but
resilient woman completely unlike my mother, but yet so familiar to me it was as
if I'd known her my whole life. And then Eliot, Rock, and finally Jack Dunlap,
who I was a little bit afraid of, but who I knew I would have to give a voice.
And the book took off from there. I wrote the first hundred pages at a racing
clip, and then had to stop and unravel where it was all going: what exactly Eliot
was up to, what Jack was going to do, how Caroline and Faith would be affected
by the outsiders they had taken up with. I came to love my characters, for all
their flaws, and I miss them now that I'm done writing the book.
I think of The Hazards of Good Breeding as being about individuals and
families and love and frustration more than I think of it as being specifically
about WASPS. The Dunlaps, like so many people out there, have hemmed themselves
in with their own traditions, sense of propriety, and social insularity—and
they are each struggling, in their own ways, to realize essential connections
between their lives and the lives of others outside the narrow slice of the world
they inhabit. Whether they succeed or not is up to each reader to decide for him
or herself.
Discussion
Questions
1. How does Caroline Dunlap change over the course of the novel? How might her
choices for post-college life have taken a new direction?
2. Jack Dunlap is an inscrutable man to all who know him. How does Shattuck
manage to elicit our sympathy toward him?
3. The Hazards of Good Breeding is a comedy of manners with dark
undercurrents. How do these come to the surface over the course of the novel?
What do they reveal about the Dunlaps' world?
4. Why is Faith Dunlap attracted to Jean Pierre?
5. The novel is very much about people's public front versus their interior
worlds. How does the theme of role-playing manifest itself throughout the novel?
6. The Hazards of Good Breeding is told from five different perspectives. H
ow does this shifting point of view (first we see through Caroline's eyes, then
Eliot's, then Rock's, etc.) affect our reading of the book and our understanding
of the events that unfold?
7. What does Paul Revere's ride embody for Eliot Dunlap?
8. Is Jack in love with Rosita?
9. Describe the role of humor in Shattuck's society portrait. Given that this is
in some ways a story about a fragmented family at a moment of crisis, why didn't
she choose a more sober tone?
10. What does Caroline realize from her experiences with Stefan?
11. Caroline is initially dismissive of Rock Coughlin. What accounts for her
change of heart by the novel's end?
12. How does Shattuck's story relate to a larger portrait of contemporary America?
13. How does The Hazards of Good Breeding fit into the American literary
tradition of authors like John Cheever and John Updike? What other writers' work
does Shattuck's novel call to mind?
14. What are the "hazards of good breeding" in this book?
|