BOOK REVIEW : East Coast View of New-World Elite

This is a novel about inheritance or accepting your heritage. It’s also a novel about New York and about being Jewish, aristocratic and rich.

Katy Becker is a beautiful widow in her 40s. She has a son off at college someplace; we never see him in the narrative. Katy has grown up in New York. Her childhood was lavish, symbolized most concretely by a country place north of the city called Indian Path (a compound something like the real-life “Tree Tops” in the John Cheever family). But Katy’s dad made a financial misstep or two and lost the enormous Becker fortune.

No matter. Young Katy married an aristocratic, high-minded young man from another great Jewish merchant family and her future should have been assured. Except that Lewis, her civil rights-activist husband, died young, and Beanie--her crass, lying, scheming, venal brother-in-law--has contrived to siphon off her rightful inheritance.

Katy--whose role in life has been to be an ornament, a walking repository of culture--is emotionally paralyzed when this happens. She has her doctorate in Medieval art; she’s way too refined to “know” about money, and so her son has been consigned to second-rate public school.

The point here is that the Becker clan has lived in New York for more than a hundred years, and it’s time for Katy, and other people like her, to grab on. Get a grip. Realize that they’re not immigrants anymore but solid citizens of the greatest city in the world.

In a devastating scene, a dangerous one to write or even think about, Katy visits her low-life brother-in-law’s tasteless mansion for an evening of second-hand culture. The topic of the evening is the Holocaust, and Katy experiences revulsion and alienation. What in the world do Beanie and his vulgar spouse have to do with terrible sufferings in past time, and on another continent, when here they are, very rich in New York, up to their ears in devious deceitful deeds?

Katy hates being demoted to the little class, and finally , after a hiatus of about 10 years, decides to go after her thieving brother-in-law.

The pause, the paralysis, is difficult to explain in fictional terms. Her father had warned her 10 years before that Beanie was trying to rob her; her very recent millionaire gentleman admirer, Mike Braden, has offered to lend her his attorneys to rectify things. But Katy has hung back, paddling about helplessly in comparative penuriousness.

What seems strange to a West Coast Gentile reader is the use that’s made here of what it means to be a real, authentic Jewish American Princess. This material is treated utterly without irony and with constant, serious ritual respect.

In a curious but very emotional scene, Katy visits her podiatrist, and as the doctor ministers to her feet, she gains in spiritual and temperamental strength. With the lawsuit against the odious Beanie pending, Katy goes out on a very rough ocean trip with her brusque beau, Braden. When a hurricane strikes, Katy demonstrates her princess courage and aristocratic unconcern by putting on false eyelashes as the boat almost sinks.

Katy was rich, and it’s time for her to be rich again. Enough Medieval art! Part of the happy ending is that if all goes well, Katy will end up not only a multimillionaire but the head of her own family foundation--the kind of philanthropist, who, on the basis of good taste, expertise and colossal knowledge of the city, can help to save her own complex world; her beloved, crumbling New York .

Let’s hear it for new-world aristocracy. Let’s hear it for the great merchant families of East Coast America.

SMART HEARTS IN THE CITY, by Barbara Probst Solomon , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $21.95, 337 pages