Growing Up Rich
“But isn’t all art derivative?” = a short topic of discussion this weekend with a friend.
Eighty percent of Growing Up Rich by Anne Bernays appears to be a character study about a young teenaged girl who is “half-orphaned” (her biological father is still alive, but her step father adopted her and both he and her mother die in an accident) and must traverse the wide expanse from an ultra refined Upper East Side life filled with private school, original Degas and Calder pieces, and every other accoutrement that might accompany those things in 1948 to “the provincial monotony of the landscape” of Brookline, Massachusetts to live with her newly appointed guardians. (If reading while taking our protagonist Sally’s observations at face value, Growing Up Rich emerges as spectacular takedown of “dowdy” Boston — which I have to admit delighted me a tiny bit. It’s just so juicy! For example, when Sally explains that she is attending public school, an adult from her former cosmopolitan life “looks at me as if I had just told him I intended to devote my life to streetwalking.” Oh, of course it’s not really that, though. Anne Bernays was, in fact, born in Manhattan but now, at 92, has lived in Massachusetts for more than half a century and is a founder of PEN/New England.)
Bernays subtly turns this ship in a distinct direction in the last 20 percent or so. It’s already been established that her observations are sharp, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given that she is the great-niece of Sigmund Freud. But this idea of “character study” takes on a different color when the act and art of writing — coupled with the power of observation — appears as its own force. If all art is derivative and if a human life can be considered its own work of art … can one “steal” the essence of that? 🤔
As Sally’s real father ponders upon their reunion at the end of the novel: “I wonder how much this reality is worth.”
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