Having finished Cheryl Mendelson’s Anything for Jane, my appetite was whetted for more, especially since I discovered that the book was part of a trilogy, which I was reading out of order. I read the first book in the trilogy, Morningside Heights then went to the third book, Anything for Jane, and I am now reading the second book, Love, Work, Children. I can’t help but continue my comparison of Mendelson’s trilogy to Jane Austen. Both authors do a wonderful job of embedding their narratives in a specific location that seems at once familiar and idyllic, as though the very nature of the environment imbues virtues upon its inhabitants. Mendelson and Austen’s works are both relationship-centric with particular respect to family circles within an upper class community and the art of courtship between marriage-hungry singles. Finally, both authors are genius at prose that draws the reader into a cottony-safe world of manners where the inner life of the characters are drawn with exquisite detail.
I was taken by surprise on page 44 of Love, Work, Children when a line from Mendelson sparked an idea for my T.R.U.E. project. The main character, Peter Frankl, a discontented, wealthy lawyer in his 60th year of life, believes he would be happier as a scholar. He often day dreams of a life as a public intellectual. As a young, junior associate who found himself employed by a large, respectable, New York law firm, Frankl was so vehemently opposed to the corporate culture that he made this anarchic speech to his fellow young colleagues; He said the firm “was a monstrous, amoral society, [so] deforming to the human spirit, that the precondition for [continuing to work there] was to refuse to see this or to disconnect these ideas from feeling and action—and to end up being monstrous and amoral oneself.” Of course Frankl finds himself trapped at the firm by the demands of a materialistic wife and beloved young children who need his support.
Frankl’s transition into a monstrous, amoral being is alluded to by the narrator’s observation that Peter’s law firm was like a prison in its confinement but unlike a prison because the firm was not a place where love or friendship could grow. This observation generated this truism, “people become animals when you put them in cages.” Where did that come from? I wondered. But I quickly wrote it down because my soul recognized the thought as Truth. Being obedient to the creative muse, I was rapidly awarded with several other Truisms that I also wrote down. Then in a flash of enlightenment, I saw these words engraved on jewelry, which would be housed in my T.R.U.E. project. To say that I am ecstatic by this forward movement after weeks of stagnation, would be a serious understatement.
(Image credit: Love, Work, Children courtesy of Amazon.com)
