Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty presented me with a dilemma — the age old struggle of plot versus characters. Can you like one but not the other?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The book opens in 1976, with this delightfully written description of Fern, Edgar and their three young children enjoying their summer house on Martha’s Vineyard:
“Summer fattened everybody up. The family buttered without reserve; pie seemed to be everywhere. They awoke and slept and awoke in the summerhouse on the island, ate all their meals on the porch while the sun moved across their sky. They look out at the saltwater cove and watched the sailboats skim and tack across the blue towards the windward beach, littered with the outgrown shells of horseshoe crabs.”
“The children were brown with white, white behinds and they wore anklets of poison ivy blisters. For them the whole point of life was to be wet and dry eight times a day and never clean. There was always sand in the bed and none of them wanted it to end.”
However, at the end this holiday Fern and Edgar discover that their seemingly endless supply of inherited money has run out.
Fern comes from one of the oldest and richest families in Chicago. Her parents are elegant, classy and self assured in their position. Their historic house reflects the worn shabbiness of wealth. Their clothes are old but so well made they last forever. Even their roses reflect this attitude:
“Their rosebushes were so old that some of the branches were a big as ankles and when they bloomed they were just imperfect enough, as if someone had come out at dawn and carefully ruffled them.”
In contrast, Edgar’s family is new money and his mother Mary studies the old money types, attempts to mimic class — redecorating every year and buying only the most current clothes each season:
“If Edgar’s parents could have worn clothes sewn from money itself they would have. Everything they had on was the most expensive version available. Mary wore a silk shift [—-] a mink stole even thought it was summer and yellow heels that had been made for her very feet by an ancient Italian cobbler.”
Ms. Ausubel beautifully weaves this tale set in the 1960’s and 70’s and chocks it full of dark humor, bittersweet ironies, and a string of bizarre vignettes. From Fern and Edgar’s indifferent parents and their lackluster childhoods – we begin to see that wealth – whether old or new – has consequences.
After Fern and Edgar get married they profess to embrace the 1960’s counter culture movement – trying desperately to eschew the wealth that follows them. But after three kids they have settled into enjoying the trappings of their privilege – sailboats, summer houses. When they learn that this accustomed wealth, always safely in the background, is gone — they both fall apart.
“Everything around her — the house, the furniture, the manner of life — was poised to evaporate. She was a soft body trying to prepare herself for the unknown future.”
Fern and Edgar each experience what could be called an extensional crisis. Edgar takes an extended sailboat trip with his mistress, and Fern, learning of the affair, escapes on a cross country road trip with a stranger (a gentle giant of a man- no really, a giant!). In one of the strangest plot twists ever, neither checks with the other and they each take off believing the other is staying home with the children. “Despicable people!” I sputtered out loud as I read these pages (What? Don’t you talk to your book’s characters?).
Their respective journeys are told against the frightening tableau of their young confused children who are afraid of being sent to an orphanage, so pretend everything is normal. The children forge meals from whatever they can find, get dressed, go to school, and play outside as always. No one realizes they are alone. Finally, an astute teacher catches on, and both parents race home. But that’s all I’ll tell you.
I found Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty* often dark, sometimes hilarious, but always captivating. A wonderful treatise on the moneyed privileged and the pitfalls of wealth – both for those who have it and those who once did.
Ms. Ausubel can certainty write and has created way (way) out of the ordinary characters — characters who are shallow, brave, mean, immature, wise. While I often despised the characters, they were real and leapt off the page, working their way into my brain. I devoured this book and whenever I wasn’t reading it – I wanted to be.
*I keep wanting to call it Sons and Daughters of Good and Plenty. 
An advanced readers copy was provided by Riverhead books, an imprint of Penguin Random House
