A Hazard of New Fortunes

Zusatztext “The first great domestic novelist of American life.” -Alfred Kazin Informationen zum Autor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. His many books include The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House . He lives in New York City. David J. Nordloh is professor of English at Indiana University. He is the general editor and textual editor of the Indiana University Press Selected Edition of William Dean Howells, published in twenty-five volumes. Klappentext Centering on a conflict between a self-made millionaire and an idealistic reformer in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York! A Hazard of New Fortunes insightfully renders the complexities of the American experience at a time of great social and economic upheaval and transformation. In its depiction of wealth! poverty! and New York City life! it remains a strikingly contemporary work. Reproduced here is the authoritative Indiana University Press Edition edited and annotated by David J. Nordloh! with full scholarly commentary and extensive textual apparatus. Leseprobe From the Commentary, by Adam Gopnik A Hazard of No Fortune Apartment-hunting is the permanent New York romance, and the broker and his couple the eternal triangle. A man and woman are looking for a place to live, and they call up a broker, and he shows them apartments that are for sale or rent, but the relationship between those three people is much more complicated than the relationship between someone who knows where homes can be found and two people who would like to find one. For one thing, the places are not really his to sell, not really theirs to buy. A tangle of clients and banks, bids and mortgages, co-op boards and co-op skeptics surrounds their relationship. Hypothèque is the French word for mortgage, and a hypothetical air attends every step you take: if you could . . . if they would . . . if the bank said . . . if the board allows. Yet the broker, at the top of the triangle, is a happy man. First, he forms a liaison with the wife, which unites them against all the things that husbands have-doubt, penury, a stunted imagination. Together, the broker winks at the wife, they will scale the heights, find a poetic space, a wking brk frplce, something. But by late morning he has formed a second, darker, homoerotic alliance, with the husband. The two guys share musky common sense, and their eyes exchange glances-she’s so demanding, pretty much impossible. Now, a couple of guys like us, we could be happy together, take what we can get, fix a place up. The skilled broker keeps the husband and wife in a perpetual state of uncertainty about whose desires will be satisfied. Over lunch, it becomes plain that the broker has a past, as lovers will. He did something else before-he was a journalist, or a banker, or in advertising. He chose to be a broker because it gave him freedom, and then (he admits) in the nineties it began to give him money, more money than he ever thought possible. He looks sleek in his Italian suit, while his couple feel for the moment like out-of-towners, hicks in cloth coats and rubbers. As coffee arrives, the couple hear his cell phone buzzing, muffled somewhere near his heart. He finds the phone, mutters into it, then speaks up: “Hey, I’m in the middle of lunch.” But the husband and wife are temporarily bound together: There is another-one he may love more than us. The only time the broker loses his poise is when the Rival Broker is waiting for him in the lobby of the building where she has the “exclusive.” Ethics and tradition insist that the two brokers show the apartment together, and suddenly the broker, so suave, so sexy, becomes an ex-husband, the two brokers like a couple after a bad divorce, polite only for the sake of the child-the apartment. The billets-doux of t...

Product details

• Authors: William Dean Howells
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.02.2002
• EAN: 9780375759277
• ISBN: 978-0-375-75927-7
• No. of pages: 624
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 203 mm x 35 mm