Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Book Review: The Last Waltz

A Fair Trade Book


Title: The Last Waltz

Author: Nancy Zaroulis

Date: 1984

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 402 pages

Quote: “There is no family so secure that scandal cannot touch it.”

And in the late nineteenth century, when a few American women—who thought themselves well off—devoted their whole lives to the pursuit and display of social status, scandal really hurt. The Last Waltz is about one of those families.

Mostly it's about two women, Isabel and Marian, who meet in their late teens and grow “old” (by pre-twentieth-century standards) together. Both have “married well” in the sense of having married rich men who can give them liberal allowances of money to maintain the levels of extravagance they need to hold their social positions. (Isabel's husband is a standard-run snob-and-bore; Marian's is a 1980s caricature of 1880s sex phobia. They also have a friend, who answers to the name of “Pussie,” whose husband's gift to her is a then-fatal sexually transmitted disease.) Both are profoundly unhappy with their husbands.

At one point in the novel, Isabel says that what she really wants for one of her children is a life of freedom from all the burdens of “a social existence,” but when that child elopes and goes West to have that sort of life Isabel and Marian feel devastated.

It's interesting to note, reading this 1984 novel in 2017, how much research went into crafting these fictional steel-magnolia types as historically plausible in everything but the way their lives echo the trendy concerns of the 1980s. We're supposed to feel sorry for characters who aren't having lots of sex and enjoying every minute of it; Victorian sex phobics reinterpreted as stifled homosexuals would have appeared in a novel written around 1994; Victorian sex phobics reinterpreted as genuine asexuals (which was how they presented themselves) would be cutting-edge now, likely to appear in novels like The Last Waltz by 2014. If this novel had been written either earlier or later, Isabel and Marian might have taken more interest in “How the Other Half Lives”--Social Darwinism was a trendy idea in the late twentieth century, but so were charity-theme social events. Their ignorance of global history, and ability to ignore technological progress, are plausible given their characters but might have made them seem more narrow-minded than the average “society matron” of the 1880s. Their lack of spirituality or religion, ditto...and although there were a few Victorian “society ladies” who could describe a dress in less than a full paragraph, a Victorian lady who didn't carry around and identify herself with some form of needlework must have been a bit of a freak.

It's a study of the period, albeit a study shaped by twentieth century Women's History courses, but it does eventually form a plot. A “society gentleman,” of the type who was told at the time that he was No Gentleman but a Cad and a Bounder, is murdered. Masses of “society ladies,” Isabel and Marian tell us, had motives for wanting him dead. Whodunit? Isabel is accused and proved innocent, and another character's suicide might be an admission of guilt, but Marian is never quite certain.

The intention of The Last Waltz seems to be to cause readers to reflect, “Hmm...my great-grandmother didn't keep a diary but she seems to have had more fun than that.” Having a life was an option even for Victorians burdened by wealth, and did not always require a young person to “run away” to sea or with a circus. The biographies of Victorians like Florence Nightingale, Lottie Moon, Theodore Roosevelt, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or David Livingstone, show that even rich Victorians could always let the “society ladies” write them off as eccentric and/or provincial, and proceed to have all sorts of adventures. 

A favorite theme among the post-Victorian “Progressive” generation was, however, the claim that working-class Victorians had more fun than wealthy ones. This was occasionally true, as was the claim that rich Victorians still tended to die horribly young, but the undisputed fact was that poor Victorians were more likely to die younger from not yet preventable causes like tuberculosis. Silly, snobby social rules were enforced on rich Victorians largely by fear of diseases. In real life it would have been a lucky Victorian who reached the age of fifty with only one horrible memory of only one friend, like poor old Pussie, literally dissolving into pus. Those families with ten children and fourteen hired servants all went into quarantine together, during the epidemics of infectious diseases, and surviving family members might have watched three or four close relatives die within a month. Wearing all black, or black and white, was recognized to mean that an early Victorian was in mourning, but so many Victorians hardly found time to wear colored clothes that, for Isabel's and Marian's generation, black and white came to mean “formal” rather than “mourning.”

As I read my reactions kept vacillating between “This might be taken from the writer's grandmother's confession” and “This is a baby-boomer's fantasy of resurrecting her grandmother at a 1970s feminist consciousness raising session.” I'm still unsure to what extent Isabel and Marian are each of those types of fictional character.

Anyway, here's a relatively attractive pair of Victorian “society matrons,” “Yankee Ladies,” bustling and flouncing around the fashionable parts of the fashionable Northeastern cities, genteelly not mentioning any part of the history of their world except their own well-repressed misery. I'm not sure I believe them but I enjoyed reading about them more than I usually enjoy reading about fictional discontented rich people. Their 400-page story is not such a page-turner as to be hard to set aside at the end of your commute, and should amuse you through several train rides.


Nancy Zaroulis is still alive and writing, though not blogging, according to Bing, so this is a Fair Trade Book. When you buy it here, for $5 per book, $5 per package (at least two books of this size would fit into one package), + $1 per online payment, this web site will send $1 to Zaroulis or a charity of her choice. 

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