(the) American (Novel of)

148 Hildegard Hoeller
world, cannot see Darryl for who he is. When Darryl stops at his
parents’ house, an old mansion on Long Island, Florence is unable to
guess the connection: “The house was so splendid Florence thought for
a minute it was some old hotel or country club—what was Darryl
doing here?” 33 While Florence cannot recognize “a good thing,” the
novel ultimately upholds Darryl as a standard of true manners: of taste
and grace. He is the escaped character of a nineteenth-century novel:
loving classical music, being polite and cultured, and sacrificing his
Wall Street career for working with the homeless in New York. The
nineteenth-century reference is even more obvious since Darryl, like so
many nineteenth-century fictional characters, contracts consumption
through his work with the homeless. Like Lily, he needs to die. In the
end, frustrated by Florence’s lack of love and ethics, he marries the only
other rich eligible girl in the novel, who nurses him in his terrible and
fatal illness.
Ultimately then Janowitz reconnects social grace and upper-class
status and disentangles them from style and fashion to come full circle—
back to Austen, back to the metaphorical Brits, back to the Old World,
back to the neurosis. Despite her name, Florence is nothing more than
an aspiring and always lacking American girl. Florence’s beauty and
style are not the same as true class and manners; indeed, her middleclass
background makes her unable to recognize class when she sees it.
Her obsession with fashion as a form of manners blocks her from
seeing the real thing—the self-sacrificing high-class Russian—and leaves
her in an unreal, empty world of signs.
Surprisingly, thus, none of the novels can separate manners from
social grace, and neither Janowitz nor Wharton believes that Americans
can have true manners. While Austen can connect them wholeheartedly,
both Wharton and Janowitz struggle. The American aestheticization
and final commodification of manners is apparent in both of their
novels. But manners, the two novels insist, cannot maintain themselves
as such. Both novels flee back—in light of all contrary evidence—to a
view of manners none of their realistic characters upholds: Lever is as
unconvincing and unviable in that regard as Lily. Both exceptional
characters are depicted against a world in which manners seemingly
exist only as fashions and signs. Yet, both novelists reconnect true manners
to social grace and to a world that is not, ultimately, American: an
undemocratic world of an upper class taking care of the lower class, a