It’s a brilliant beginning, turning the reader into a viewer, then a voyeur: “Her mouth filled the screen. Purple lip gloss, clear braces.” Giggling, 13-year-old Daisy is filming herself in the lava- lamp-lit privacy of her messy bedroom. Her seductive dance intensifies into an erotic striptease. She lifts up her skirt, “and the next part was hard to watch.”
Daisy e-mails the video clip to 15-year-old Jake Bergamot, a boy she’d “hooked up” with at an unsupervised party in her spectacular Riverdale home, where there’s plenty of booze and empty bedrooms.
The brutal, painful fallout that results in this modern- day viral nightmare is all the more chilling because it is so easy. Because it can happen to anyone. The wrong moment, the impulsive message, one quick touch of a key — and even the most accomplished lives can come tumbling down. Jake and his parents are so skillfully rendered by Helen Schulman that “This Beautiful Life” is as much a bracing novel as a timely cautionary tale.
Liz and Richard Bergamot have struggled past their blue-collar beginnings. Educated at the finest schools and universities, they can provide their two children with lives they never had. Richard has been lured away from Cornell by Astor University in New York City. A devoted husband and father, he’s handsome and “allergic to failure.” Liz, like her husband, holds a Ph.D., but she’s quirky and never quite comfortable in her own skin.
Missing their bucolic existence in Ithaca, she’s both conflicted and beguiled by the pleasures of their new sophisticated city life.
While their son, Jake, attends that fateful party at Daisy’s house, Liz takes her adopted 6-year-old daughter, Coco, to the Plaza Hotel with other private-school mothers and daughters. The little girls frolic naked in the bubble- filled Jacuzzi, and “all this decadent beauty reminded Liz of the sprites at the Allee d’Eau, at Versailles, the wet, shiny, prepubescent girls flipping and flopping among the bubbles like baby seals, their mothers ringed around the bathroom sipping their champagne and wondering when exactly their own youth had abandoned them.”
It’s a good life, successful and stimulating, in spite of Liz’s uneasy liberal musings. But as long as Liz and Richard keep loving each other and being devoted, understanding parents who enjoy their kids, what could possibly go wrong?
After a sleepless night at the Plaza with Coco, Liz arrives home, looking awful and feeling worse. Jake is hung over and ashamed for going too far with Daisy, a younger girl he couldn’t stand. He’s hoping his mother “could read his mind and instantly forgive him, like she used to.” Instead, the ever-honest Liz admits to a hangover, then “shuffled off to her room to sleep it off.”
Needing a connection, Jake checks his computer and discovers Daisy’s e-mail. Shocked, he watches the video twice, not sure if it’s pornographic or even sexy. “It was like a hot potato. He had to fling it to someone else.” And so he does — to a friend, who instantly forwards it to two other friends. And on and on and on.
By Monday, everyone at Wildwood, his exclusive private school, has seen it. News helicopters hover over the school. The New York Post prints a story. Jake’s shameful ostracism has begun. In no time, the video ends up on a popular website with millions of viewers.
Of course, we’ve all read stories about sexting in the news. Scandals involving adolescents sending explicit video clips of themselves have become a distressingly common symptom of the Internet age. Police and school administrators around the country are struggling to stamp out a practice that can lead to charges of possessing child pornography, hefty prison terms and shattered lives.
Schulman has managed to capture this bizarre of-the- moment tragedy in a novel that remains deeply humane and sensitive.
