Their Pride and Joy
Who was it said consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds. Having delivered my earlier jeremiad against pathetic females, I come to Paul Buttenweiser’s Their Pride and Joy which I first saw in the Harvard Co-op, shortly after it was published, made a mental note, and then moved to Leeds. A few weekends ago, in a bookshop in Qualicum Beach, I found it again, a battered trade paperback. Yes, it is a doomed-girl novel, at least in one dimension, bearing a certain resemblance to Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness though Styron is the richer, more poetic – perhaps the better writer – Buttenweiser has the clinician’s eye, and perhaps where Styron is aiming for mythic tragedy, Buttenweiser’s is a social tragedy, particular to a time and place … but I should reread the Styron before I embarrass myself.

In any case, Their Pride and Joy is Joan, only daughter of a wealthy, philanthropic family who are New Yorkers first, and Jews long after. It is the early sixties, there is a Catholic (Kennedy) in the White House, and in her final year at Bennington College, Joan comes home with a mysterious illness. To the modern eye, there is no mystery: it is anorexia nervosa. But this is the early sixties and no one understands what afflicts her, least of all her energetic, oppressively loving, achingly insecure family – secular assimilated Jews in post war America. The children lead their own lives, insists Joan’s mother Peggy – who then attempts to arrange all the details to perfection; she uses Joan’s illness to detach her from Bennington College, which Peggy finds unsuitable, and start her on a career of good works in charitable causes. The conventional portrait of an anorexic is of someone whose primary preoccupation is their weight, whereas Joan is portrayed as being utterly incapable of seeing her own place and worth in the world; she believes she does not deserve to exist. On the second page of the novel Joan’s grown brother reflects on the changes and losses that happened “after Joan’s death”; from that moment on, the novel is set on course to its end. It is as much Carl’s story as it is Joan’s; he is a fat, unhappy adolescent in training to be a concert pianist, painfully aware that he does not have the great drive or talent required to match his family’s golden predictions of his future, unable to lose weight because any visible effort to do so would gather too much loving attention. His viewpoint frames the story. Poignantly, this has autobiographical elements. The author, now in his 60s, is a well-known psychiatrist and philanthropist, who studied piano and had an older sister who died young of anorexia.