Danger behind the security gates
Charlotte Moore
HUMAN CAPITAL by Stephen Amidon Penguin, £12.99, pp. 375, ISBN 0670915270 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Human Capital is set in a prosperous Connecticut suburb, just before the events of 9/11 triggered at least some reassessment of capitalist complacency. The society Stephen Amidon depicts is small enough to allow reputation to matter and gossip to have power. The story follows three families, one rich, one middle-class but floundering, one that has fallen foul of the law. The one thing all the characters share is a mistaken belief that they can control their version of the truth. But when catastrophe strikes and their lies and evasions are brought to light, which characters have sufficient integrity to salvage anything from the wreckage?
This is a novel about accountability, in a world where moral sense has been blurred and muffled by the acquisition of, desire for or loss of wealth. Amidon’s portrait of the too rich Manning family is particularly skilful. Quint Manning, a highly successful financier of humble origins, is married to bored, bright, beautiful Carrie; their relationship, though founded on love and a shared sense of purpose, is being weakened by overwork, empty socialising, and the pointless pursuit of money for its own sake. Their three spoiled sons inhabit their own cyberspace; servants and electronic gadgets mean that there is no longer any need for the individuals within the family to make real contact with one another.
Their stifling world of tennis parties, security gates and endless champagne looks like Nirvana to Drew Hagel, overweight, harassed, struggling to preserve what remains of his father’s real-estate business. Drew is delighted when his daughter Shannon starts dating Jamie, the Manning’s drunken son, and in a rush of overconfidence stakes his financial all with Quint Manning without consulting his wife. But Shannon transfers her affections to disturbed, vulnerable Ian, an orphan on probation living with his warm-hearted, dope-dealing uncle, and Drew’s hopes are dashed. The novel’s teenaged characters operate according to their own rules and values, and are hardly understood at all by the older generation. A crisis provoked by a hit-and-run accident causes an upheaval that drastically changes all three families.
Human Capital ought to be a really good novel, but it isn’t. It’s cleverly planned, mainly credible, with a good balance of character and action. The ‘oh what a tangled web we weave’ theme is hardly original, but it is executed with conviction. But there’s something false at the centre. When disillusioned Carrie visits brave, wounded Shannon, she finds her painting her flat. Shannon — the moral touchstone of the novel — keeps ‘lots of plants ferns and ivy and a herb box in the window’. When Carrie enters, she notes that ‘floral smells filled the room’ — but they wouldn’t, would they? In reality, all she’d be able to smell would be paint, and ferns and ivy don’t smell anyway. This detail highlights Amidon’s weakness. He’s so keen to point a moral that he can’t get under the skin of his characters. The whole thing’s too schematic. Everything is overexplained, which makes the novel ultimately unfulfilling for the reader, but attractive no doubt to the Hollywood director on whom Amidon has his eye.
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