This Beautiful Life

This Beautiful Life
Helen Schulman
Harper Collins, 2011

When 15-year-old Jake rejects the sexual advances of an eighth grader, then forwards a pornographic video she made for him to his friend, the beautiful life that his mother Liz and his father Richard created for him and his younger sister disappears. As expected, the video goes viral and immediately puts Jake’s future in jeopardy as well as disrupting the family’s well-being. Jake and his friends are questioned by the police and suspended from school; Liz has a breakdown of sorts; and Richard’s new job in New York is up in the air. If only, Liz laments, they had never left their idyllic life in Ithaca. If only, Richard wishes, he had made more time for Jake. If only, Jake thinks repeatedly, he had deleted that email without even watching it.

Set in a pre-9/11 Manhattan full of excessive wealth and a strange kind of innocence, this story could happen to anyone, which is what makes it so compelling. Liz and Richard make lots of mistakes along the way, not the least is their lack of parenting to their older child in order to concentrate all their time and energy with the younger one, who, ironically, becomes ignored during the family crisis. Still, it is hard to watch this unraveling of what seems like a perfectly happy family, who will never the same after this event. Readers expecting a happy ending will want to read something else, because this is a sobering, thought-provoking and somewhat depressing story.

Rating:

Other novels by this author:
P.S. (2001)
A Day at the Beach (2007)


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