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• I was able to relate to the characters in Helen Schulman's shattering novel, This Beautiful Life. Liz and Richard Bergamot lived in upstate New York, Ithaca, about 30 minutes from where I lived for 45 years. Richard got a fabulous offer for a job in Manhattan, doing work that he found meaningful and rewarding. The family moved to Manhattan.Fours years ago, my husband also received a job offer, doing something meaningful and rewarding, and off we went. Unlike Liz and Richard, our children were grown and off to college, so we did not have to uproot them and raise them in Manhattan.Jake is their 15 year-old-son, who had to leave the suburban beauty of Ithaca and navigate the urban center of Manhattan. Coco, their adopted Chinese daughter, took to Manhattan and all its charms like a duck to water. She was popular with all the "right" girls at school, and got invited to every fancy party.Liz transitioned from working part-time teaching art at the university in Ithaca to being one of the "ladies who lunch". Richard was consumed by his job, and I loved how Liz described him as "exuding competence. He was a self-cleaning oven. And even after all these years, Liz was not immune to the power of his good looks."The description of parenting of these children of privilege hits close to home for many parents today."they are both too close to their children and too far away from the ground. They are too accomplished. They have accumulated too much. They expect too much. They demand too much. They even love their kids too much. This love is crippling in its own way."Jake receives a video from a very young girl he met at a party. It is a pornographic video she made of herself. He doesn't know what to do, and he sends it to his friend to get his opinion. His friend passes it on, and soon it has become viral; the whole world sees it.The life that the Bergamots have is turned upside down. Jake is suspended from his private school, and he may be prosecuted for distributing child pornography. Richard's boss forces him to lay low from his very public position because the story is all over the tabloids and they can't afford the bad publicity.Liz withdraws into her own world, refusing to get out bed most days, glued to her laptop computer. She watches the video of the girl endlessly, and that leads her to other pornography that she can't stop watching.Watching the family fall apart is devastating, and Schulman makes these characters so real that you ache for them. Reading it makes you think "there but for the grace of God and one bad decision go I". As parents we try to teach our children to make good decisions, and we hope that when they eventually do make a bad decision, as they all will, that it is one they can come back from.But in today's plugged-in world, where the click of a mouse can change one's life, making a bad decision can be life-altering. Jake is a good kid, he never would have sent that video out into the world to hurt the young girl, yet that is what happened and it nearly destroys his family.I cried a few times reading this novel, no more so than when Jake tells his dad that he screwed up again, and Richard says, "I'm your father. I'm always on your side." This is a good family, and how they try to live with what happened is something every parent can relate to, although we hope to never be tested as the Bergamots were.This book takes you on an emotional, heart-rending journey, one that will make you think about the fragility of the life you have.

  4.00 out of 5

  bookchickdi

• This Beautiful Life is both strikingly of the moment and just a bit behind the times. Its events take place in 2003, a time when many of us were starting to live online, but when the most common way to share over the internet was still via e-mail. A story in which the catalyst is a video that goes viral might play out a bit differently now, in the YouTube/Facebook era. Having said that, while the details place the novel in a very specific time and place, Helen Schulman has crafted a timeless, resonant story that dissects choices and their consequences, looking at one family’s “beautiful life” at the instant it’s on the verge of shattering.Both Richard and Liz Bergamot have been strivers - Richard is the first in his family to graduate high school, let alone college and beyond, while Liz grew up in a single-parent home in the North Bronx. Together since graduate school, they have made choices in their marriage that define their roles and spheres within it. When Richard accepts a job leading the expansion of a major Manhattan university, that choice moves the family from small, bohemian-flavored Ithaca, New York to the Upper West Side and effectively back-burners Liz’s career for the duration. Spaces are made for their children, Jake and Coco, at an elite private school. It’s a new world for them all, and just as they’re finding their way, it’s all blown apart by a 13-year-old girl’s bad choice to make an explicit video and e-mail it to a 15-year-old; the 15-year-old’s bad choice to forward the e-mail; and the parents’ difficult choices about how to handle the fallout.While the novel is primarily event-driven, the hook resides in how the primary characters react to the events, and Schulman reveals this though the alternating perspectives of Liz, Jake, and Richard. It’s interesting to view these characters though one another’s eyes, and the author succeeded in making me feel sympathetic toward all of them; there are really neither heroes nor villains here, and the emotional charge and challenge of their situation feels authentic.Another hook for me was Schulman’s use of specific place references that I knew personally. I was part of the Cornell University community in Ithaca (as a grad-student spouse) for several years, and I recognized places that came up in Liz’s reflections on the family’s life there, but Ithaca’s appearances in fiction don’t really take me by surprise any more. I was surprised that Liz grew up in that “middle-class housing project” in the Bronx, Co-op City, however; my great-aunts lived there, and frequent visits made it part of the landscape of my childhood. I don’t see it show up often in my reading, though.This Beautiful Life got its hooks into me immediately, and I think it will stay with me for awhile - there’s a lot to think about, and talk about, here.

  4.00 out of 5

  Florinda

• This book opens with an email version of sexting - a video that a young girl sends of herself by email to a young man whom she likes. As often happens, what travels on the internet may suddenly, and without permission, go viral. This video did just that.What happens afterward is the premise of this story, or so I thought. The book itself turns out to be that of a family from Ithaca, New York, who relocates to Manhattan so that the husband can get a more rewarding job. His wife, though highly educated, no longer works as she now remains at home caring for their teenage son Jake and their adopted-from-China six-year-old daughter Coco.So what happens when a young teen receives a pornographic video and passes it on immediately to his friends? What are the ramifications - both legal and psychological? I'm still trying to figure that out. This novel, although well written and very much into the daily life of the mom and dad, did nothing to assuage the hunger I felt to understand more about the predicament of their son Jake. I felt that the author neglected this kid as much as the parents did.I enjoyed reading this book, but, in the end, I admit that I felt shortchanged by what I was not told.

  3.50 out of 5

  SqueakyChu

• The cover gives the story away. Upper middle- class family moves from Ithaca to New York where 16 year old son and 6 year old adopted daughter (from China) attend elite private schools. The move is due to Dad’s new job at a New York University. Although she has a Ph.D, Mom doesn’t have to work because Dad makes a huge salary. A beautiful life, right? Well more like an easy life.Relationships unravel when school notifies Mom and Dad that son Jake has forwarded a pornographic video made for him by a 13 year old girl (yikes!). To be fair, there is no malicious intent on Jake’s part. He’s just stupid! The video goes viral.Of course the house of cards collapses: Mom gets stoned and watches pornography on her laptop; Dad is offered a leave of absence from the university until things calm down; Jake gets suspended before his university qualifying exams and little Coco is caught imitating the 13 year old’s sex video for her friends. The fact that Mom actually lets Coco “play” on a laptop loaded with pornographic images is glossed over.Things are resolved in a fairly realistic way, no Hallmark ending.Ms Schulman presents some interesting and scary aspects of internet law and teens: culpability, forwarding images/info, confidentiality etc. Dad’s surprising sympathy towards the 13 year old crush was a tender moment. Apart from the Dad—I feel he gets the short end of the stick—I couldn’t sympathize with any of the characters. Indulged and self-indulgent, they slide into trouble with little resistance.

  3.00 out of 5

  julie10reads

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