| Searching for an Inheritance |
September 7, 2009
The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy is a really clever and engaging book. Dundy ensnares with her marvelous use of language and her fabulously concocted characters, including the monstrous narrator turned endearing and the Old Man, a charmingly snobby and lecherous lover nicknamed "Seedy". Her well-built plot of Electra love with a twist of vengeance seals the deal, making this intelligent and original book a true reading pleasure.
The narrator of The Old Man and Me has a real name and an assumed name, and with her false identity she hunts down the inheritance she lost through her own baseness and cruelty. But forgive her, because she was just a child, a stepmother was involved, and fatherly love should be unconditional, right? As she meets up with her prey and the ties between them tighten, the parallels between hunted and hunter become clear, while the motives of each become murky. The addition of drugs, mod Americans, and lost Englishmen place the novel firmly in the 1960s (when it was written) and in a class-stratified society where the clash between old school and new rules was even more striking than in the United States.
A big theme of the novel are the differences between England and the United States, both in terms of class distinctions and societal comportment. There is wonderful repartee at one point where a upper-class Englishman offers "There was a time when we thought all Americans were gangsters" and the narrator responds, "And we thought all English were gentlemen." In the end the differences are not as great as either narrator or Old Man would wish them to be. Snobbery, greed, and cruelty flourish on both sides of the pond, as do naivete, frailty, and a desire to make up and make good.
The narrator began her quest believing it was all about money. "But it was never about the money," she realizes at the end. The Old Man and Me is about so much more than money, and is so much more interesting than money could ever be.
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