Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

After midnight, as the merrymakers gravitated towards the seventy-inch television screen off the ballroom proper, the character of their drinking began to change, to cross the line between lubrication and anesthesia. Mixers were omitted. Whole bottles of champagne were hogged. Men danced with men, and women with their drinks. Peripheral guests and out-of-town celebrities departed discreetly, leaving the hard core of the pro-merger campaign, the Struthers-Meisner-Wesley axis, to shake their fists at the silver screen, wrangling with it, until the channel was changed to His Girl Friday , the late-night movie on KPLR.

The referendum had needed to carry both city and county by simple majorities. In the city, where less than 17 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, it was failing narrowly. In the county, with voter turnout barely 14 percent, it was missing by a four-to-one margin. Overall, the merger was receiving just over 20 percent of the vote. But even Vote No declined to term its victory a landslide. When little better than one eligible adult in seven had bothered to go to the polls, the only thing anybody could say had carried by a landslide was apathy.

Apathy? The analysts frowned. After all, the campaign had generated extraordinary publicity. Both sides had put forth cogent arguments, and neither had shied from unleashing the more vicious incentives, the racism and jealousy and greed, that tended to flush voters out in droves. The brightest lights in the St. Louis sky, the Jammus and Probsts, the Wesleys and the Hammakers, had guided the campaign. No one who paid the slightest attention to local news could have failed to grasp the importance of deciding whether the city and county should be reunited in a single new county. And yet no one, in effect, had voted.

It was a night when men and women paid to face the public would have paid to stay home in bed. The election was a Comet Kohoutek, a Super Bowl XVIII. Commenting on the returns as they came in, apparently still believing themselves to be heard at one and two in the morning, the local newspeople sensed their responsibility for the excess hype and did everything but apologize. Their eyes scurried back and forth like panicked mountaineers on Rushmore faces, appealing to their associates for help, coming to rest again on the camera only after they’d succeeded in obtaining it.

Don, uh, you wanna try and explain this?

Take a crack at this, Mary?

Bill. What would you say?

To the media, with their ethos of combat, St. Louis looked suddenly and inexplicably craven. Threatened with the prospect of thinking and deciding, the body politic had surrendered. It embarrassed the commentators — but only because they failed to place the election within the larger context. Their shame was a measure of their obsolescence. They did not understand that America was outgrowing the age of action.

With a maturity gained by bitter experience, the new America knew that certain struggles would not have the happy endings once dreamed of, but were doomed to perpetuate themselves, metamorphically foiling all attempts to resolve them. No matter how a region was structured, well-to-do white people were never going to permit their children to attend schools with dangerous black children. In any system devisable by mortals under lobbying pressure, taxes were bound to hit the unprivileged harder than the privileged, the exact nature of the unfairness depending only on who happened to be privileged at any given moment. The world would either end in a nuclear holocaust, or else not end in a nuclear holocaust. Washington would uphold repressive regimes overseas unless it decided not to, in which case communism would spread, unless it didn’t. And so on. All political platforms were identical in their inadequacy, their inability to alter the cosmic order.

Enlightened Americans accepted the world as it came. They were willing to pay a high price for the food they ate — dense buttery ice creams, fresh pastas, chocolate truffles, boneless chicken breasts — because high-quality foods went down easily, leaving the mind free for more philosophical pursuits. By the same token, sexual promiscuity was passing out of fashion. The threat of AIDS ensured that the spirit would no longer be a slave to the passions. Instead of making love, instead of making war, young people were mastering their base instincts and going to professional schools. The national economy played to perfection its role in this trend. It also came to the aid of investors uncertain about how best to spend their money, as times of instability called for greater inwardness, for devotion to arbitrage and tax-free bonds and leveraged buy-outs, to profits devolving from mathematics itself, the music of the spheres. Entrepreneurship was spiritually and financially polluting. Americans seeking purity wisely left the toxic wastes and consumer complaints and labor unrest and bankruptcies to other nations, or to the remnants of the original merchant caste. The path to enlightenment led through the perception that all communal difficulties are illusions born of caring and desire. It led through non-action, non-involvement, and individual retirement accounts. The new generation had renounced the world in return for simplicity and self-sufficiency. Nirvana beckoned.

At dawn the brain trust gathered in Jammu’s office for damage assessment. Seasoned campaigners, familiar with setbacks, they took the long view, eschewing childish outbursts. They paced in shirtsleeves. They smoked cigarettes. They gazed out the eastern windows at the gray streets and the fog-locked Arch. Only in their solicitude towards Jammu did they betray their awareness of the magnitude of the catastrophe.

Pete Wesley had brewed coffee, stepping back from the 30-cup pot and scowling at its controls, forcing proficiency in a field of endeavor with which he was not that well acquainted. He brought steaming conical cups in plastic zarfs, two by two, to the craving, sobering hands all around him. He pointed at Jammu. “Do you, ah,” he swallowed, nearly garbling his question, “want coffee?”

She shook her head.

The men milled with their cups, drinking. Each time one of them stopped at the big pot for a refill he glanced at Jammu. Coffee?

She shook her head.

Her foreignness and gender heightened the innate pathos of the moment, complicating, with paternal tenderness, the unwanted superiority most underlings feel when their commander has met defeat. Because it was her first American election, and she was bound to have seen it as a referendum on her personally, they were afraid she might be taking all the blame. But they were even more afraid of trying to forestall this, since in their circle the intimacy of alibis and consolation was considered bad form. They waited for her to come around, to remember again that up until the last minute the opinion polls had continued to show both city and county residents giving her very high approval ratings. If every resident had been compelled to vote, or if the sun had done them a favor by shining on Tuesday, or if the campaign had induced less boredom and more grass-roots participation, the merger would have carried easily, for the simple reason that she supported it. In the practical sense, too, the election hadn’t constituted a referendum on her, because her strength had never depended on her effectiveness in getting out the vote. The merger’s failure took nothing away from the motives her various followers had for remaining in her camp. She still formed the nexus between the industrialists like Chet Murphy and the Democrats like Wesley, between the bankers like Spiegelman and the informationalists like Jim Hutchinson, between the planners and the blacks: between private maneuvering and public opinion. In September she’d had only an aging ex-lover named Singh to comfort her in her early-morning depressions. Now she had the cream of the St. Louis elite, doting on her, trying to keep one another tactful for as long as she was gloomy, and she was still the kind of woman, brooding and brilliant, grand, who merited these attentions. The great wouldn’t have become great if they were easily satisfied with themselves.