A Changed Man
By Francine Prose
HarperCollins, 421 pages, $24.95
Following on the heels of a crop of books published in connection with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Francine Prose’s new novel–about a member of a white supremacist group who turns over a new leaf and goes to work for a philanthropic organization–seems a perfect reflection of the cultural zeitgeist.
While Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” with its it-could-happen-here hypothesis, was an effort to shed some light on that most sinister of mysteries–how millions of ordinary people with no special predisposition for callousness or cruelty could have been swept up in the murderous tide of the Holocaust–“A Changed Man” approaches the subject from a different angle. Its wacky and thoroughly contemporary plot turns on the following question: What would compel a divorced Jewish mother to bring a neo-Nazi skinhead home for dinner?
In this light-hearted sendup of the liberal left and the philanthropy world, the skinhead is Vincent Nolan, a drifter with a hard-luck story. Escaping the clutches of the Aryan Resistance Movement, he shows up one day at the offices of World Brotherhood Watch, a human-rights foundation headed by Auschwitz survivor Meyer Maslow, and offers his services. What altruistic impulse led him there? ” ‘I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me.’ “
In truth, he’s mostly out to save his own neck. The whitepower boys don’t like race traitors, especially when they swipe a truck, $1,500 and a cache of drugs on their way out. But as luck would have it, the foundation’s annual benefit gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is coming up, and a little publicity about a neo-Nazi convert joining the ranks is just the thing to boost ticket sales.
That’s the admittedly not very high-minded calculation Meyer makes when he takes Vincent under his wing. But then Meyer wouldn’t be where he is today–at the helm of a multimillion-dollar human-rights foundation, a best-selling author, “the greatest Holocaust witness”–if he were squeamish about playing the public-relations card in the service of good works. If he can simultaneously help Vincent get his life back on track and make use of him for the benefit of the foundation, where’s the harm in that?
This is the familiar do-the-ends-justify-the-means quandary, and it is a recurring motif in the book. Prose’s do-good characters are not saints, and the philanthropy business is one part charity to two parts ego-stroking. Is it all right to preach about saving the world and go around in head-to-toe Armani? More troubling, Meyer’s compassion extends to high-profile cases across the globe more readily than to devoted friends and colleagues in his immediate orbit.
Which is how the responsibility of sheltering Vincent falls to good-hearted Bonnie Kalen, chief of fundraising for World Brotherhood Watch and Meyer’s all-around fix-it gal. A divorced suburban mom who’s recovering from a soul-crushing marriage, she isn’t exactly the ideal candidate for a neo-Nazi houseguest, and this preposterous domestic situation offers up the book’s best laughs.
Prose doesn’t hit us over the head with the satire, but she does lay things out deliberately, so it would be hard to miss, for example, the surface similarities between World Brotherhood Watch and the Aryan Resistance Movement. We are meant to catch on that Victor’s incentives for signing up with Meyer and Bonnie–a home, a job, something to believe in–are not so different from what lured him into the Aryan Resistance Movement. Homeless and beaten down, he joined for the “free lunch,” and only incidentally began to absorb the ideas.
Nor, apparently, are hate groups alone in inspiring a cult-like devotion in their members. Danny, Bonnie’s 16-year-old son, has taken to calling his mom’s boss Meyer Manson. Meyer can get her to do anything if he can convince her it’s for a good cause, even if it involves “[i]nviting some demented tweaker to stay here until one night, high on crystal meth, he figures out that they’re Satanists and that God needs him to hack them up and stash them in the freezer.”
“A Changed Man” isn’t meant to be a slasher-thriller, but the fact that we never believe that the above scenario could play out is actually a weakness of the novel. Prose’s decision to soft-pedal Vincent’s moral deviancy–he’s just a guy who’s had some hard times and gotten mixed up with the wrong people–robs the story of a good deal of dramatic energy. Not only was Vincent never much of a racist (“he didn’t believe in hating people unless you knew them personally”), under the Waffen SS lightning-bolt tattoos on his biceps and the combat boots he’s a regular Prince Charming. He’s polite, intelligent, well read, and more attentive to Bonnie and her sons than Bonnie’s self-centered, philandering, cardiologist ex-husband ever was.
It may have been Prose’s intention to demonstrate the extent to which appearances can be deceiving–the old don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover maxim as applied to the neo-Nazi crowd. But in terms of pure page-turning momentum, as soon as we realize Vincent isn’t a walking time bomb and doesn’t even have any appalling character traits that need fixing, nothing really urgent seems at stake. Which is an awkward problem for a 400-plus-page novel that’s supposed to sell us on its hero’s remarkable transformation.
That’s not to say “A Changed Man” is a dull read. Prose carries us along on the sheer energy of her sentences. And more so than the larger movements of the plot, the voices of the characters and their running commentaries on their lives are what keep us engaged. “Blue Angel,” Prose’s National Book Award-nominated novel about gender politics run amok on a college campus, worked in much the same way. It was Prose’s vivid rendering of the interior world of the writing instructor-protagonist, the amiable Ted Swenson–and less so the details of his ill-conceived infatuation with a student or the witch-hunt aspects of the sexual-harassment trial–that made the book such a great read.
Here the characters are a motley crew, and Prose’s range as a ventriloquist makes it fun to be in their heads. But it’s ultimately neurotic Bonnie who steals the show, and her lightly simmering romance with Vincent provides some welcome dramatic tension.
Still, there are long swaths of narrative when nothing terribly crucial seems to be happening, apart from Vincent’s growing more useful to the foundation.
Vincent proves to be a natural at selling his conversion story, outdoing even an old hand like Meyer at charming bigwig donors and impressionable newspaper reporters. The World Brotherhood Watch troops decide to march him out at the benefit dinner as Exhibit A in Meyer’s changing “one heart at a time” program. Aided by some unexpected dramatics, the event is a resounding success and leads to an invitation for Vincent and Meyer to appear on “Chandler,” a TV talk show, that ultimate arbiter of minor-celebrity status.
Prose takes cheerful digs at our culture’s insatiable appetite for overcoming-adversity stories and delights in zooming in on social transactions and dissecting their often-inane complexity. All of which makes for an amusing social satire with charmingly self-aware characters.
But “A Changed Man” also has the unmistakable feel of an exercise–an accomplished, expertly plotted exercise, but an exercise nonetheless. It may be timely and clever, but it lacks the staying power of some of Prose’s richly imagined earlier works–like the beguiling “Household Saints”–in which ho-hum reality is visited by flashes of the fantastical, and the story simply sweeps you off your feet. I’d take that over an enlightened neo-Nazi any day.
