Book review: "Adam the King"
In the 1980s, Jeffrey Lewis concentrated on working-class cops as a writer and producer for "Hill Street Blues," but recently he's turned his attention to silver-spooned characters. His new book, "Adam the King," completes a quartet of slim novels begun in 2004 with "Meritocracy." The series is about a group of friends who, like the author, went to Yale and have enjoyed lives of success and money and just enough spiritual angst to make them rueful and sympathetic.
The novel begins in the 1990s with a memory of "the wedding of the year" in Clement's Cove, Maine, a coastal town where wealthy families keep summer "cottages." A restless billionaire named Adam Bloch married Maisie Maclaren. Adam's friend Louie, who narrates all four of these novels, remembers that the reception tent was so big that trees had to be cut down. "(Adam) would have fixed the weather if he could, he would have sent planes to seed the sky or do whatever they could do."
But the greatest expression of Adam's unfettered devotion to Maisie is the extravagant house he built - "Bloch's Folly" - "so outsized for the cove, and in the old shingle style, with a copper roof and a turret from which to see the sea in many directions." Presented with this palace, Maisie says that "it would be nice if it had a lap pool."
That casual comment, not meant to be deflating, set in motion a series of events that reduced the house to the empty, "burnt-out hulk" Louie sees at the end of chapter 1. In the engaging story that follows, we learn exactly how that tragedy came to Bloch's Folly.
Billionaires who barge into coastal towns and scar the landscape with mansions are old news. Lewis, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Castine, Maine, has surely seen his share of such intrusions, but his Adam Bloch is the consummate gentleman. He's modest, a little embarrassed about his wealth, determined not to confirm any local anti-Semite's impression of how a rich Jew behaves. At all costs he refuses to look like "someone who was coming in and throwing his weight around, or someone who was disrupting the way life was."
The key to Adam's search for redemption is an accident that took place more than 30 years ago in this town. "Bloch was the driver," the narrator remembers, "when Maisie's sister Sascha died in a crash." Consumed by guilt for so many years, he's finally found happiness with the most unlikely person. "It was as if all his adult life, every moment he wasn't making money, Bloch had been quietly searching, in the same way other men search for a fountain of youth, for the antidote to tragedy."
The thrill of that discovery makes Adam anxious about doing everything right. He's determined "to keep life in a proportion he could recognize," but he's also determined to do anything to please Maisie, and so when she mentions a lap pool, he immediately begins plans to add one. Since his house is built on a ledge, he needs the little plot of ground nearby owned by a kind woman who cleans houses and has kept her trailer on that spot for years.
The complications that develop - all the way to the fiery climax - are not what you expect. Lewis is a master of the subtle interplay of coincidence and character, the light tripping of events that leads to a disaster at once inevitable and shocking. And he chronicles Adam's burdened spirit with such insight that you can't help but be moved no matter what your tax bracket.