Greenwich: A Novel-Kate Broad, author; Imani Jade Powers, narrator
I will begin by telling you that I did not like the main character of this book and that the woke themes running through it caught me by surprise. In the year 1999, Rachel Fiske, still a minor since she was a few months shy of her18th birthday, was planning to go off to Swarthmore, an elite college, at summer’s end. Her mom, Maureen, was supposed to visit her sister Ellen in the very wealthy, tony town of Greenwich CT, to help her as she recovered from a fall from a horse. Jules, Rachel's sister, only 10 years old, had just been diagnosed with cancer, so instead, Rachel, who had recently been totally ostracized by her high school friends because she had committed the unpardonable sin of making out with someone else’s boyfriend, a betrayal that was unforgivable, pleaded to go in her place to help out. Her mom could then devote herself to the care of Jules. She really did not want her family to discover what she had done or that she was suddenly friendless. Early on, we learn that Rachel has secrets and is quite the accomplished liar. She never seems to feel loved appropriately and seeks ways to get attention that are inappropriate. She is devious, dishonest and manipulative. It was hard to believe that this recent high school graduate, portrayed as completely naïve and unaware of her elite position in life, could be real. Nevertheless, Rachel seems to be the epitome of the entitled 17-year-old teenager, a Karen, a pejorative term used to describe spoiled white women, unaware of the way most ordinary lives play out, especially in the elite spaces in which she was privileged to interact. She had even assumed, when she got to the magnificent home of her aunt in Greenwich, that her cousin Sabine’s nanny, Claudia, was the maid, because she was black.
While in Greenwich, she discovers that her uncle is a very busy and very prominent businessman, and her aunt, after several months, is still complaining of pain from her injury, requiring medication and rest. Both her aunt and uncle seem a bit distracted when it comes to their three-year-old daughter, Sabine, but the nanny is there to help out, and now, so is Rachel.
At twenty-one, Claudia Meadows is just four years older than Rachel. Rachel adores her, perhaps a bit too much, as she is prone to do because she is so hungry for friendship. She often overdoes her feelings due to her outsized need for acceptance. Rachel is manipulative, making suggestions for things to do that Claudia could, but should never do. Rachel can easily arrange things because she is a guest, after all, and not an employee, like the nanny. She often pretends innocence when she knows she is not really innocent at all, like when she steals various forms of alcohol from her aunt and uncle and convinces the nanny that it is okay, they won’t mind.
Rachel also snoops around her aunt’s home, going into forbidden spaces when no one is home. She opens private drawers in her Uncle Laurent’s office, examines his papers and discovers possible secret deals that might have illicit implications. She listens in on telephone conversations, explores her aunt’s nightstand and medicine cabinets and helps herself to pills from her aunt’s secret stash. She gathers and stores up secrets and then opts to use them as weapons for attention. She would think about spilling her secrets, just to be the center of attention, breaking promises, and hurting people who would be caught completely unawares, even if they were the guilty ones, and she, on rare occasions, was the innocent party.
Rachel always pushed the envelope in the wrong direction, making excuses for her betrayals and lies, never accepting responsibility for her actions which were often not well thought out. She held onto grudges for years and years, excusing her own part in events and blaming others for instigating them. In the book, her behavior is somewhat excused because of her age in 1999, and because of her supposed naivete, but she was too bright a woman for me to believe that. She was, after all, pre-med, destined to become a doctor, and surely someone that smart would have enough common sense to know right from wrong at the almost legal age of 18. She was about to head off to a prestigious university most only dreamt of attending.
Rachel gave the impression that she was unaware of the danger she always seemed to place Claudia in, but she didn’t really seem that clueless. She often suggested and encouraged the improprieties and inappropriate behavior. When she was suddenly sexually awakened, she pretended an ignorance which was just not believable unless she had been living under a rock. She excused her own mistakes and often made them worse with confessions that were too late or about behavior too unforgivable.
When tragedy befell the family, what part did she really play in it? Who was really responsible for the horrible accident? Did her aunt and uncle abuse their position of wealth and power? Were they negligent parents? Did they coerce others, buy them off, to excuse their own heinous actions and place blame elsewhere? How different was their adult behavior from the supposed childlike behavior of Rachel? Weren’t both self-serving in the end? Who paid the ultimate price? Did all of them believe their own lies? Is that what justified them? Why were they able to rise through the political world and the business world?
Two decades later, did Rachel ever really accept her own human weakness and make appropriate amends, or did she, as she always seemed to do, simply make matters worse because of her feelings of worthlessness. Was being loved and appreciated really all she wanted or was she really just a spoiled, selfish, dysfunctional teenager who grew into a vindictive adult?
Rachel was a contradiction in terms since she alternately seemed like a child, much younger than her years because of her supposed inability to comprehend the simplest of wrongdoing, and yet, at other times, she seemed older because of her manipulative behavior and eventual conclusions that led to more deception and revenge. She kept excusing her actions, insisting she had no other choice. Wasn’t she smart enough to know the difference between a right and wrong choice?
Was Claudia, only about 4 years older than Rachel, really supposed to have been the adult while Rachel was still considered the child? What price, if any, did Rachel ultimately pay for her own mistakes? While the book indicates racism may have played a part in the outcome, I think that it was more about the power of money and the ease with which people were bought, all people. Claudia was the tool to make the reader aware of how power corrupts absolutely, and Rachel illustrated how elitism warped perception and purchased control. Claudia eventually became an activist, using her skill as an artist, coupled with her words of description, as her own tool to gain power. Which is worse? Aren’t both behaviors activist behaviors that are coercive? Which is more dangerous? Which is more powerful? Did Rachel ever see the light?