Montauk
Set in the summer of 1938, Montauk recalls the days when well-to-do New Yorkers left the city’s heat and summered on Long Island at resorts that catered to their every need. The wives and children resided at places like The Montauk Manor for the season, while the husbands spent the work week in the city and came out to Montauk on the weekends. Beatrice and Harry Bordeaux are one such couple, except they are childless, a state over which Beatrice has become increasingly anxious.
Harris has a fine ear for the privilege of the summer visitors versus the work ethic of the year-round residents. Beatrice, raised in Pennsylvania, has more in common with Elizabeth, who does the washing for the Manor guests, than Jeanie, the self-appointed leader of the society wives. Through Elizabeth and her family, Beatrice meets Thomas, the lighthouse keeper, and finds him a kindred spirit. Their friendship deepens into something more, one of the more predictable developments in the story. Other plot points are telegraphed with equal subtlety.
Montauk works as an exposé of the pampered lifestyle of the elite. Beatrice accepts a newspaper editor’s offer to write her observations of Manor residents (under a pseudonym, of course) and contributes devastating pieces about their selfishness (dirty diapers sent back to the city for maids to wash, misuse of charity funds). It veers sharply towards melodrama at the conclusion, in a way that reveals Beatrice to have more in common with the privileged class than her working-class friends.
