The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Family Life

Synopsis

Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. But then Rachel's cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many.

Release date: June 5, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Reading Group Guide for The Innocents by Francesca Segal

Adam Newman belongs to a strong and vibrant community of Jewish Londoners. His fiancée, Rachel Gilbert, and her large family have considered him one of their own for years. And as a junior member of his future father-in-law’s law firm, he’s entwined himself inextricably with the people among whom he has grown up. But it isn’t until one of Rachel’s cousins, the enigmatic and atypical Ellie Schneider, returns to London from New York, with the wake of a scandal at her heels, that Adam realizes just how inextricable his ties to the community really are.

At first put off by Ellie’s worldliness, Adam gradually comes to see Ellie, Rachel’s polar opposite, as a product of both her past and her difficult present. He also comes to see her as a woman fully aware of her actions and their implications, but without regret—something that Adam finds both mystifying and compelling. His conversations with his fiancée’s cousin reveal her to be a woman better educated, more self-aware, and more complex than he ever realized. He also finds that he’s drawn to her intensely, and that perhaps his future life with Rachel is not the future that he wants after all.

A modern-day recasting of Edith Wharton’s seminal novel The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal’s The Innocents explores our intense and personal connections to family and community; the simultaneous dangers and protections of existence within such a community; and the seductive powers of experience beyond our own. Segal’s rich and evocative depiction of a contemporary London community reveals its strong parallels to late nineteenth-century New York, while her protagonist, Adam Newman, diverts from Wharton’s characters in important and enlightening ways.

1.   Segal’s debut novel is a retelling of the classic novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. For those of you who have read the book or seen the movie adaptation of The Age of Innocence, discuss the specific ways in which The Innocents parallels Wharton’s novel, and then consider the important ways in which it departs from it. Does knowledge of this parallel add to your understanding of Segal’s novel, or does it complicate it?

2.   Apart from Adam’s initial physical attraction to Ellie, what in the beginning of the novel foreshadowed the fact that Adam and Rachel were not, perhaps, as ideally suited to one another as he’d thought for the past twelve years?

3.   How did the backstory about Jackie’s death help you to sympathize with Ellie? What aspects of her personality seem most likely a result of her mother’s early death and her father’s subsequent emotional distance?

4.   Discuss Ziva’s relationship with Ellie and consider how the two women are similar in terms of being survivors. How much do you think this accounts for their mutual affection for one another? Could any of the others—Jaffa, Rachel, Adam—have truly understood Ziva? Why or why not?

5.   Compare Ellie’s character with that of Rachel, and discuss Adam’s inability to commit wholly to just one of them for most of the novel. Between the two women, whom did you prefer? With whom did you sympathize the most? Do you think Adam made the right choice in the end?

6.   Also, compare and contrast the novel’s “Evan Goodman” financial scandal with recent events in the financial sector of our own culture, such as the Bernie Madoff scandal. Discuss how the ordeal operates as a catalyst and as a complication of the plot within the novel. Do you think it can also work as a symbol with any of Segal’s themes in the book? Why or why not?

7.   How well does Segal portray the social, psychological, religious, and emotional lives of the Jewish community in North London? Do you feel that she conveys a reasonable and realistic portrait of this large and diverse group of people? What were the greatest strengths in her depiction, and what were weaknesses?

8.   Similarly, how did characters like Ziva Schneider help you to understand the Israeli immigrant experience? In particular, what did the novel help to show about the Jewish survivors of World War II, and their difficulties with nationality and assimilation into post–World War II European society?

9.   Is Rachel’s character a passive one? Would you call her passive-aggressive? Why or why not? By the end of the novel, in what significant ways has her character changed?

10.  Discuss how Segal incorporates the subject of death into her novel. Would you call her handling of the subject matter sensitive? Objective? Realistic? Consider the many moments in the novel where death is encountered or referenced, and discuss Segal’s success when it comes to writing about the end of life and its impact on those who remain.

11.  Similarly, discuss Segal’s choice of setting for this adaptation of Wharton’s novel. In what important ways does the Jewish community of North London in the early 2000s parallel late nineteenth-century New York? Discuss the key characteristics that these communities share, and then discuss their important differences.

12.  Discuss the significance of Segal’s title as it relates to the characters in her book. Not only does the title recall Wharton’s novel, but it reflects a characteristic of the group of people she’s writing about, as well as of specific characters. Discuss the ways in which The Innocents is both a sincere title and an ironic one.

While Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel provided you with a plot, what difficulties or challenges did you encounter when attempting to reimagine this story? What led you to retell this story in a new time and place?

I’d read The House of Mirth when I was about twelve and barely remembered it, and I think I tried the odd Henry James around the same time and had struggled a bit. But whenever I’m trying to get under the skin of a place, I read its writers—I discovered Salman Rushdie, who’s now one of my favorite writers, on a press trip to India—and a few years ago when I was living in New York I went back to James and to Wharton. And I just fell in love. I think The Age of Innocence was the sixth or seventh of hers I read in succession and so, by the time I reached it, I was familiar with some of her central preoccupations—the opposition of the individual and the group; the vulnerability of women in all social strata; the disparity between the declared motivations and the deeper currents that stir human society, whether it was her own, upper-class world satirized so exquisitely in a novel like The House of Mirth and The Reef, or an entirely different milieu, in tales like Summer or Ethan Frome.

I would never have chosen to start, spontaneously, with a classic on which to base a novel of my own—the self-consciousness and fear of comparison would have held me back. But I didn’t really have a choice, in the end. It just happened, almost from the moment I started reading The Age of Innocence: a portrait of a world entirely removed from my own era or experience that nonetheless felt instantly, immediately familiar, with all the support systems and pressures and judgments and long-interwoven lives. It was, I think, the one and only moment when a large cartoon lightbulb pinged on above my head like the Roadrunner. I read that glorious opening scene at the new opera house, in which all of Old New York high society is assembled to hear Faust. And it just seemed immediately obvious—it was just like going to synagogue on the High Holidays. After that, I simply had to do it. I had always known that I had certain ideas about life in a small, suburban community that I wanted to explore, and suddenly I had the perfect vehicle for them.

The tone at the end of your novel is less bleak and more optimistic than that of The Age of Innocence. What do you feel are the most important differences between Wharton’s novel and your own?

I had a slightly different message from Wharton. The Age of Innocence is already less scathing and condemnatory than The House of Mirth, written fifteen years before. But still—it’s pretty damning. I wasn’t willing to condemn North West London in quite the same way, nor did I believe it fair to suggest that the fulfillment of Adam’s life would be that “his days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought to ask.” Newland Archer has a loveless, emotionally sterile marriage with May Welland, and his only consolations are society and status. And even the value of these is subtly undermined by the liberations of the next generation—Newland’s son Dallas is in love with Julius Beaufort’s daughter Fanny, and therefore is doing precisely what society long before had believed would mark the apocalypse—“marrying Beaufort’s bastards.” But it’s not the apocalypse—it no longer matters. They’re marrying, unimpeded, for love. Newland and Ellen were thirty years too early for their love affair. And it is explicitly stated that they are the grand loves of each other’s lives. In that way, my novel is very different. I didn’t want it to be clear-cut.

I would never tell a reader whether I believe Adam’s decision was right or wrong in terms of their future together beyond the book—I’d love to know what conclusions people draw by themselves, actually. But yes, in either case, my message is far less categorical and more optimistic than Wharton’s.



Adam had, for the occasion, bought a new suit. He had wavered between dandyish black, chalk-striped and double-breasted, and a more traditional two-button jacket in deep navy wool. After some consideration he had chosen the navy. It seemed a more appropriate suit for a man who was newly engaged.

And now he was in the suit and in synagogue, considering the stained-glass windows that painted a dappled light, pale rose and paler sapphire, onto the painted faces in the women’s gallery. There were three of these windows—a red-flamed golden candelabra for Chanukah; a rainbow in a cobalt sky with white leaded doves swooping beneath its arch; and a third pane in which acid green palm trees framed the two rounded, silvery tablets of the Decalogue, an orange and lemon sunburst above them. Beneath this one sat Rachel Gilbert between her mother and her grandmother, looking intently at the pulpit. Adam, in turn, lowered his eyes from the windows and looked intently at Rachel.

They had been together since they were sixteen—twelve years last summer. For twelve years she had been his girlfriend and now, for a week, she had been his fiancée. And it all felt different. He could never have anticipated the shift, profound and inarticulable, that had taken place when he had seen the ring over which he had agonized winking on Rachel’s slender finger. It was more than possession, more than union, more than love. It was absolute confidence. It was certainty, and a promise of certainty always.

Beside him Jasper Cohen stirred suddenly, shifting his bulk beneath the folds of his white prayer shawl. “Rachel’s cousin’s here.” He nudged Adam in the ribs with a heavy elbow and nodded toward the balcony where the Gilbert women were ranged, coiffed and contemplative, in a mahogany pew. Rachel’s mother, Jaffa Gilbert, sat closest to the rabbi, her cropped and hennaed hair hidden beneath a green hat, red-framed glasses on a red plastic chain resting on the broad velvet shelf of her bosom. Beside her sat Rachel herself, demure in high-necked charcoal silk, looking down at her hands, her face half-obscured by a sheet of tumbling, dark hair. Rachel’s grandmother Ziva Schneider was on her other side, peering at the text in her lap with a grimace of either concentration or skepticism. And then the cousin, Ellie Schneider.

“So?”

“You didn’t tell me she was back from New York.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“If there’s going to be a half-naked model in shul then I care.” Jasper leaned over Adam, straining to see. “God, she’s tall. You’d need a stepladder to get up there.”

“Six foot.”

“Too tall for me. You could handle her.” Jasper flipped over a few pages of his prayer book without looking at them. “When are we going to get hold of that porn film she was in?”

“Art house,” Adam hissed. Long inured to Jasper’s indiscretion, he was nonetheless alarmed by it on this occasion. Whatever other rumors might be circulating about her, he did not want the congregation thinking his fiancée’s cousin was a porn star.

Jasper snorted, loudly. Jasper did everything loudly. He was not secure enough to believe that anyone would pay him attention unless he made himself unavoidable.

“Arse house, maybe. I’ve seen clips on YouTube, mate, it’s porn. We’ve got to order it.”

“No.”

“No it’s not porn or no we shouldn’t order it? Gideon said that they censored half an hour from the final version but you can still get it uncut in the States.”

“Gideon didn’t say that, I said that. Rachel was upset about it.”

“Well, either way, Columbia kicked her out for doing it so there’s got to be something worth seeing.”

“Shh,” said Adam finally, frowning. He was not the only one, he noticed. Whispered conversation among the men in the back pews was in general permissible, encouraged even, if the content was engaging enough for the surrounding eavesdroppers. Football, in particular, was a much beloved topic. Services on the High Holidays were long; it was understood that one had to pass the time. But sustained discussion about porn during Kol Nidre—the beginning of Yom Kippur and a significant, spiritual incantation—was pushing lenience to its limit. The congregation was fasting until sunset tomorrow night; in the meantime they were meant to be atoning. Adam too had seen clips of Ellie Schneider’s acting debut on the Internet; in one she was delivering a breathy and hypnotically rhythmic monologue to the camera, wearing only a stained Columbia University T-shirt while the rest of her was exposed and exploited by a menacing costar. Synagogue was not a place in which he felt comfortable recalling it. Around them the Al Chet prayer continued. For the sin we have committed before you by improper thoughts. For the sin we have committed before you through speech. Pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.

Adam rejected the memory with some effort and instead focused on the women’s gallery, hoping to catch Rachel’s attention. She looked down at him and widened her eyes. From her expression he could see that she had a great deal to say and was desperate to say it—her cousin was embarrassing her; she could not believe that Ellie was in shul at all, let alone that the girl had come to Kol Nidre exposing skin from clavicle to navel, wearing a tuxedo jacket with nothing beneath it and black trousers—trousers!—that clung and shimmered as if she’d been dipped in crude oil. Adam needed little more than a glance to understand Rachel’s signaling, for the subtle contractions of her lips and the arching of her dark brows were a language long mastered. He knew their vocabulary, and every expression of her lovely face. He did not see the appeal of unpredictable women. Rachel never surprised him, and he considered it a testament to their intimacy that he could predict her reactions with complete confidence. Life, he knew, provided enough of the unexpected. Adam had perspective. A steady and loyal copilot was more important than whatever passing frisson might come with more spontaneous spirits. He smiled at her.

Outside the synagogue Adam waited for Rachel and her family. For late September it was warm, tenacious leaves still green and living on the oaks that stood like looming sentries along the edge of the empty parking lot. Tonight, people were leaving slowly, taking their time to fold prayer shawls, gather coats, greet friends. The fast decreed that there would be no supper; nothing at all, in fact, until the same time tomorrow evening when they would all be leaving synagogue once again, but at a more urgent pace. Tonight they would have to be sated with spiritual—or at least social—sustenance. Men and women were now reunited after the service and families reassembled, lingering on the steps and drifting out past Adam, calling good-byes to one another into the hazy autumn darkness.

“Hi. Here again.”

The voice was American, low and close behind his shoulder. He turned to find Ellie Schneider winding a long gray scarf around her neck, an unlit cigarette already in one hand.

Until now Adam had had a clear image of Rachel’s cousin in his mind assembled from magazines and the Internet—limbs of satin; champagne blond hair; high cheekbones; and high, pointed breasts. He knew about her other life beyond the page, of course. In reality the girl was a mess. But in photographs her pale skin was as smooth as poured cream, and the bright green eyes, Disney wide, evoked a fresh-faced innocence entirely at odds with the darkness he knew was behind them. And so the darkness was easy to ignore. She was related to his girlfriend and he had taken a proprietary interest.

For years, in his head, he had been establishing a relationship with Rachel’s younger cousin—close, vaguely paternal, faintly flirtatious, but always within the bounds of what was appropriate among old friends. She would confide in him about her antics, and he would be fond and exasperated and offer her sage, avuncular advice. When he and Rachel married, she would treat their home like her own and would turn to them for refuge, would stay with them (visits during which she might sometimes be glimpsed in her underwear—though in Adam’s defense, this was not usually the focal point of the daydream). They would help her turn around her troubled life. In the pub with Jasper and the boys, he discussed her New York life in a confident, possessive manner. Ellie’s seedy glamour, such a contrast to her conventional cousin, nonetheless gave Rachel a certain edge. No one else had so notorious or so alluring a relative. The girls had been close in childhood and in the solitude of his own thoughts, Adam had appropriated this closeness. He was a friend and confidant. Now, he was forced to confront the reality that she was almost a perfect stranger.

The private image he’d constructed was now superimposed, ill-fitting, onto the girl who stood before him. Her eyes were the same extraordinary green, bright and clear and fixed on him with an expression of idle curiosity, but beneath the thick lashes were rings of gray and plum and lavender, as if she’d slept many nights in old makeup or perhaps simply never slept. Around her, the exposed heads of the community’s departing women were sleek and blow-dried, neat as a pin in order to stand before God’s judgment and each other’s, but Ellie’s hair was in a loose ponytail of overbleached straw blond, and looked unbrushed. Her heavy, pouting lips were chapped. Beneath the gaping collar of her jacket, her gaunt frame seemed as flat-chested as a little boy’s, and when she turned away for a moment, tugging her hair out from under her scarf, her profile revealed a deep shadow beneath a cheekbone that protruded like sharp flint. He hid his surprise and looked instead at the cigarette, hoping to convey to her that lighting it on Yom Kippur—while still in the grounds of the synagogue—would be flagrantly, extravagantly offensive. He did not want Rachel’s parents to be embarrassed further.

“Where again?” he asked. Despite his inventions, he had not expected her to remember him.

“I met you here once, a long time ago. Jaffa brought me with her to pick up Rachel from Israel Tour. I was desperate to come, I’d missed her so much. I was playing on the climbing frame when the buses got in. Just there.” She nodded toward the other end of the car park and his eyes followed hers to the smooth, empty tarmac where years ago had stood a curved rack of low monkey bars and a shallow plastic slide. “I worshiped her and I was just insanely jealous that summer. I just thought—Anyway. You and Rachel got off the coach together, you were carrying her bag. I remember, it was the first time I’d noticed a boy doing that. And then she brought you over and introduced you to Jaffa and Lawrence. So I met you.”

“You were very little then.”

“Ten.”

“Good memory.”

She shrugged. “You all seemed happy. That’s rare enough to make an impression.”

At that moment Rachel’s parents appeared behind her and he lost the chance to reply, though Ellie’s comment had bothered him. He knew a lot of happy people here. He remembered the day that Ellie described as clearly as she did, not for the stern blond ten-year-old who’d shaken his hand with the formality of a politician but for Rachel—he had first met her on that youth group trip to Israel, and as their coach of sunburned teenagers had drawn into the car park he had asked her to be his girlfriend. And he knew it seemed anachronistic, or simply unfashionable, but from the moment she’d smiled back, bashful and willing, he’d known that they would get married. She’d had such certainty, such a placid conviction in the essential goodness of the world and what it promised her. To Adam, raised by a mother who prepared with steely determination for the worst to happen immediately if not sooner, Rachel’s unwavering, no-nonsense optimism had been an elixir. He hadn’t known that he was allowed to expect a calm, happy life until Rachel had shown him that she anticipated nothing else. Her belief was such that there seemed no doubt she would have it; whoever shared that life with her would share that calm and happiness.

He’d loved her since that glorious month of freedom in Israel. The boys had pierced their ears, kneeling on blankets for Arab jewelry traders to shoot ill-advised gold studs through their lobes; Rachel and her friends had sat cross-legged on adjacent rugs while Ethiopian girls worked slim braids into their hair, the plaits then wrapped in bright cotton so that one or two worms of green and red stuck out stiffly from each ponytail. Their teenage rebellions that summer had been innocent and conventional and brief—the earrings had been removed at Heathrow; there had only ever been kissing and maybe, for a precocious couple, one hand in a bra. And Adam and Rachel had done neither of those things but instead had begun tentatively, in the final few days, to sit together on the bus. They were all happy then—Ellie was right. But they were happy now, too.

“Good, good, you found each other.”

Rachel’s father, Lawrence, clapped Adam amiably on the back and then, overcome by emotion at the thought of the engagement as he had been intermittently all week, gripped him by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length for a loving appraisal. He then enfolded him in a bear hug. Adam and Lawrence were the same height—six foot two—but Adam was broad-shouldered while Lawrence was thin and always slightly stooping, as if to avoid intimidating anyone with this impressively un-Jewish height. Yet still his bear hugs felt enveloping. The warmth of Lawrence’s presence alone was enveloping. Proud to be tall, particularly among Ashkenazi men who tended to halt at around five nine, Adam had nonetheless been content to stop growing where he did. It would have felt wrong to stand taller than Lawrence.

Jaffa, small and wide where her husband was tall and slim, was frowning at Ellie’s cigarette. “Ellie, you can wait for that, no? Show respect.” She had removed the green hat to expose short hair home-dyed a deep wine purple, streaked with lighter aubergine shades where it had begun to fade with washing. It was a color much favored, for reasons Adam had never fathomed, by Israeli women of a certain age.

Ziva Schneider joined them in time to hear this remonstrance. “You think,” she asked her daughter, “that God finds it more respectful if she smokes on Kol Nidre around the corner?”

Jaffa pursed her lips in irritated silence, as her mother knew full well that it was not God’s judgment that concerned her. She wanted to stand exultant in the car park as the crowds flooded from the synagogue, graciously accepting congratulations on the triumph of her daughter’s engagement to Adam. She wanted to soak up naches like a sponge. Such a large assembly would not come together again until Rosh Hashanah the following year—this Yom Kippur she wanted to fire her news at huge clusters of rival mothers. She adored Adam, God only knew, but there had been other engagements recently, newer couples walking down the aisle; the names of girls younger than her daughter featured on the announcements pages of The Jewish Chronicle. There had been some concern that Adam would leave it “too long.” But now it had happened, and Rachel would not yet be thirty at the wedding if they planned it quickly. Today of all days, Jaffa Gilbert did not want to concern herself with her niece’s rebellion. She turned her considerable back to both Ziva and Ellie and caught Adam’s face between plump hands.

“Ah, Adam, Adam. Rachel says she’ll be just a little while, bubele, she is talking to Brooke Goodman about something. You are breaking the fast with us tomorrow, yes?”

Adam nodded, his face still between Jaffa’s palms through the first few motions. An assortment of rings—heavy silver and bright molded plastic—scratched gently against his cheeks.

“I’ll wait for Rachel, please go ahead.”

“I am going nowhere, I have a cab,” said Ziva, sitting down neatly on a low brick wall. “I am an old lady, I will not walk back and no injunction says I must. I am eighty-eight. I am infirm. Pikuach nefesh. This morning I already call Addison Lee, and Ellie will come with me.”

“Infirm? Eze meshugas? At lo chola, Ima!”

“Sha shtil,” said Ziva, waving away Jaffa dismissively. At that moment a black Volkswagen drew up at the curb and Ziva hopped lightly to her feet, disappearing into it before Jaffa could intervene. Ellie folded herself into the front seat and the car departed. Adam watched her go with curiosity.

“Eze meshugas?” Jaffa asked again, this time to herself. . .