Ooh, a novel about an apology savant! By a Pulitzer nominee
Jonathan Dee’s s A Thousand Pardons opens with privileged Westchester couple Helen and Ben Armstead heading to couples therapy. Ben’s been increasingly disengaged and quiet, but he suddenly loses it in front of the therapist.
“Have you ever been so bored by yourself that you are literally terrified? That is what it’s like for me every day. That is what it’s like for me sitting here, right now, right this second. It’s like a fucking death sentence, coming back to that house every night. I mean, no offense.”
“No offense?” Helen said.
Heh. “No offense” is a bad apology cosine, a trigonometric associate of “sorry but” and “sorry if.”
And that’s just the beginning of Ben’s spectacular implosion — which ultimately involves a hot first-year associate at his firm, a jealous thuggy fratty dude, a hotel and a bottle of bourbon and a smashed-up car. It all leaves Helen stunned and humiliated as well as in major lifestyle jeopardy. Ben’s inchoate instinct is to take responsibility for his sins, but his scrappy-scumbaggy lawyer insists that apologies make tricky legal situations worse. So Ben is shipped off to rehab (despite not actually being an alcoholic; it’s part of the business of showpology), the family’s assets are frozen, and longtime stay-at-home mom Helen is forced to find a job to support herself and 12-year-old Sara. She winds up working in a tiny PR firm in Manhattan, where it becomes clear that she’s got a genius for staging public apologies. Her first success involves the owner of a wee Chinese takeout place who is accused of exploiting his workers:
“You will say that you are sorry,” Helen said. “You will not defend yourself. You will not contest any particular charge, because contesting it is what allows people to keep talking about it. Without getting into specifics, you will apologize, and ask your customers and the people of New York for their forgiveness. And they will give it to you. They want to. People are quick to judge, Mr. Chin, they are quick to condemn, but that’s mostly because their ultimate desire is to forgive.”
Mr Chin’s groveling tour goes great, and Helen moves on to advising a married city councilman who’s been caught on surveillance video hitting his girlfriend:
“You will admit to everything. You will apologize to this young woman, by name, for your violent behavior. You will not use any phrases like ‘moment of weakness’ or ‘regrettable incident.’ You will apologize to your wife, and to your children, and to your parents if they are still alive, and to your constituents whether they voted for you or not, and to women everywhere. Basically, you will get up in front of the cameras and make an offering of yourself.”
When the councilman tells her, “This was a stupid thing for me to have done, but it does not define me. It was a one-time thing, and I want to get away from it,” Helen is quick to shut that down:
“You will never get away from it,” Helen said. “But you can incorporate it in to the narrative. You have to be sincere. You have to be completely abject, and not attempt to defend yourself or you behavior in any way. No ‘I was drunk,’ no ‘she hit me first.’ You have to take, and answer, every question. You have to hold your temper when people try to get you to lose it. Do you think you can do that?”
Helen knows she has a gift: “She got powerful men to apologize.” And she knows her skills are astonishing, “even if they seemed less like skills than like instincts.” But she’s not a self-reflective person, and even as word gets out about her powers and she climbs into the corporate-crisis-management stratosphere, she’s oblivious to Sara’s personal crises and Ben’s entire life. She’s so passive and opaque, it’s hard to care deeply about her. (Sara, with all her teen eye-rolling and angst, is a much more interesting character.)
We get snippets of all three family members’ perspectives, but because we never fully inhabit any one character’s head, there’s no real feeling of catharsis or revelation. And I’m not sure how cynical the book is about the power of apology. Helen’s recommendations are all good, from a SorryWatch perspective, but of course, they’re also manipulative and hollow. Does sincerity matter at all? Is the purpose of saying you’re sorry purely to get something you want? What about the power of “I’m sorry” to bring human beings together, to rescue them from their places of individual isolation and sorrow and anger — are we SorryWatchers naive to believe in these noble ideals? Is it better to have reconciliation without apology, since apology has become so debased and performance-oriented? Mr. Dee, tell me!
My frustration aside, the book is very funny, especially in its portrayal of the cushy corporate world of image management. And the writing is a pleasure — fluid and witty and unpretentious. You have to suspend a metric ton of disbelief when a movie star in need of emotional as well as image rehab shows up, and he and Helen have a past…and there’s a terrible mystery…and wait, what? But that’s how you know this is a “literary novel” and not a “women’s novel”: because the lack of realism is presented so matter-of-factly. If A Thousand Pardons were written by a woman, Helen would have to have a much more complex interior life and the author would have to try to justify the book’s many implausibilities. (And per Maureen Johnson’s examination of gendered book covers, the book would look different.)
Despite my occasional exasperation, I really enjoyed A Thousand Pardons. It’s a smooth, funny, entertaining read, and you can feel smart holding it on the subway without being embarrassed or actually having to work too hard. Sorry if that’s a little cold.
(P.S. If you have recommendations of apology-related books for us, or scenes of great and/or terrible apology in literature, send ’em along!)
This sounds like a good book – though the question of sincerity, when Helen was Apology Central, raises a point. I remember hearing in college French class madame say “Shame!” to someone for not doing their homework. The phrase is literally “avoir honte” – have shame. Perhaps it’s the residual rigidity of Puritan values in American society which creates exaggerated public shock and attempts to hand shame around like hors d’oeuvres, thus creating these Byzantine public apology dances in the first place. If we could pass on the shame-pushers, people might experience actual emotional connection to their actions – feelings for real! – and then sincerity might make a comeback. I don’t think it’s idealistic to hope that, but …it’s hard to imagine how it could happen.
Well in one of the bits you quote, Helen says, “you have to be sincere,” and I think that’s true of a good apology. A good apology has a performative quality–not in the sense of “it is a performance” (although that too) but in the sense that it performs an action in itself — the action of avoir honte, I guess, the act of experiencing shame. If it were easy to fake a good apology, people wouldn’t resist it so passionately, wouldn’t add in wriggle words , etc.
I guess I’m arguing that no matter how grumpy and insincere you feel, to apologize in the correct form is to _experience real shame_, and in that sense to apologize for real.
Of course: I have not read the book! ahahahah
And mostly I just wanted to comment that “the business of showpology” is a delightful phrase.
Helen TELLS people to be sincere, but gives them scripts to make them SOUND sincere even if they’re not. I’m not sure whether this is meant to be ironic or cynical, this notion of using sincerity because that’s what makes apologies go over whether the sincerity actually real or not. I can’t explicate on this without spoilers…and I do recommend the book if anyone wants to email about this privately!
I think what I was trying to say (and again, have not read book, so . . . I don’t know if this even applies to the book) is that in some ways the thing about good/correctly done apology is that it is an _action_, the action of causing yourself to experience shame–which is why people resist it so fiercely. If one could easily fake a good/satisfactory apology, people wouldn’t offer crappy ones all the time, and wouldn’t have to be forced at gunpoint (or publicist-point, or Sorrywatch-blog-point) to offer correct ones.
So to that extent, it doesn’t totally matter if it’s sincere or not. To apologize correctly is to expose yourself to public shame, which is why it’s so painful to do. I have apologized for things that I did not 100% believe were my fault–I used to do this at work sometimes, just because I hate it when all work comes to a halt while we try to parcel out blame and defend ourselves etc. But anyway: those pragmatic, not-entirely-sincere apologies were just as painful as the ones I’d make when it really WAS 100% my fault.
I think if you can apologize correctly WITHOUT feeling any shame . . . I don’t know, you might be a tiny bit of a sociopath? but in that case you’re never going to feel real/useful/sincere shame anyway.
I only just while I was writing that last comment figured this out about apologies, this performative or action quality they have, and it’s super interesting to me!