Past Imperfect

I really enjoyed Julian Fellowes’ Snobs, a drily observational manners novel in which a marchioness sticks to her childhood nickname of Googie as a power move to keep social inferiors calling her by her title. If you only know Julian Fellowes from Downton Abbey, imagine an entire novel of that scene where the dowager countess keeps a blank face while asking the middle-class cousins what a weekend is.

In Past Imperfect, an aging London bachelor gets a letter from Damian, the frenemy of his young, society days, with a strange request.  Of course, in Julian Fellows, manners-novel style, the request is couched in polite phrases about dropping in if he could spare the time and it’s not too much of a bore. Damian is on his deathbed, and he believes one of their old crowd secretly had his baby, so our narrator who never gets a name, Nick Carroway style, starts an investigation, both into their old circle’s current lives, and into his own youthful memories.

There are loads of secrets to uncover, partly because Damian slept with pretty much everyone they knew. But partly because there are just so many things unsaid. Lots of new brides with “premature” newborns, lots of quite-rich pretending to be super-rich, lots of marriage as a proposition with winners and losers. Damian’s crowd came of age just after formal presentations had ended, but The Season was still very much in force, and class-conscious mamas engineer the right invitations for their marriageable daughters.

The story moves between memories of their shared youth and visits to the aging friends, with sharp observations. Our narrator hasn’t been in close contact with this crowd for years (yes, he finally explains why towards the end), but he slips right back into that class, inventing imaginary errands that are going to take him right by their homes, and cornering his old friends on their schedules. The narrator compares their escapades when they were all young, lively and rich,  with who they’ve become in later middle age. Sometimes bright party girls have become timid, apologetic wives, married to the unsatisfactory partners selected by their parents. Boozy Season bros have become rigidly establishment snobs,  failing businessmen or vastly richer doing vague City things. It’s fascinating when scandals are revealed, and Past Imperfect has a lot of deceit around sex and money, but it’s just as fascinating when our nameless narrator describes an underwhelming dinner menu or a parvenu country house with dry, but sharp, observation.

My only complaint in this sly, clever novel is a short section when he goes to LA, and the observational wit just grinds to a halt. Yes, true, Californians are overly fond of exclams and fad diets, but these remarks seemed like phoning it in after all the chapters on performing one’s money, performing one’s marriage, and all the quiet ruminations on aging.