The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Honesty and the Golden Rule have been abandoned in favor of dishonesty and greed. Financiers make huge fortunes in questionable schemes, ruining others in the process. The rich buy their way into political positions. Old values have given way to the new morality of every man for himself, regardless of others. That's "the way we live now."

Despite how current this situation sounds, Trollope's 1875 novel reflects his views about Victorian England. He wrote, "...a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable."

As an illustration, Trollope includes all manner of dishonesty in his complicated plot: the financier who entertains royalty while selling worthless stocks, the investors who ignore questionable aspects of finance as long as they are getting a share of the profits, the lady novelist who gains favorable reviews by flattering influential editors, the aristocratic but short-of-cash young men who profess love for rich young women to get at their money. All these and more.

The main focus of the plot is the rise and fall of the financial "genius" Melmotte, who, despite reader expectations of a good-versus-evil villain, turns out to be a marginally sympathetic character, because he is at least honest with himself about his actions and motivations.

True to Victorian expectations, the many other characters are mostly involved in the marriage plot, wherein the course of true love never does run smooth but mostly sorts itself out admirably. The several romantic stories do not all end as expected or even, perhaps, as the reader would hope.

The structure of the narrative is much like a current soap opera, with the action switching from one story line to another from chapter to chapter. As in a soap opera, all the characters are connected in some way, sometimes only by a propensity to congregate in the same places. (I am reminded so much of Days of Our Lives, a program I have watched guiltily off and on for more than forty years.)

On the plus side, the characters seem real and I learned to care about some of them; there is no high drama, but there are several intriguing plot lines; as in real life, no characters are portrayed in strictly black-and-white terms.

On the minus side, Trollope gives us only one segment of society, the more privileged, and ignores the multitude of very poor people in portraying "the way we live now," and the book drags sometimes and seems over-long (767 pages in my edition). I think Trollope must have grown a bit cynical, because the two characters most honest with themselves and with others both end up as losers in the marriage plot.

Highly recommended, if you have the time. This is widely considered to be Trollope's best novel.