From rich promise to ragtag writing
The Benefactor, young New Zealand writer Sebastian Hampson’s second novel, concerns Henry Calder, an approximation of a silver fox who has been sacked from the editorship of a fashion magazine he helped build into a cultural touchstone.
His wife, Martha, a woman lazily described as “everything to everyone,” has gone and Calder resides in a pristine penthouse, tapping away at his scandalous memoirs between reaches for the booze bottle and the anti-depressants.
Calder’s recollections, drenched in questionable power, kitsch glamour and irresistible consumption, take us through the heady 1980s and 90s when his influence went unchallenged and the seeds of an already decaying marriage were laid. Enter roguish, 20-something Maggie who, Calder believes, can offer him a chance for redemption.
Throughout most of the novel, Hampson reaches for the self-destructive listlessness of grief and loss. But he can only invoke a deep sense of emptiness. This is the trap of Hampson’s style, mostly composed in internal monologue marred by a plague of cliches: boats in port are “teeming”, gunshots “ring out”, brows “furrow”.
And too often there is a distinct lack of place. The allusive richness of Calder’s life and his rarefied corner of New York demand a palpable texture and a redolent feeling – a sense of being smothered in something gorgeously unattainable. What we get is terse shorthand or blank modernity.
Some settings are introduced with only an essayistic naming of obscure artists and architects. All those grand domes, steel cathedrals, impeccable habits and finely tableclothed dinners, barely conjured at all.
Above all, Hampson’s problem is one of class and status: people who imbue their world with frilled, gilded and shiny material things have, by their very nature, no inner life. It would take a brilliant writer to render the rich empathetic.
As Hampson writes of Calder: “The true details were both filthier and more exciting – yet he wasn’t sure if they aligned with his intentions, if he could commit them to the immortal page.”