The Sandersons Fail Manhattan
By Scott Johnston
St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages, $29
The title character of Frank Perry’s 1970 film Diary of a Mad Housewife, based on the novel by Sue Kaufman, is a young Central Park West resident, Tina Balser, who feels more and more distant from her bossy, obnoxious, and socially ambitious husband, a successful lawyer. In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” named Sherman McCoy, who lives in luxury on Park Avenue, makes a wrong turn in the Bronx and ends up victimized by New York City’s cynical, cold-blooded racial politics and targeted by the rapacious, headline-hungry tabloid media.
Scott Johnston’s new novel, The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, inhabits a thematic territory that overlaps considerably with both Perry’s and Wolfe’s. Our protagonists are William and Ellie Sanderson, who, like Sherman McCoy, live on Park Avenue. William, a WASP blueblood who is a rising star at a financial management firm called Bedrock Capital, has just joined the board of the distinguished Lenox School for Girls, which his two teenage daughters attend. His principal goal these days is to ensure that his older daughter, Ginny, gets into Yale, like generations of Sandersons before her. Ellie, who grew up as an Army brat, doesn’t care about such things.
Admission to Yale, we learn, used to be easy for Sandersons. They were “legacies.” Their parents wrote big checks every year. What William doesn’t grasp is that times have changed — drastically. The Ivy Leagues no longer care about legacies. In fact, they don’t even care about the generous contributions of alumni like William, which are small potatoes compared to the sums they take in from other sources. What they want now is minorities: applicants who are black or Latino (Asians don’t count as minorities: they’re “white-adjacent”) or, best of all, members of the “LGBTQ+ community.”
Once upon a time, a deep-pocketed father like William could have expected the fancy school his daughters attend to help them gain admission to an Ivy League college. But that’s changed, too. Padma Minali, Lenox’s new head of school (the old title, headmaster, has been deemed too redolent of the Confederacy), is presiding over an institution that she’s doing her best to transform radically even as her board members, out of moral indifference, an unwillingness to rock the boat, and a thoroughgoing ignorance about current developments in social activism, timidly endorse her innovations.
So it is that when Padma, who makes an annual salary of $1.6 million, has the opportunity to recruit into Lenox’s student body a “trans girl,” Easter Riddle — a process that “mostly involved throwing money at Easter’s parents” — she leaps at the chance to admit “the first trans student at any girls’ school in New York.” No, Easter isn’t academically up to snuff, but for Padma, that’s immaterial: “A new front had been opened, justice for the transgender. Padma knew how important it was to force the pace, to keep the reactionaries off-balance, adjusting to fights they’d already lost. How quickly trans rights had suffused the culture!”
And how quickly Padma, a diehard revolutionary, had adjusted to it! “Perhaps the cleverest thing the Movement did,” she reflects, “was allow the other side to think that their concessions would calm the waters, that the ‘crazy radicals’ would happily retire to quiet lives in picket fence America — just as soon the establishment agreed to that one last thing. But that was many things ago. There was no calming the water. Revolution was a permanent mindset, and new cultural exigencies were always waiting in the wings. Padma marveled at their foolishness, those rich men and women so desperate to signal their virtue.”
And why is Padma fomenting revolution at a Manhattan girls’ school, of all places? Because such schools are the radicals’ “top priority.” At places like Lenox, “change could be affected more rapidly than through the sclerotic public school system” — or anywhere else, for that matter. And teenage girls are especially vulnerable targets because they’re “pack animals and highly susceptible to social activation. This made them good little soldiers, and none more so than the white ones…. Padma sometimes marveled at how easy they were to manipulate. Instill guilt. Appeal to virtue. Activate. Repeat.”
Among Padma’s allies in the effort to make Lenox a radical beachhead is Shonda-Gomez Brown, a handsomely paid consultant who, at an “anti-racism” training session for parents, reminds them that the U.S. “was founded by genocide” and leads a “land acknowledgment” in honor of the Lenape tribe. Less well compensated is Dina Campbell, an award-winning reporter who, having been downsized from the New York Times because of the economic challenged posed to the traditional media by online journalism, makes a paltry salary that can’t really pay her Manhattan rent — and who’s therefore desperate for a hot story.
Soon enough she gets one. A one-off item about Easter’s admission to Lenox turns – thanks to a couple of innocent missteps by the Sandersons — into a series of blockbuster reports on alleged “transphobia” at the school. No one is spared: the very mention of “transphobia” in connection with one of its employees brings Bedrock Capital, a multibillion-dollar enterprise, to its knees, whimpering for mercy. Sylvia Haffred, a big-name, notoriously publicity-hungry lawyer (patently based on Gloria Allred), gets involved. Chaos ensues. But Padma is fine with it, because she subscribes to the leftist dogma that “chaos paved the way for social change.”
In the midst of the chaos, Ellis runs into Bob Ellison, a parent whose daughter has been banished from Lenox because of his lack of sensitivity about trans issues. He explains to her what she and her family are going through. As with the French and Iranian revolutions and the rise of the Third Reich, what places like Lenox are experiencing now, in these woke times, is a form of mass psychosis. “Evil,” he tells her, “doesn’t just happen. It’s allowed to happen, often by the seemingly well-intentioned people who might otherwise be in a position to stop it.”
There are, he adds, never more than “three groups at play.” The “true believers” are revolutionaries, skilled at “exerting control over institutions,” even though they’re usually small in numbers. The “sleepwalkers” are the majority, “caught up in their daily lives” and indifferent to the true believers’ machinations “because no one’s come for them yet.” And the “cowards” are “people of importance, people with money and power,” who could stop the true believers in their tracks but instead choose to work with them, because they’re “doing just fine, thank you.”
So it is that the “cowards” will always give in on the current issue — whether it be the exaltation of black thugs in the wake of George Floyd’s death or the unquestioning acceptance of transgender ideology. The problem is that “the goalposts always move. There will always be a ‘next’ movement, something else to march for.” And eventually the cowards and sleepwalkers will find themselves ground to bits under the revolution’s heel, just like those who thought that Robespierre or Hitler was a passing fancy.
No, The Sandersons Fail Manhattan isn’t a litany of lectures about the pernicious rise of woke ideology; I quote these passages at length because I think that Johnston has done a terrific job here of summing up the ways in which radicals have captured Western institutions with frighteningly little pushback. In fact, this book is a terrific read, a compulsive page-turner — consistently funny, surprisingly absorbing, and even, on occasion, touching.
At the outset, pegging this as a light comic novel, a fast and superficial read, one doesn’t expect to care about any of these people. But one ends up cheering for several of them — and wishing for some of the others to get their just desserts. I’ve already mentioned Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Bonfire of the Vanities, but at times, while eagerly following this narrative, one is reminded of the comic novels of Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge, among others.
Diary was, of course, a movie based on a novel, and Bonfire became a movie too; I’d suggest that Sandersons would be a rollicking good film — although, for obvious reasons, I can’t imagine any Hollywood studio touching it. I can only hope that Angel or the Daily Wire, or some other counterculture producer, will snap it up. They’d be happy they did.
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