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It says something about a writer's talent and his ability to transmit the vagaries of human nature when Trees can so readily capture my interest in spite of the landscape of his narrative. I kept waiting for some character in Club Rules- any character- to do something noble, to be something other than self-pitying, self-obsessed or self-serving. Didn't happen. Nonetheless, Trees has created the perfect novel of impermanence. Set in a small pond stocked with big fish in an exclusive country club enclave in the Midwest, either everyone has an angle or is too rich to care, although most are social climbers and hangers-on in search of opportunity. The iconic Anne and Preston Baird Winthrop are the king and queen of the set, the faux royalty that others envy and circle around, watching, emulating. But when Anne's suspicion of marital infidelity escalates to open confrontation and an emotional stalemate, a rift is opened in the marriage that has tragic consequences.
Anne's dilemma- and Preston's- might be sympathetic were they not so cushioned in the values of their lifestyle and uniquely unable to empathize or communicate, one crack in the surface of the relationship enough to send the regal Anne floundering, her husband barely engaged in the devastation of his marriage. The supporting characters are equally banal, some overtly vicious, the store owner who aspires to be Anne's closest confidant in order to gain social cache, the boorish Norman Bond who yearns to belong where he is merely the brunt of jokes, his newly-religious wife, the meticulously devious bank employee on the scent of a scandal and the spoiled, malicious boy aptly named Piggy after a character in The Lord of the Flies.
These characters come together in the various layers of their social strata, cling for a moment and then drift away. Golf remains a metaphor for lifestyle, the perfect game vs. the amateur, the cream always rising to the top, where it predictably curdles. Ambitions are realized, or shattered, while treading the pristine green of the country club golf course, a steady stream of personalities reflecting the shallow nature of modern life in the age of consumerism. This tale of betrayal, tragedy and complacence is for those with a taste for reality laced with cynicism and opportunism, truly a Nietzschean Garden of Eden. Luan Gaines/2010.
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