The Captive Reader

There are not a lot of books I find worth staying up for on a weeknight.  Sleep is a wonderful thing and I take it seriously.  But last night I foolishly started reading just before (what should have been) my bedtime and ending up reading until almost midnight, caught up in the joyfully comic fantasy of Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon.

Adapted many, many times for the stage and screen, this tale from 1903 will already be familiar to many of you.  When his grandfather dies and leaves him a million dollars on his twenty-fifth birthday, Monty Brewster knows his life will change.  No longer does he need to work for a salary – good though he was at his work – or leave anxious tailors and tradespeople waiting for bills to be settled.  No, he can live as he likes and begin to help the people he loves live a little better too.  And he can pursue the girl he loves, knowing he has fortune enough to give her a life of luxury and ease.  Yes, the future is bright.  But only days after his first inheritance Monty learns of another: an eccentric uncle has left him seven million dollars – but only if Monty is penniless by his twenty-sixth birthday.  And penniless with conditions – the money must not be thrown away in excessive gestures of charity or idiocy – it must be spent wisely and reasonably and he may tell no one about the second inheritance.  With only a year to do it, Monty sets methodically to work.

I found the entire thing delightful.  Monty is, as we are told at the beginning, entirely admirable.  He has “a decent respect for himself and no great aversion to work”, the ability to stay calm in a crisis, to mix with all sorts of people, and to view things in perspective and with humour.  He is warm and friendly and trusting, yet with a solid business sense and no nonsense about him.  He is, in fact, a rather perfect hero and I loved reading about his successes in carefully spending his fortune – and his failures when his attempts to invest poorly or gamble away bits of his fortune backfire and find him with more rather than less riches.  It is no small thing to spend a great fortune but he sets about it methodically and sensibly, enjoying himself along the way.

Enjoying themselves far less are his friends and loved ones.  At first delighted by Monty’s well-deserved wealth, they are pained to see him frittering it away and constantly on the look out for ways to curb his spending and save him from himself.  The first flush of spending – lavishly decorating a new apartment, throwing extravagant dinner parties – was fun for everyone but as the year goes on and Monty’s excesses grow more and more extreme both his friends and society at large can’t help but lament his extravagance and judge him harshly for it.  And when you are being judged extravagant by New Yorkers at the turn of the century, in the most gilded city of the gilded age, you really must be an extreme case.

I think McCutcheon must have had fun dreaming up all the ways to spend a million – and carefully accounting for them in the ledger Monty keeps.  Silly parties can only help so much.  It’s when he hits on the idea of taking a party of friends to Europe that the money really starts disappearing.  First with the hire of a yacht.  Yachts will always be a wonderful way to spend money very quickly and get very little return.  True then, true now, true always.  And once in Europe Monty is wildly successful at spending.  He buys cars, hires a villa, rents out hotels, and hires an opera company and opera house for not just one night but two.  But the joyful spending of the early days in gone and as his birthday draws near it becomes a chore to rid himself of all his funds, made painful by the taunts of society and the disapproval of his friends.

There is, of course, a romance, though not the one Monty himself dreamed of when the year began.  It is obvious from her first introduction who his real love interest will be – a girl who knows him well, who can tease and speak freely with him – and it’s satisfying to watch them both realise their true feelings over the course of the year.  A little less satisfying when the girl is abducted off the yacht by an Arab sheik in the middle of the night and a daring rescue is then enacted but, oh well, McCutcheon was clearly getting bored with all the accounting Monty was doing and felt the urge to liven things up.

It’s all a bit of whimsy but whimsy is wonderful.  The second half is weaker than the first but it matters not.  It’s a quick book to read and the overall effect is so fun and sprightly that the odd weakness can be overlooked.  Definitely a book worth staying up late with.