RICH MAN POOR MAN American saga by Irwin Shaw

This is one of my favourite American novels.  I must confess to not knowing much about American literature. I like some of the more serious works, such as the novels of F Scott Fitzgerald, but I can’t read Hemingway, or Faulkner.   I’ve struggled to appreciate other novels like Upton Sinclair or Theodore Dreiser, but I just find them too wordy and hard to “get into”.  My favourite American novels tend to be from the “second rate” type of literature, a good interesting story, like Gone with the Wind.
Irwin Shaw was a journalist and when he took to writing novels, he went for telling a good human interest story, rather than fine writing.  Rich Man Poor Man was televised in the 1970s and was his best known novel.  The TV version was immensely popular.

Like many American writers, he lived in Europe much of the time, and was a liberal who disliked the McCarthyite years in his native country.

The story begins in 1945 on the last day of World War Two.   It focusses on two brothers, Rudolph and Tom Jordache, from a German American working class family, in a small town in upstate New York.  Rudy, the elder, is intelligent and ambitious.  Tom is younger, an angry teenager who loves to fight and is always at odds with the world.  Rudy’s ambition is to go to college and make a fortune.  His brother has no ambitions.  Their sister, Gretchen, is beautiful, intelligent and artistic minded, but sensual.   Their parents are unhappily married and they only unite in love for their favourite child, Rudy.  Both mother and father want him to get on.  They ignore Gretchen and Tom.  She rebels by taking a rich lover, the town’s “wealthy WASP”, Teddy Boylan.   Although she has ambitions to go into the theater, her sexually passionate nature makes her fall into bed with many men, whereas Rudy maintains a strict control over himself and works his way through College and into a position of trust in a large business.   While Tom's life goes from bad to worse.  When his first real love affair ends badly, he becomes a sullen young man who earns his living with his fists as a boxer.  He gets into trouble constantly.

Rudy supports his mother, when his father commits suicide and his brother and sister leave town, and he manages to achieve his ambition of making a fortune in business.   In the TV version of the book, Rudy’s character was changed somewhat, making him more selfish and cold hearted than the Rudy of the book.  In the TV series, Rudy is seen as refusing to help someone he knows, who has fallen foul of the Communist Witch hunts in the 50s.  Generally until later in the series, he comes across as hard and completely self-interested, while Tom is gradually made more of a hero.   However Shaw’s original Rudy is (while ambitious and hard headed) an essentially decent man who takes responsibility for his family, makes a good living and does not refuse to help his college tutor who is being hounded for supposed communist leanings.

The novel covers the post war period, and outlines Rudy’s progression to a wealthy businessman and then a husband and father.  He retires from business and goes into local politics.   Tom gets mixed up with the mafia, during his boxing career and to escape them, becomes a merchant seaman.  Even then his violent past sometimes catches up with him. Eventually he becomes a calmer happier man, and settles abroad, in the Mediterranean with his son and his new English girlfriend.   Rudy’s marriage hits a bad patch and his wife’s drinking causes a tragic incident.  Tom manages to avert another disaster caused by Jean, when she has been drinking, but that leads him to a final fight which ends in tragedy.

Its hard to say why I like this story so much.  The characters are well drawn, and there is plenty of drama and human interest.  And the post war epoch, in America is interesting.  And unlike some writers, Shaw was unpretentious and simple in his writing.