Suzannah Lessard

this was a good read, and an interesting look into the personal life of one of America's most venerated and infamous architects. Also interesting because it was written by his great grand-daughter, who adds a lot of personal family history, which may or may not add to the story of Standford White the architect, but certainly adds interest and sexual intrigue to the family history. I found the beginning much more compelling than the end -- but where can you go after America's most prominent architect is shot in the face by the jealous husband of a sexual conquest?… (meer)

Suzannah Lessard believes there is a “deep coherence between our landscapes and the evolving human condition”. In The Absent Hand, she attempts to link the two, mostly by criticizing every kind of habitation available in the USA, from farmhouses to apartments, townhomes to McMansions, ante-bellum homes and even hotel rooms.

She relies mostly on her own experience, because she has moved house quite a bit. So there are evaluations and reminiscences of life in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, Georgetown and Rensselaerville, NY, an intersection between the Catskills and the Adirondacks.

She devotes the most legalistically detailed descriptions to the evil suburbs, with their edge cities and New Urbanist designs. The disneyfication of purpose-built towns comes in for justified criticism as well. There is a tour of the King of Prussia Mall, which Lessard does not like (same for all malls) any more after her tour than before. There is also a lot of history around the development of the mortgage and its associated redlining, which ensured segregation, and that cities would deteriorate and hollow out.

Oddly, there is no discussion of cookie-cutter Levittowns in the northeast. Nor does she delve into the simple truth that there are now well over 300 million Americans, all of whom want their own space. Things simply cannot be the pastoral way they were when the population was half a million. 300 million means more rules and regulations, housing speculation, zoning, planning, endless bickering and whole new developments where once there was a happy balance of nature. Our landscapes reflect our numbers as much as the human condition.

The greatest detail in the book is Lessard’s memory of ancillaries. Colors of walls, cleanliness, the blond desk in her hotel room, pastoral fields of various wildflowers, and old houses and mills in her village in upstate New York. Her impressions of the importance of landscaping on the human condition are far more vague, broad and never definitive.

She’s not big on change, and waxes nostalgic on everything from farm fields to a boy behind the counter at a long-disappeared deli in Maryland. Still, she ends by saying she hopes for imaginative alternatives going forward. She is not convincing in that.

The absent hand of the title appears to be the federal government, which does not direct development or define objectives. Lessard claims several times the USA is unique in the world in this way, but it’s the same next door in Canada, as well as in China, where all such decisions are local (much to the frustration of the central government). Greece doesn’t even keep a land registry, let alone nationwide planning or policy. I must have missed something, because the USA does not seem unique in the lack of national land management to me.

Lessard slips in and out of memoir to refer to novels or films, informing her notion of the importance of landscapes. I don’t think anyone doubts their importance and variety. What I doubt is that it is worth a book.

At best, The Absent Hand is a very personal memoir, beefed up with tours of cities and suburbs she visited - to beef it up. For example, she is very critical of Natchez as a living ante bellum museum. Overall, as a personal memoir it has some merit for her fans, but as a thought-provoking work, The Absent Hand fails.

David Wineberg… (meer)

June 25, 1905 Harry Thaw shot Stanford White in a nightclub on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden, which White, a talented (understatement) architect had designed among many many other buildings in the city of New York. Even now that story reverberates around, and people know what Evelyn Nesbit, the young woman at the eye of the storm, looked like as she was the ur-Gibson girl, as well they may sort of have the idea that White was a libertine. This disaster, for the White family, from which Susannah Lessard hails, lies at the core of the memoir which examines how a disastrous event in a family can echo down the generations - particularly when the strategy for coping with it consists of silence.

Lessard had been stricken for over a decade with severe writer's block until one of her 5 sisters called them together for a meeting to 'talk about something'. It was the revelation of that 'something' that ended the block and triggered the work of research and reflection that went into this book.

Along with his prodigious talent White had, to put it mildly, creepy and voracious sexual appetites, and in that time there was nothing to stop a wealthy and influential and charismatic man from having his way. He liked girls just emerging from puberty into womanhood. But he wasn't 'just' a predator, his victims tended to fall under his charms, and he was brilliant in his choices of girls whose situations were shabby genteel, desperate in other words, and he would literally drown their families in acts of generosity to pay for their silence. He lost interest quickly, but he was also warm-hearted so he tended to be loyal to some degree to the person later, if they were in need.

So. Lessard grew up at Box Hill, the White family compound out on Long Island. You may recognize her name from her many New Yorker pieces, in fact, and she is a very fine writer. Among many traits, her ability to observe and then reflect, creatively and deeply, on what she has observed is a particular strength. Some of the best writing is about her relationship with the piece of land that her family has lived on for so many generations - and as she is related to the Smiths who settled that area in the 1600's she has deep roots indeed. She describes how certain places on the property draw one and seem to exude a different power and essence, convincingly comparing the effect on her to the Australian 'dreamings'.

But amid the beauty and security lurked a monster - the secrets never fully explained, about White and the fact that the tendency to sexual predation by men and silence by the women, had not ended with Stanford, but continued. Not every man, certainly, but some. And no one did anything about it. Swirling at the core of the book is her own father's failing in this regard. Father of six girls, in one way or another, over the years he abused them, not often and probably not beyond a certain line (but bad enough, believe me). They never talked about it. The mother, like her mother and grandmother, 'didn't notice anything'. In fact Lessard realizes at some point that she never talks to her sisters about anything and none of them talk about their childhood until this 'meeting'.

No one likes to be exposed - and I am sure the White clan did not appreciate this book, although some may have - but I applaud it. The bamboozle of people turning a blind and even bizarrely indulgent eye to older gropers, and the notion that somehow young beautiful girls are 'asking for it'. And that, after being groped, raped etc the inability, often, for those victims to talk coherently about what happened to them, is often regarded as proof they are 'making it all up' although that is changing with more understanding about the symptoms of PTSD and how the brain manages trauma.

Nesbit, victimized, continued to blame herself - but she did make a decent life for herself in the end, sculpting and teaching sculpture in California and living a long and decent life. I was fascinated in fact by her journey and determination to survive.

There is a lot more about the history of the family I'll brush past - Stanford's son Lawrence married a member of the Chanler family, Laura, and she was a daughter of one of the famed 'Astor orphans' who grew up at Rokeby, in a kind of gothic Eight is Enough situation, gobs of money and no supervision, along the Hudson. Another wildly gifted but emotionally unstable lot - the Chanler story braided in with the White's adds another layer of mystery to Lessard's understanding of her origins. Her great grandmother, Daisy Chanler (Margaret Terry Chanler) while living in Rome, converted to Catholicism and there is a good deal about the effect this rather quirky and personalized form of Catholicism had on the family as well especially in setting them apart in their social milieu.

A complex book that ranges widely but remains focussed, I think, on Lessard's determination to make the point for all women, that silence about abuse of this kind only leads to more suffering, and that healing can only come through fearless examination and necessary airing of difficult sorrows. *****… (meer)