Secular Sacraments
In the traditional marriage plot, a sympathetic protagonist falls into some potentially catastrophic misjudgment of character before undergoing a moral and sentimental education that culminates in her happy union with a virtuous spouse. Some of the best contemporary fiction is tempted by this basic story yet is charily self-aware about repeating what has already been done and overdone. Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) comes to mind, but Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011) is probably the prime example: its knowing title telegraphs its intention both to capitalize on, and subvert, a time-tested narrative strategy.
At first glance, to say that A. Natasha Joukovsky’s sparkling, multifaceted debut novel, The Portrait of a Mirror (2021), is also a variation on the Jane Austen theme would seem grossly inaccurate. After all, by the time we are introduced to her cast of characters, the traditional process of finding a mate has already run its course. And while amorous complications soon arise, on the whole it could be said that they stress-test existing bonds rather than furthering the creation of entirely new ones. And yet weddings do play a major role in The Portrait of a Mirror, both as fodder for the New York Times Sunday Styles section that the characters by turns grace and scrutinize, and as major life events that defy their expectations. Bypassing the quadrille of courtship, Joukovsky repurposes the marriage plot as a witty, unsparing dissection of human vanity and a quasi-sociological look at the mores of America’s de facto aristocracy.
Set in 2015, the novel focuses on two thirtyish couples from the prep-school-educated East Coast elite. They’re the sort of people who repair to vacation homes on Nantucket for the weekend, get married at country clubs located at the end of winding, mile-long driveways, and understand “the tremendous appeal of very-exact cheese.” There’s Wes, a boyishly handsome tech start-up founder from a wealthy family; his almost equally charming and successful wife, Diana, a consultant at a huge international firm; Dale, an aspiring novelist who works for the same firm and who, like Diana, got into consulting to “preserve optionality”; and his fiancée, Vivien, an exceptionally beautiful and stylish museum curator.
All four are highly intelligent and self-reflective, physically alluring, and by most standards immensely wealthy. They are also restless and dissatisfied—not in some unusually wretched, Dostoevskyan way, but burdened with the sort of domesticated yet inexpungible misery that could afflict any of us, and that having a trust fund might only accentuate. They hope to find happiness in a monogamous relationship, yet their habitual way of desiring works against them. Diana, who may be more restless and dissatisfied than the others, explains to Dale why she was first attracted to her husband:
Wes just had this thing about him, the not-actually-a-thing thing that people always seem to think they’re going to achieve by buying certain shit and doing certain things, but never seem to be able to. You know—you know the special effect some people give off that seems materially imitable but isn’t? He had that. You know what I mean?
—I think the term you’re looking for is self-actualization, he offered.
—Sure, fine, whatever you want to call it—self-actualization, self-assurance, ease, nonchalance, thing—the point is, I wanted it too. Violently.
In Diana’s explanation of her motivation to marry is a shrewd insight into consumer culture. As she notes in passing, many of us hope to get an elusive quality that she calls “thing” by buying what charismatic people have or what we think they’d have. On Diana’s reading, consumerism isn’t simply materialist—it’s an attempt to reach a higher level of being.
Much of the novel can be read as expanding on this idea that we imitate the external behaviors and lifestyle of those we envy in hopes of becoming self-actualized. In a crucial early section, for instance, a young management consultant describes a Super Bowl credit-card ad in which a pantheon of Greek divinities argue about who’s going to pick up the tab at dinner. “Now you, too, can pay with MercuryCard,” the ad concludes, “it’s available on Earth wherever credit cards are accepted. Apply today. Pay with MercuryCard. Dramatic pause. Pay like a god.” The slogan recalls what René Girard in a late-career interview described as the liturgical essence of advertising and consumption:
Advertising doesn’t try to demonstrate to you that the object it is selling is the best from an objective point of view. They’re always trying to prove to you that this object is desired and possessed by the people you would like to be. Therefore, Coca-Cola is drunk on a very beautiful beach, in the marvelous sun, with a bunch of suntanned people who are always between the ages of 16 and 22, who are everything you would like to be, who obviously wear very few clothes, because they have the most shapely bodies. Everything you might envy.
There is something sacramental about this. Religion is always mixed up in these things. If you consume Coca-Cola, maybe if you consume a lot of it, you will become a little bit like these people you would like to be. It’s a kind of Eucharist that will turn you into the person you really admire.
Tongue-in-cheek though it may be, the credit card ad in The Portrait of a Mirror works the same way, first subliminally arousing the viewer’s envy and then offering an object able to mediate between earth and Olympus: thanks to MercuryCard, the quotidian act of purchasing can become a way of communing with immortals. Significantly, the credit card is not just any object. It sums up all the others, standing in recursively for the system as a whole, since it is not just an object you want, but an object you want because you can use it to buy the objects you want. If Coke is the sacramental wine of consumer culture, the wafer-thin card is like the host.
The consumer sacrament is supposed to turn you into someone uniquely glamorous, a pagan demi-god who possesses “thing.” In his essay Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard (whom Joukovsky hadn’t read when she wrote her novel) calls this “deviated transcendence,” a misdirected search for God in the merely human neighbor. Just about everybody in Joukovsky’s novel is trying to get “thing,” and the main characters desire and admire it in each other. Dale tells Diana that she has it. Diana would like to agree, but she can be sure he is right only where her New York Times wedding announcement alter ego is concerned. “It didn’t even seem like me in there,” she says of the factually true but deceptively glossy profile. “Like, I was actively jealous of the girl in the article—jealous of myself!” As for Wes, he is entranced by Vivien, who is so perfect and poised that she “almost failed to pass the Turing test.” And so on.
From the inside, however, nobody actually feels like a god, not even Wes, who in wealth, education, and natural endowments represents the acme of privilege. In fact he is himself the dupe of the idea that self-actualization is “materially imitable”: his $2.3 million apartment is a showpiece “with wowing dinner party potential but radically insufficient closet space.” The purchase “reflected not who Wes was, but who he wanted to be, who he wanted his friends to think he was.” It is, in other words, a sacramental attempt to commune with the gods, to put on a shiny new identity. And it’s one more link in a chain of futility in which almost everyone thinks others have “thing” at the same time as they strive to persuade others they have it.
The novel asks whether marriage can extricate us from this liturgy of the self. Diana implies that it could, or at least that she once thought it could. In dismissing the idea that “thing” is materially imitable, she implicitly distinguishes the sacrament of marriage, which promises to unite you directly with the person who has “thing,” from the sacrament of consumption, in which you acquire a material object—a credit card, a can of Coke, an apartment—that is supposed to plug you into that person’s je ne sais quoi. But marriage, too, fails to fulfill: “I’m not sure whether it happened before or after the wedding, it was such a sneaky slip—at some point I realized that our self-actualized selves, that special thing that everyone else now saw in both of us—not only had I never had it, not really—I no longer saw it in Wes, either.”
Even those characters who do not share Diana’s unreasonable hopes—“I want my life to be packed with . . . incessant intensity,” she exclaims—must face what she and Dale call the problem of “postmerger integration”—the moment when the window of “optionality” has closed, the thing craved has become too familiar to retain its pseudo-sacramental charge, and what remains is an impractical apartment or a spouse who was tantalizing because seemingly unattainable. That Diana uses business jargon, even jokingly, to talk about love and marriage hints at how, for her and her peers, corporate finance has become the dominant metaphor for making sense of life’s recurrent patterns. But Joukovsky hints that this metaphor has real descriptive power not because love relationships are governed by the laws of economic rationality, but because financial transactions themselves obey the same underlying rules of mimetic desire that amorous attraction does.
Marriage cannot satisfy the characters’ longing because for them the sacrament’s meaning has shifted away from mutual self-giving and binding, long-term religious commitment. This is underscored when, about halfway through the novel, the Episcopal priest who was slated to marry Dale and Vivien departs on a humanitarian mission instead. “I know your thoughts and prayers, like mine, rest first and foremost with the thousands of dead and millions left homeless in Nepal,” he writes by way of excuse. A friend with an online credential ends up officiating at the wedding, which, from the music to the readings to the staged photos, is shaped by the same curatorial mentality governing Diana’s Instagram posts and Vivien’s art exhibition at the Met. As for the wedding announcement in The New York Times, once a pendant to the ceremony itself, it has now become the event’s not-so-secret raison d’être.
In other words, even for Dale, who has a real capacity for empathetic love, marriage has become another in a series of secular sacraments, more culturally and personally important than but in the same fundamental class as Wes’s loft in the Flatiron district or a really good breakfast sandwich that the narrator refers to as a “holy sacrament.” As Timothy O’Malley writes in Church Life Journal, once people have been “formed to perceive human happiness as mediated through an endless process of acquisition […] the wedding itself becomes the product par excellence.” Joukovsky is acutely aware of this. It is significant that she has given her soon-to-be-married male character the last name McBride. It is a name that simultaneously evokes fast food and the wedding industry, and it is the occasion for one of the novel’s cruelest and funniest jokes, which explodes near the conclusion like a time bomb.
Readers who come to this novel hoping for some of the same pleasures to be found in Pride and Prejudice will be gratified to encounter brilliant and often hilarious reconstructions of human motive delivered in prose of surpassing elegance. What these same readers will not find is the familiar arc from single status to perfect match, from blindness to self-knowledge, that we find in Austen’s novels. While this may prevent Joukovsky’s book from becoming as popular as it might be if it remained true to the rom-com formula, it is, I believe, an integral part of her design. Her novel thinks through a profound crisis in economic liberalism, which coincides not just with the inability of the secular sacraments to provide lasting satisfaction—something they have never really been capable of doing—but also with the characters’ almost unbearable awareness that this is the case, and their simultaneous helplessness to follow a different path. To capture this state of lucid paralysis, she pushes her satire relentlessly past the point at which most authors cave to our expectations about how stories like this one are supposed to work. Like the pool into which Narcissus stares on the cover of Joukovsky’s novel, The Portrait of a Mirror conceals somber depths beneath its glassy surface.
Trevor Cribben Merrill is a husband, father, and writer. He is the author of a novel, “Minor Indignities,” and a forthcoming essay, “The Situation of the Catholic Novelist” (Wiseblood Books, October 2021).