Rich Man, Poor Man (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Irwin Shaw |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Delacorte Press |
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Publication date
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September 1970 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 629 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 94537 |
| Followed by | Beggarman, Thief |
Rich Man, Poor Man is a 1969 novel by Irwin Shaw. It is the last of the novels of Shaw's middle period before he began to concentrate, in his last works such as Evening In Byzantium, Nightwork, Bread Upon The Waters, and Acceptable Losses, on the inevitability of impending death. The title is taken from the nursery rhyme "Tinker, Tailor". The novel was adapted into a 1976 miniseries.
The novel is a sprawling work, with over 600 pages, and covers many of the themes Shaw returns to again and again in all of his fiction – Americans living as expatriates in Europe, the McCarthy era, children trying to break away from the kind of life lived by their parents, social and political issues of capitalism, the pain of relationships. On the very first page Shaw subtly telegraphs the sad ending of the story, in the same way that the first scene of a film will often quote the last scene.
Originally published as a short story in Playboy Magazine, it became an international bestseller when published as a novel. The bulk of the novel concerns the three children of German Americans Mary Pease and Axel Jordache – the eldest, Gretchen, the middle child, Rudolph, and the youngest, Thomas. It chronicles their experiences from the end of World War II until the late 1960s.
In the early parts of the novel Shaw goes to great lengths to make the point about "Jordache blood" – violent, bitter, resentful. One of the ways he does this is by meticulously describing the hate-filled marriage of the parents, Mary and Axel. The novel is told in the third person omniscient point of view but never wholly objectively, often through the lens of the consciousness of one of the five family members. When told through the POV of either Mary or Axel the view of humanity, and of the Jordache family, is relentlessly bleak and pessimistic.
The tripwire that sets all of the ensuing plot action in motion occurs when Gretchen Jordache begins an affair with the president of the company she works for, Teddy Boylan, a man much older than herself. Eventually her brothers Rudolph and Thomas also become involved with Boylan, in different ways, and it is his influence upon all three that first springs each of them into the world beyond the small upstate New York town where their parents scrape by with their bakery. Boylan constitutes their first true encounters with an adult beyond their parents.
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