The Way We Live Now is one of the finest of over forty novels that Anthony Trollope wrote in his long and productive career. What makes this novel truly great is Trollope's ability to involve the reader in a lengthy and complicated story. Few other writers have Trollope's skill in creating a world that seems as true as our own. From the beginning of the story, we take an interest in the activities of the major characters and find ourselves thinking about them and their problems even after we have finished reading for the day. Trollope's characters are as real as our own family and we think of them as relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Often, we would like to step into the novel and discuss a pressing problem with a character.
At the center of The Way We Live now is Augustus Melmotte, the financial wonder of the age who dupes investors with a Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernard Madoff proud. All the characters in the novel are in Melmotte's orbit. He is the most important character in the story. When he departs, page 638 in my edition of the novel, all that is left is to tie up loose ends, and there are many of them. Unfortunately, Trollope takes too long to do so, at least in my opinion. That is the only weakness in what otherwise is a great novel.
Few authors have ever described so accurately and well the lives of the ruling class in England. Readers of George Eliot's Middlemarch, or Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or perhaps Dickens' Bleak House and Little Dorrit will certainly want to include these great novelists in the discussion of true artists who create an unforgettable world of the imagination. Trollope not only belongs in this august company, in some ways he is superior to it. Readers of Middlemarch surely will wish to argue with me. Yet Trollope has few equals when it comes to dramatizing the ordinary events of everyday life. His description of each scene is so complete and accurate and his dialogue so real that for the time we are reading we lose any sense of distance as a reader and, as noted earlier, become involved as if we ourselves were a character in the story.
I had just finished reading five of Trollope's Palliser novels and decided to take a break from this series before starting The Duke's Children, the final Palliser novel. The Way We Live Now came higly recommended by both professional critics and Amazon reviewers. I add my voice to the chorus of Trollope admirers and enthusiastically recommend The Way We Live Now to all lovers of Victorian literature.
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In good faith, I ordered this book in the middle of October. I've just started reading it, and I noticed that many of the pages, particularly the last chapters, are illegible—the printing is smudged and misaligned. For some reason, the return option is unavailable for this defective item.
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GreenInk
An excellent read with strong contemporary parallels.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2021