"Being Polite to Hitler," by Robb Forman Dew (Little, Brown, 304 pp.)
A widowed schoolteacher realizes she can't handle another day of taking care of other people in National Book Award-winning novelist Robb Forman Dew's generous, insightful new social comedy, “Being Polite to Hitler.”
The day Agnes Scofield decides she's had enough is in 1953, when none of the folks in Washburn, Ohio, have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Pools are closed due to the threat of polio, Freud is in, and bomb shelters are being installed in brand-new surburbs. This is Dew's third book featuring Agnes Scofield, but (once they've made a flow chart of Scofields, Claytors, and Butlers) newcomers won't regret visiting Washburn.
Agnes can't afford to retire – she can't even afford to heat the upper two floors of her home. If a chance to break free presented itself, could she separate her identity from the selfless one she spent decades perfecting?
By now, everyone from director Douglas Sirk to “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner has instructed us that the life of a 1950s housewife was a misery of pearl-bedecked emptiness the likes of which June Cleaver never dreamed. Dew, however, offers a more nuanced view of Midwestern, mid-century life – kind of a “Way We Lived Then.”
The title comes from Agnes's daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who explodes at a boor at a party who is self-righteously congratulating America for executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When her husband is embarrassed, Lavinia calls Washburn on the idea that manners means keeping quiet and not offending anyone. (Needless to say, this tactic is almost as alien to today's Americans as a Klingon tea ceremony.)
“You wouldn't want to be at a swanky dinner party somewhere.... And in the middle of the first course, say, you wouldn't dream of embarrassing Hitler by mentioning anything as indelicate as the concentration camps,” Lavinia says. “Don't bring up the Jews! Don't say the word homosexual! Don't plead for the Catholics or the Gypsies! So you just talk about the weather in the Rhineland. Or the quality of … the wonderful German beer! Or maybe the bratwurst … Good grief!”
But of course, as her humbled husband notes, this is a tried and true coping mechanism. “Everyone he knew – even Lavinia most of the time – held fast to propriety in the face of chaos, desperate etiquette in the face of despair and terror.” The trick, he thinks, is knowing when to stop – when, in fact, it's Hitler you're being polite to.
There are a few outside chapters covering the occasional day in the life of a rocket scientist and the woman who designed the Doomsday Clock, as well as one sneaky reference to the author, that distract more than they add.
But when it's trained on Agnes or the loose swirl of people related to her, “Being Polite to Hitler” does a wonderful job of revealing, as one character puts it, “the inevitable conclusion that the profound and the mundane are joined at the hip,” and “there's no such thing as an ordinary person anywhere in the world.”
