Inspiring Older Readers
The Graduate by Charles Webb
Benjamin Braddock is 21, he’s a brilliant student, he’s just graduated and he finds himself unable to come to terms with the seeming hollowness of the future that awaits him. He’s lost and adrift in the sea of existential doubt that lapped at the feet of so many young men and women who, in the early 1960s, found themselves contemplating the US suburban nightmare rather than the American Dream.
If this scenario sounds like it rings bells it may well be because you’re already familiar with the magnificent movie adaptation – directed by Mike Nichols and starring the very young Dustin Hoffman and the magnetic Anne Bancroft as the monstrous, Mrs Robinson. To be fair, the film is pretty faithful to Webb’s short novel even though I would have a few quibbles with the casting of Hoffman and Bancroft simply on the grounds of faithfulness to the novella.
So strong are the movie performances that you have to really battle not to let Hoffman and Bancroft’s interpretations overwhelm your own. It is seductively easy to allow their voices to inhabit and monopolise the dialogue. Webb himself was not much older than his central protagonist when he wrote this and the novel sometimes suffers from what seems to me to be a lack of authorial maturity – for example, he doesn’t really prevent Benjamin from becoming a humungous pain in the backside and Elaine, the Robinson’s daughter, is as wooden as they come. Why on Earth she would, even for a moment, tolerate Benjamin’s insufferable behaviour is completely beyond me.
But all of that is more than compensated for by the superb and chillingly unnerving creation of Mrs Robinson. Reviewing the book for The Guardian in 2009, Hanif Kureishi is astute in his assessment of her:
“..the triumph of the book, as of the film, is Mrs Robinson. If one essential quality of a good writer is the ability to make memorable characters who appear to transcend the work they appear in, then Mrs Robinson is one of the great monstrous creations of our time. Well-off, middle-aged, alcoholic, bitter, disillusioned, perverse and yet to be rescued by feminism, her situation is far worse than Benjamin's.
Nonetheless, she is the book's only potent character; a smooth, confident seductress, using Benjamin for sex while he is her more or less passive object. That, presumably, is how she likes them. Mrs Robinson, we know, will never consider her lover to be her equal. For her Benjamin is only of use if he is "just a kid", and she always addresses him – with enraging superiority – in the firm terms of a mother to a child.”
The Graduate is both a coming-of-age story and a withering attack on middle-class American mores that is made all the more compelling and melancholic by the evidently heart-felt and ultimately well-meaning ‘niceness’ of Benjamin’s concerned parents. Their desperate groping in the dark as they try to understand what has happened to their son is, it seems to me, one of the stand-out features of Webb’s story. The sense of sadness, even outrage, they feel over Benjamin’s accusation that they are only concerned about what’s happening to him because he is their ‘trophy son’ to be paraded in front of their horrible friends is palpably cutting and unfair – and rather typical of the insufferable young man he’s become.
Elaine’s passivity, the sense of parental concern and claustrophobia and the fact that Mr Robinson doesn’t simply punch Benjamin in the face when he discovers that he not only slept with his wife but now wants to marry his daughter, all adds to the atmosphere of artificial ‘decency’ that overlies the whole. All of the characters in the book feel as if they will only break free from the leash of suburban decency if someone is prepared to act with some sense of authenticity – by letting their real feelings out.
Although at the end of the book Benjamin’s dramatic snatching of Elaine from her imminent wedding to another man is dramatic and seems to fulfil that need for primal authenticity, that too is an illusion. In truth, Elaine and Benjamin do not really know each other at all and we are left to suspect that Elaine may end up being the collateral damage on whatever journey Benjamin is making.
Webb's exploration of the 'state of American youth' was, in many ways, the precursor of a debate about the longer term impact of the 1960s 'youthquake' on US and Western perceptions of what it means to 'find yourself' in a world that doesn't want you to make that discovery. It's sharp, it's bitter and at times it's very funny.
The Graduate is available as a Penguin Modern Classic and various hardback copies are also cheap on various internet platforms.
Terry Potter
January 2020