The Arrangement (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Arrangement is a 1967 novel by Elia Kazan, narrated by a successful Greek-American advertising executive and magazine writer living in an affluent Los Angeles suburb who suffers a nervous breakdown due to the stress of the way in which he has lived his life – the "arrangement" of the title. In 1969 Kazan made it into a film. The Arrangement was a best-seller and garnered generally favorable reviews but it has been out of print since the 1980s.
Plot
The Arrangement is the first-person story of Evangelos Arness, aka Evans Arness, aka Eddie Anderson, a second-generation Greek-American World War II veteran, a son of an Anatolian rug merchant who went broke after Black Tuesday. He has come to use the name "Eddie Anderson" in his career as a self-loathing advertising executive and the name "Evans Arness" in his second career as a muck-raking magazine reporter, the career in which he ostensibly takes pride (Lincoln Steffens is his role model).
His personal life is just as duplicitous: to outsiders he is happily married but is in fact a compulsive adulterer with his wife Florence's "don't ask – don't tell" tacit approval, one aspect of the titular "arrangement". His serial adultery ends when he begins a liaison with a female assistant at his advertising firm, Gwen Hunt, whose independent mind fascinates him; he becomes obsessed with her, perhaps even feeling true love towards her. He fails to lock a drawer with their nude photographs, perhaps subsconsciously wanting to be found out; a prying maid discovers them and shows them to Florence (and before that, it turns out, to their adopted daughter, now a university student). Florence persuades him to leave Gwen and to re-invigorate their life with a self-improvement regimen; both seem perfectly content though somewhat dull but after several months he crashes his car in an apparent suicide attempt.
The rest of the novel deals with his inability to return to his old role as he attempts to find a new life in which he can be who he authentically is rather than who others desire him to be or whom he has sold people on his being. He has to return to New York City, where he left his parents and brother after college, to deal with his father's dying. After several false starts, in which the newly "authentic" Eddie is arrested for indecent exposure, burns down his parents' house, a symbol of his father's tyranny over the family, is later shot by Gwen's jealous suitor, and is subsequently committed to a mental hospital, Eddie settles down with Gwen in Connecticut as a liquor dealer and starts to write short stories.
