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This arrived in the mail yesterday morning. We hadn’t ordered anything, so it was a nice surprise. (The design of the cardboard package would work for a clutch in kid leather. In fact we will use this carton as a clutch when we hang out with our friend who uses a ziploc bag or brown envelope with bubble wrap padding for his iPad.)

The package contained a paperback of The Privileges by Jonathan Dee. Ah. We had started reading The Privileges in December and loved it…until we got to page 139.

There was no page 139. Our copy was missing pages 139-170 (in printing, one signature). After we had gnashed our teeth, it occurred to us to contact the publisher and report the defective copy. We found the publisher’s website and sent a letter using their general email form. The very next day, a representative contacted us and asked for our delivery address. They would send us a replacement copy free of charge. (And we could keep our freak copy.)

So our reading of The Privileges has a happy ending.

The Privileges is about Adam and Cynthia Morey, a beautiful young couple who amass incredible wealth through a flexible attitude towards morals and ethics. We should hate them, but for some reason we don’t—in this New York morality (specifically, the lack of it) tale, true love justifies financial shenanigans. Then again, when the Morey children and relatives turn out to be screwed up, we’re not surprised. Elegant and exuberant, The Privileges is a novel about love, money, class, and what they really cost.

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First paragraph:

A wedding! The first of a generation; the bride and groom are just twenty- two, young to be married these days. Most of their friends flew in yesterday, and though they are in Pittsburgh, a city of half a million, they affect a good- natured snobbish disorientation, because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event, the magical disquieting novelty of it, to imagine that they are now in the middle of nowhere. They have all, of course, as children or teenagers, sat through the wedding of some uncle or cousin or in quite a few cases their own mother or father, so they know in that sense what to expect. But this is their first time as actual friends and contemporaries of the betrothed; and the strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel proudly unready. They are adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults. Last night’s rehearsal dinner ended with the overmatched restaurant manager threatening to call the police. The day to come shapes up as an unstable compound of camp and import. Nine hours before they’re due at the church, many of them are still sleeping, but already the thick old walls of the Pittsburgh Athletic Club seem to hum with a lordly overenthusiasm.