Mooney notes that a large part of the responsibility for this crisis rests on the shoulders of our government. She takes a clear and convincing look at the way other countries, with more federal support, successfully allow for shorter work weeks and subsidized health and child care. But while she acknowledges we deserve help, she also suggests some of us could use a "value shift" (particularly, perhaps, those of us who came into adulthood during the flush economy of the Internet boom and haven?t let go of that sense of everyday abundance). We may think we need things—a bigger home, a luxury vacation, skinny jeans—when in fact we are simply yearning for them. (Another book out this month, Pamela Paul's Parenting, Inc., builds on this argument—that today's marketing forces blur the boundary between want and need. In doing so, it offers the reader a distilled version of the parenting products and services that are truly useful, as opposed to those that prey on our fears.)
Here's a telling detail in the difference between our generation and our parents': When asked what made for a "good life" in a 1975 survey, 38 percent of the American public responded, "A lot of money," Mooney reports. When the same poll was taken in 1996, 63 percent chose that answer. When material wealth is held too tightly in focus—particularly in lives that, despite financial struggle, do offer basic comforts—we lose sight of the broader happiness of marriage, children, or simply being.
Which brings me back to The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel does, indeed, inherit a large part of the Touchett fortune. And yet, ironically, she still runs off with a man who marries her, as she eventually realizes, "like a vulgar adventurer," for her wealth. In the end, Ralph and Isabel both must face this ultimate lesson: Money did not hold her aloft from life's hardships; it ensnared her in them.
