The Graduate

There’s something disturbing about reading The Graduate.  I’ve seen the film and should have known what to expect, but it still made me uncomfortable.  There’s something a little too relatable about Benjamin Braddock.  The plot, in case you’re not familiar with it is very simple; man graduates, has affair with a friend of his parents, falls in love with her daughter, stalks daughter.  There’s also an incredibly uncomfortable rape lie bit, which isn’t as much of a plot point as it should be.

Charles Webb’s book is brilliantly written, and I think that’s part of the issue.  It might have been five years ago now, but I still remember how it felt to graduate.  To have achieved this thing that I had essentially worked my whole life for and to be set lose in to the world with all the proper adults I knew expecting me to have a plan.  I get why Benjamin Braddock has no idea what he’s meant to do.  So, when he goes off the rails post Mrs Robinson- affair, it’s worrying that I related to him.  In the latter half of the book he is quite simply mad.  He stalks the object of his affections and makes her life hell until she is worn down and guilt tripped into accepting him.  It’s horrible and misogynistic and made all the worse for how likeable and funny the man doing it all is to begin with.  It’s one of those books that, if it were told from the woman’s point of view, would be a horror story.

As I mentioned, the book starts with real humour.  Webb works to make Benjamin likeable.  There’s a great bit near the beginning in which Benjamin tells both his parents, separately, about his time travelling.  The story he tells his father involves prostitutes and drink and the version his mother hears is about pretty scenery.  It reminded me of my brother’s yearly drunken Christmas Eve chats with our dad, in which he forgets not only to filter what he’s saying, but also the fact that our parents do talk to one another.

So, the story moves on and as Benjamin stalks Elaine Robinson, it becomes darker.  There’s a real issue to the way women are treated in the book and not just by Benjamin.  I’m happy to write him off as a bit crazy (and, yes, there are social and cultural pressures of the time that cause this but he does not react to them in a way that’s in the bell curve of normal).  I have an issue with Mr Robinson too.  He’s not best pleased when he finds out that Benjamin and his wife have been at it, but he has a horrible attitude to his daughter.  There’s one line in particular that is incredibly creepy: after Benjamin tells him that he loves Elaine, he responds, “I’m sure you think you do, Ben, but after a few times in bed with [her] I feel quite sure you’d get over that as quickly.”  I might be taking that the wrong way, but it’s odd and it’s far too proprietary for my liking.

The Graduate is an incredibly easy read; it disappeared for me in an afternoon- albeit it one spent on a train.  It relies so heavily on dialogue, with a minimal description of everything else that I can see why it worked so well as a film.  At times, Webb’s book feels more like a screenplay than a novel (it’s probably at this point that I realise that I accidentally borrowed the screenplay from the library).  It’s so minimal and that’s what makes it brilliant.  It’s a book that demonstrates that brevity is the soul of wit and so does away with the outward flourishes. 

I’m now on to The Path to the Spider’s Nest by Italo Calvino.