Ordinarily I put together a set-up paragraph for each book that covers no more that 15 percent of the text. The idea is to introduce the main characters and indicate the trajectory of the story without giving away any important plot points. I couldn’t do that for Proud Flesh because the first quarter of the book focuses on wealthy San Francisco businessman Ferdinand Borel. He ships his infant daughter to Spain and then dies in the 1906 earthquake. But the daughter, Fernanda, is the book’s main character, and she doesn’t show up until the first third of the novel is over. So readers can safely begin the novel there, missing only a lively description of the quake from the view of Borel’s Chinese servant.
Proud Flesh by Lawrence Rising. Boni and Liveright (1924), 317 pp.
Here’s the set-up from p. 116, when Fernanda makes her first appearance. Now twenty-one, beautiful, rich and arrogant, she arrives to collect her inheritance from Gus McKee, conservator of her father’s estate. In tow is her suitor, Don Jaime Carlos del Val y Echiverra, who may be a Spanish nobleman. Fernanda is soon in the social whirl with the city’s wealthy elite, most of whom actually live in Hillsborough. She attends parties, goes to the opera, and amuses herself as only the rich can do. Then she meets brawny and ambitious Patrick O’Malley, once a plumber, now a prosperous businessman. All her breeding tells her that he’s scum, but her hormones don’t seem to care.
Rising apparently is trying to illustrate a social phenomenon that he sees in post-earthquake San Francisco: the rise of the skilled workers, who rebuilt the city at union wages, and the corresponding decline of the old families, whose founders became rich during the Gold Rush but whose current members have left town or lost their wealth. If that’s his idea, he would have done better to focus on the transition rather than providing before-and-after views. Maybe he merely wants to present a tribulations-of-the-rich romance of the sort usually associated with Gertrude Atherton. In that case his characters needed to be more sympathetic and less stereotypical. As it is, readers are unlikely to care much about Fernanda, Patrick, or anyone else in the novel. A modern audience for this book is difficult to imagine.