The Arrangement: A Novel

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This article is about the novel. For the movie, see The Arrangement (1969 film).

The Arrangement is a 1967 novel published by Stein and Day and written by Elia Kazan telling the story of a seemingly-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.

[edit] Plot summary

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 who is the son of an Anatolian rug merchant. 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 obstensibly takes pride (Lincoln Steffens is his role model). His personal life is as confused as his professional life; to outsiders he is apparently happily married but is in fact a serial, and compulsive, adulterer. His serial adultery ends when he begins a liaison with a female assistant at his advertising firm, Gwen Hunt; she soon becomes his exclusive mistress. He maintains his affair with her for months, secret from his wife Florence, until his adopted daughter is shown nude photographs of him with his mistress discovered by a prying maid and she tells the maid to show them to Florence, which seems to lead to precipitate the crisis leading to Arness' nervous breakdowns and attempted suicide. The rest of the novel concerns itself with the character's attempts to recover from this event and his inability to transition smoothly between the world of his mother, his dying father, and his brother which he had left behind in New York after college but into which he is reinjected due to his father's declining health and eventual terminal illness, and his current, L.A.-based, life, and his attempt 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. After several false starts, in which the newly "authentic" Eddie is arrested for indecent exposure, burns down his parents' former home, is shot by a jealous boyfriend, and is committed to a mental hospital, Eddie develops a quiet, contented life in Connecticut as a liquor dealer and settles down with Gwen.

[edit] Reaction

The novel was seen by some as being partially autobiographical; the main character, like Kazan, is a Greek-American and a political liberal who had once briefly been a member of the Communist Party USA before becoming disillusioned with it in the era prior to World War II. The Arness character is also familiar with many lower-tier figures in the Hollywood film industry, which is where Kazan had achieved his greatest fame. Kazan decreed that the work was entirely fiction; the character was considerably younger than Kazan, who had not been in combat in World War II.

However, critical reaction was largely favorable, although some critics expressed surprise that Kazan would launch a career as a novelist in his late 50s. (In reality, Kazan had written a previous novel about a Greek immigrant and his friend, an Armenian immigrant, called America, America and made it into a film.) John Barkham of Saturday Review stated "The theater's loss is literature's gain: Elia Kazan has written a striking novel." Life was so effusive in its review that an excerpt from it became the blurb on the dust jacket of a later printing. Honor Tracy, writing in The New Republic, stated, "It is impossible, in a short space, to give a work so rich, complex subtle its due..."