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The Beneficiary
- Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father
- Narrated by: Janny Scott
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
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The Beneficiary
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Publisher's Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay...like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh." (The New Yorker)
A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance - financial, cultural, genetic - conspired in one person's self-destruction.
Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the 800-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on - but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime.
In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets.
Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex.
Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, 100 years hence?
What the critics say
"Flair is in the DNA. As attentive to outré details as to psychological turmoil, Scott makes the most of the suspense built into her story. Her father, having promised Scott in her 20s that she would inherit his many diaries, made her hunt long and hard for them after his death in 2005. The bequest was brilliant: A man in unhappy thrall to a place lured his daughter further and further in - and she escaped with priceless insight into its, and his, hidden depths." (The Atlantic)
"Fascinating for the painful personal legacies it uncovers. At the same time, it is also compelling for the parallels it draws between an earlier age of inequality and our own and the questions it raises about how contemporary stories of new-rich families 'will play out, one hundred years hence.'" (Kirkus Reviews)
"Compulsively readable...a rare combination of wit, empathy, candor, and shrewd sleuthing, [The Beneficiary] is a multigenerational story that encompasses the Gilded Age, great wealth and two World Wars, suicide and secret affairs, hidden diaries and the life-long impact of alcohol. The world of wealth and privilege Scott recreates so vividly may be hard for the rest of us to imagine, but everyone will recognize the flawed but fascinating human beings at its heart. Not to be missed.” (Geoffrey C. Ward, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-finalist A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, 1905-1928)