The Swans of Fifth Avenue

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Chapter 19-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

People as Commodities

The world of the swans turns people into commodities, where each person has a value attached to their name. Truman participates in this commodification in a more direct way; he claims he “used” the swans for “material.” The swans, in turn, treat Truman as a commodity—for a time, at least, he performed a specific purpose. “Truman leapt into their midst,” they reflect, “and suddenly the gossip was more delicious, the amusements more diverse” (384). Other men, too, become commodities. Slim frequently brings up Ernest Hemingway because he has value for her. Pamela takes Slim’s husband because Leland has value for her. Typically, women are the objects, yet the story subverts gender norms and turns almost everyone into commodities.

Babe stands apart. She doesn’t want to be a commodity, complaining to Truman, “I’ll only be remembered for the way I look, the way I dress” (409). Babe thinks it’s bad to be an object—it signals superficiality. Truman counters her logic. Beauty is as meaningful as an artwork or poem. Babe is an “artist,” and the “product is herself” (490). To become a product, an object, or a commodity isn’t automatically inimical. A person can symbolize a commodity and have the depth of a painting or piece of literature.

Gossip as Bonding

Where people are commodities, stories are currency. Gossip brings Truman and the swans together; trading stories about other people cements friendships. Indeed, Truman even asks Babe early on, “[H]ow can we be friends if we don’t gossip together?” (46). Even though Babe does not generally like to speak negatively about others—a trait that sets her apart from the others—she willingly enters into the broader economy of storytelling, where her subject is most often herself and her fears. With friends like Slim, Truman participates in more conventional, and sometimes mean-spirited gossip. And, in the scenes of luncheons at Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque, gossip becomes a means for creating group solidarity, often in ways that subvert social niceties.

Emptiness

Images of emptiness pervade the novel. Truman fails to find fulfillment in literary and social achievement, eventually trading in the hard work of writing for an easier, if more devastating, kind of infamy. Even after the Black and White Ball, Truman’s satisfaction is fleeting: “And it left him, just like that. The good feeling, the triumph, the accomplishment. [….] He felt empty, deflated, defeated. Alone” (363). Here, Truman’s main foil is Bill Paley, a man characterized by hunger both abstract and concrete, the media mogul who can’t stop eating, the man with the perfect wife whose “roving eye” sweeps all over Manhattan.

The pervasive sense of emptiness also extends to the character’s identities. The price of flexibility is instability, and Babe in particular worries that without her external appearance, she has nothing to offer. At various points in the text, several of the swans—Gloria, Slim, Pamela, and C.Z.—reflect on their pasts and find themselves wondering why they worked so hard to marry terrible men or gain entry into a society characterized by artifice. As nothing seems to counteract emptiness in the novel, emptiness becomes a fact of life that people must live with.

A profound structural emptiness also exists at the center of the novel itself. For all the drama it causes, very little of the content of “La Côte Basque 1965” is explicitly represented in The Swans. As much as it motivates the central actions and functions as the main crisis, the story itself is largely absent, relegated to the pages of the November 1975 issue of Esquire. Without the original to compare it to, there is no way to know for sure what Truman has done, at least not without leaving the confines of Benjamin’s novel.