The Noise of the World

The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

Roger Barton, a young idealistic lawyer at the San Francisco firm of Lowell & Morrison, refuses to help railroad Irish homeowners on Telegraph Hill out of their land for the Morgan Gravel Company and quits on the spot, defying senior partner John Lowell. Anne Mitchell, the firm's stenographer, overhears the confrontation, is sickened by Lowell's cynicism, and resigns the same day, though it costs her the best job of her working life. Anne goes home to her cramped flat and her family: her cheerful but muddled mother Hilda, her bitter, penny-pinching father James, a Coast Electric Company clerk who gambles away his pay and rails against unions and radicalism, and her practical, independent nurse sister Belle, who teases Anne about Roger and predicts an engagement. Feeling guilty for never having gotten to know Anne better, Roger spends days finding her a new position with a publishing firm, then travels to Quincy, where Anne is vacationing with her cousins Barbara and Janet Saunders. Walking to an old Indian graveyard on the dunes, he confesses his love; Anne accepts. They keep the engagement secret for weeks, reluctant to face James's disapproval of a fiancé without a job. When James mocks professional men who quit their positions for principle, Anne blurts out her engagement, and James forbids Roger from the house. Anne and Roger elope at a lunch hour, getting their license and marrying before a judge with only a stenographer and janitor as witnesses. Roger accepts a position as private secretary to Hilary Wainwright, a wealthy shipowner and philanthropist, and the couple settles into a small hilltop cottage above the bay. Their honeymoon in the mountains is idyllic, but back in the city Roger grows increasingly disillusioned with Wainwright, whom he comes to see as spiritually smug and insincere despite his talk of "the responsibilities of wealth." Roger's doubts sharpen after he is sent to investigate the case of Angelo Sabatini, a Sicilian fisherman jailed for arson and attempted murder after protesting a fish company's practice of dumping catches to keep prices high; Roger comes away convinced Sabatini is a victim of the system rather than a criminal. Tension also surfaces at a family Christmas dinner, where Roger clashes with Belle's suitor, the smug Dr. Stetson, over class, heredity, and the supposed mental inferiority of the poor, embarrassing Anne. On Christmas Day, Roger reluctantly helps deliver a charity Christmas tree to the children of Wainwright's striking stevedores, canvassing their squalid tenements and coming away ashamed of the gesture's hollowness. Anne, meanwhile, discovers she is pregnant and dreams of a son to be named Roger Mitchell Barton, though she is quietly hurt when Roger's first reaction to the news is fear rather than joy. As the longshoremen's strike drags on, Wainwright convenes an ill-fated meeting meant to unite labor and capital over sandwiches; it is dominated by the fierce labor leader Tom "Black" O'Connell, who denounces strikebreaking and prophesies the coming of a new social order, and by Katya Orloff, a hardened Russian revolutionary. The meeting collapses into open hostility, and soon afterward Roger resigns from Wainwright's service. Though tempted to return to corporate law through an old college friend, Walter Marsh, Roger instead goes to work for Tom O'Connell's radical labor organization at a fraction of his former salary, over Anne's unspoken money worries. Anne tries to share Roger's new life, meeting Katya and the flirtatious young Merle, who lives openly with the much older O'Connell, and attending protest meetings, but she cannot enter into the crowds' raw hatred and mass emotion the way Roger does; where he is exhilarated by O'Connell's fiery rhetoric, comparing him to Christ driving the money-changers from the temple, Anne is chilled and repelled by the mob's baying anger. A quiet, widening gulf opens between husband and wife: Roger increasingly absorbed in revolutionary fervor, Anne increasingly guarded, sewing baby clothes, managing a shrinking budget, and privately withholding full assent from a cause she cannot feel as he does. The narrative breaks off with this rift unresolved, as Anne walks home from a mass meeting still unable to share the throbbing enthusiasm that carries Roger.

By Adriana Spadoni · First published 2016 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Social Realism, Social Novel · 34 chapters · 110,615 words

First lines

"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"

"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue."

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literary fiction · contemporary fiction · Italian literature · psychological drama · family relationships · identity · memory · grief · loss · love · human relationships · social change

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