This book is supposed to be a murder mystery / courtroom drama but its actual value is different. The Perfect Marriage demonstrates the reason for class differences. That the author clearly doesn’t intend to do so makes the whole thing extremely funny.
Jeneva Rose’s characters are upper-middle-class professionals who behave like the participants of the Jerry Springer Show. They are violent, short-tempered, emotionally incontinent, comically promiscuous and painfully incompetent. That such people wouldn’t be able to succeed in a highly competitive professional sphere if they kept freaking out and clawing each other’s faces off in public doesn’t occur to the author.
Class resentment exists because lumpenproletariat thinks that the middle class is like them but with money. Social dysfunction exists because wealthy people think that the lumpen are like them but without money.
Take airports. We’ve all been frustrated at airports. But for some of us, starting a brawl at an airport is a physiological impossibility. Others, on the other hand, don’t have a problem with doing that. When we observe airport brawlers, do we suspect them of being lawyers and college professors? Of course not. We know that one of the many reasons why they got to be lawyers and professors is because they have the self-control to avoid freaking out in airports.
Jeneva Rose doesn’t know this. Or she does and simply panders to the public that is increasingly eager to refuse to notice how important self-discipline and self-control are.
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