The Arrangement (novel)

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The Arrangement is a 1967 novel by

Plot

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, a son of an

His personal life is just as duplicitous: to outsiders he is happily married but is in fact a compulsive adulterer with his wife Florence's "don't ask – don't tell" tacit approval, one aspect of the titular "arrangement". His serial adultery ends when he begins a liaison with a female assistant at his advertising firm, Gwen Hunt, whose independent mind fascinates him; he becomes obsessed with her, perhaps even feeling true love towards her. He fails to lock a drawer with their nude photographs, perhaps subsconsciously wanting to be found out; a prying maid discovers them and shows them to Florence (and before that, it turns out, to their adopted daughter, now a university student). Florence persuades him to leave Gwen and to re-invigorate their life with a self-improvement regimen; both seem perfectly content though somewhat dull but after several months he crashes his car in an apparent suicide attempt.

The rest of the novel deals with his inability to return to his old role as he attempts 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. He has to return to New York City, where he left his parents and brother after college, to deal with his father's dying. After several false starts, in which the newly "authentic" Eddie is arrested for

The Arrangement entered The New York Times Best Seller list on the week of February 26, 1967 and became #1 for the week of March 26, the first of 14 straight weeks through the week of May 28. The novel returned to the #1 spot on the weeks of June 18 and July 2 before beginning an 11-week run at the top from the week of July 16 through September 24. The Arrangement dropped out of the New York Times Top 10 after the week of December 10 after spending 42 weeks on the list.^[1]

Critical reaction

The novel was seen by some^[who?] as being partially autobiographical; the narrator, like Kazan, is a Greek-American and a political liberal who had briefly been a member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s before becoming disillusioned with it. Arness 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;^{[citation needed]} the character was some 15 years younger than Kazan, who had not fought in World War II.

Critical reaction was largely favorable, although some critics^[