“Anyway, because of Beezy’s patrician vibe and the fact that our parents grew up in a very horses-and-beeswax part of an already pretty aristocratic area of the state, you would have thought they were marked for success. You would have thought they couldn’t have avoided it! But well into their youth each of the five really did their utmost to scupper their own chances in life in utterly idiosyncratic ways, which is the usual province of the middle-to-upper-middle class. We didn’t realize this at the time, of course. To us, our parents were doing just fine.” ChildrenParentsElitesAristocracyUpper ClassUnderminingPatricians Book:Idle Grounds Source: Idle Grounds