Wallace Shawn, his father, and his grandfather could be the subject of a
\n trilogy of novels, telling the story of America from the thrusting energy
\n of the self-made man in the first generation to the absorption into the East
\n Coast establishment in the next and finally to the rage, disgust, and disillusionment
\n of the third. His grandfather, Benjamin Chon, known as Jackknife Ben, was
\n an embodiment of the immigrant drive for material success. The child of Eastern
\n European Jewish immigrants, he set up as a street peddler, sold knives and
\n later jewelry in the Chicago stockyards, and made a small fortune. His children
\n grew up in a house with servants and a billiard room, and were triumphantly
\n assimilated into the American upper middle class. His son William, his surname
\n safely Anglicized, became, as the revered, long-serving, and famously fastidious
\n editor of The New Yorker<\/I>, one of the presiding figures of the postwar
\n liberal literary establishment. And then along comes his<\/I> son Wallace,
\n haunted by the conviction that to be born into American abundance is to have
\n a soul marked with original sin. Guilt, not gratitude, is the keynote of Wallace
\n Shawn's reflections on the luxury of his childhood. In his opening monologue
\n in Louis Malle's film My Dinner with Andr\u00e9<\/I>, in which he plays himself
\n in a long conversation with the director Andr\u00e9 Gregory, Shawn recalls his
\n privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he was born in 1943:<\/p>\n