If living a moral life is the loftiest of human aspirations, should we not take our standard of this life from those at the top of society, those we think of as the loftiest of human types, those to whom we look "up"? We seem to take much else from them -- house design, hairstyles, dress length, dietary norms, even the latest small talk -- so why not their ideas of good and bad?

Yet it strikes me that, in life as in fiction, morality rises from the bottom up, not from the top down. Good as that is, I think we can adopt that premise to writing and let a novel rest on the foundation of a good old formula.

1. Isolate your characters in some small, preferably exotic, but in any case easily controllable setting. Not too exotic; an offshore island perhaps, not too far from the main coast of Florida, is ideal. (Shades of "Cape Fear!")
   
   
2. Make them extremely wealthy. Who wants to read about the ennui of earning a living? Jobs just get in the way of romance. (Shades of the "The Great Gatsby") But extremely poor, even homeless, is also good. (Stella Dallas?) Just so no one has to get up and be on time at the office every day. (Dostoevsky knew this)
   
   
3. Make the mix improbable -- the wilder the better. Old husband, young wife, whites living amicably cheek by jowl with blacks. In "Tar Baby," by T. Morrison, a beautiful black model from Paris, her education paid for by the patron of the story, who is white, is living upstairs, though she is the niece of the below stairs couple who are the entire domestic staff.
   
   
4. Introduce into this status quo a wild card. In Morrison's book, he is a kind of black satyr, gorgeously muscled and dreadlocked, who has jumped ship and swum ashore, hiding for days undetected in the closets of the mansion. The old couple, the black butler and his wife the cook, sheathed in an impregnable dignity and a sense of the rightness of things that nothing, not even the glamorous young woman nor the imperious employer can alter, would be my guide to the moral life.
   
   

Much of their ethic trickles down, it is true, from above. But they have changed it utterly beyond recognition, for they have believed it and lived it. Their dignity and probity, if it rises, is the only hope of the upstairs.