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to think back to A Life Force sixteen years earlier to find a book that had challenged him artistically to this extent. The Name of the Game was a multigenerational epic covering more than a century’s time, and Eisner not only had to present a multitude of characters in proper period costumes, he’d also decided to include more prose, aside from the usual dialogue balloons, than he’d ever attempted in a book, and he had to strike a balance between what to show and what to tell. Schreiner, convinced that Eisner had a “strong book” on his hands, cajoled and prodded, drawing up lengthy lists of suggestions, all with the hope that Eisner wouldn’t grow frustrated and give up. The narrative and pacing of this book were better than in Eisner’s other ambitious, multigenerational book, Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, largely because of Eisner’s willingness to adopt Schreiner’s suggestions for expanding, cutting, or rewriting scenes. By fall 2000, The Name of the Game was nearing completion.

Since this is a story about how people marry (and stay married) for power and social position, Eisner opens the novel with lengthy accounts of how the Arnheim and Ober families acquired their wealth, the Arnheims through a successful corset company, the Obers through a dry goods business and, eventually, banking. Both families descended from German Jewish backgrounds, although, as Eisner carefully points out, the Arnheims were Ashkenazim, part of a wave of “crude and noisy” but “intelligent, resourceful and innovative” immigrants settling in East Coast seaport cities, and the Obers were part of a group of Jewish immigrants who headed west shortly after their arrival in America. As Eisner mentions in the book’s foreword, supposedly written by Abraham Kayn, whose son married into the Arnheim family, marriage was a game played out for social and financial security.

Pencil sketch for the cover of A Good Marriage, the working title of an early version of the graphic novel that would become The Name of the Game. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

There were bad marriages and there were good marriages. Marrying beneath oneself was bad. Marrying outside of your religion or race was worse. However, marrying a rich girl (if you were a boy) or marrying a successful man (if you were a girl) was good. After all, the family into which one married was most important.

The Arnheim and Ober families become connected when Conrad Arnheim marries Lilli Ober in a marriage arranged by their successful fathers. Conrad, loosely modeled after Ann Eisner’s father, is the ultimate product of privilege: spoiled as a child, uninterested in the family business if it means work, self-centered and unfaithful to his wife, and occasionally violent; over the course of the story, he rapes one of his two wives, beats both, kidnaps a daughter from her grandparents, neglects the business to its demise before starting up a stockbrokerage firm. In general, he is one of the least sympathetic characters Eisner ever created. Lilli stays with him because she enjoys the life of wealth and privilege, as does Conrad’s second wife, Eva, who finds him repulsive but refuses to grant him a divorce because she will not give up the life to which she’s become accustomed.

Ann Eisner was the model for Conrad’s daughter, Rosie, and like Ann Eisner, Rosie is openly rebellious, uninterested in the family money, and even less interested in the kind of person her parents would like her to marry. She is more taken by Aron, a poet and the novel’s Eisner character. Their courtship and wedding strongly resemble Ann and Will’s own—including a touching scene depicting how out of place Sam and Fannie Eisner were in the Weingarten circle—and Conrad even pulls Aron aside and offers him a job, as Ann’s father did with Will.

At this point, Eisner breaks away from autobiography. Rather than refuse his father-in-law’s offer, as Eisner did in real life, Aron takes him up on it. He discovers that he is very good at the job, and by the end of the novel, he has taken on many of Conrad’s characteristics.