Procreational Shenanigans

The Heirs     Susan Rieger     (2017)

Five sons are the beneficiaries of the estate of Rupert Falkes, who dies in the first chapter of The Heirs. Or maybe there are seven sons, since it comes to light after Rupert’s death that he may have had a mistress and family on the side. But then again, maybe he didn’t.

This witty novel has a large cast of characters who populate its complex plot, which lurches back and forth in time. Novelist Susan Rieger fleshes out the personalities of the five sons quite well, but it’s the mother, Eleanor, widow of Rupert Falkes, whom readers come to know best.  “Rupert married Eleanor because she was the girl of the year in 1960, because all the other men he knew wanted her, because she knew the difference between sarcasm and irony, because she was a knockout, because she’d read George Orwell, because she was sexually electrifying, because he could talk to her.” (13) Later in the novel we learn that “she was a MILF before there was a word for it.” (205) Okay, then, you should get the drift: sexual adventuring is a theme in The Heirs.

The family doesn’t need the money that Rupert leaves. They’re all filthy rich in their own right. It’s the inheritance of uncertainty about Rupert’s past that dominates their discussions and Rieger’s analyses of their discussions. Rupert was a self-made man, an orphan who was left as an infant on a church doorstep in England in 1934 and rose to be a prominent New York lawyer. His family thought they knew him. Eleanor was from well-established American bloodlines and brought wealth to the marriage. She’s more inscrutable, but she’s fully adept at social graces, like knowing not to wear white shoes after Labor Day.

Rupert’s sideline in sons isn’t the only procreational plot in The Heirs. For instance, Rupert’s gay son, Sam, longs desperately for a child of his own. And the wife of an early boyfriend of Eleanor’s wonders if her husband might be the father of at least some of Eleanor’s kids. The liaisons get mighty tangled.

Like her characters, Rieger is acerbic and sophisticated, willing to insert barbs no matter how sharp and providing a glimpse into the lives of the elitist ultra-wealthy. Despite, or perhaps because of, the furious pace and the elements of retroactive continuity, The Heirs is deliciously entertaining. And if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m a sucker for novels set in New York. Check out other reviews in the New York Novels category from the Archive of Book Reviews in the right column.

A Dystopian America

The Mandibles:  A Family, 2029-2047     Lionel Shriver     (2016)

Hang onto your hat. The year is 2029, and Russia and China now rule the world. The economy of the United States has crashed spectacularly, because of the national debt run up by the Latinos who control the federal government. All savings and investments are worthless, inflation is uncontrolled, jobs have disappeared, and ordinary citizens have become scavengers and thieves to stay alive. Guns, though forbidden, are essential. Despite the dire situation, elderly Americans continue to be cosseted, through programs such as Social Security and Medicare, because they are reliable voters. (Somehow, voting isn’t disrupted.)

Caught in this maelstrom are four generations of the Mandible family, New Yorkers who used to be upper middle class. Over the course of the eighteen years that this novel covers, most members of the Mandible clan survive and eventually escape to a locale (I won’t reveal where) that has created an isolationist libertarian paradise, basing its economy on the gold standard, with a flat tax and no social services. In other words, Lionel Shriver’s book is not just an echo of Ayn Rand but a loud, clanging reverberation.

A “mandible” is a jawbone, and in this novel the Mandibles exercise their jawbones frequently to expound on political and financial issues. I grew weary of the ultra-right-wing screeds against the Federal Reserve and against non-white people. There were even snide references to Chelsea Clinton and someone named (ha-ha-ha) Krugman. Almost all the characters whom Shriver presents as reasonable and civilized humans espouse views that are economically untenable and, to me, morally reprehensible.

Yet I kept reading through to page 402 in order to follow the threads of daily life in Shriver’s dystopian scenario. As housing becomes scarce in the years after 2029, more and more of the Mandibles crowd into one home, inevitably creating scenes of interpersonal conflict. What do you do when there is no more toilet paper and very limited water supply? How do you stretch a cup of rice to feed a crowd? These conundrums of human existence in a sadly debased America are sometimes solved in clever ways. And some of the future language that Shriver injects into the dialogue is amusing, if flippant. For example, since the very aged Baby Boomers are pariahs, the word that replaces “crap” is “boomerpoop.”

A couple of the characters in The Mandibles are intrepid in the face of disaster. The hero of the Mandible family turns out to be Willing, who is thirteen years old in 2029 and comes of age as he teaches himself advanced survival skills. He’s the one who leads the way to the promised land of libertarianism. Another Mandible, Avery, who is middle-aged at the start of the novel, blossoms: “Things seemed to matter again. It seemed to matter how she spent her time and what she told her children. Why, it was tempting to wonder whether, while the likes of the Stackhouses were musing idly over whether to cover the footstool in taupe or mauve, folks on the margins were living real lives, and making real decisions, and conducting real relationships, full of friction and shouting and moment—whether all this time the poor people had been having all the fun.” (188)

But mostly The Mandibles is a book about ugliness. Kindly people die. Hard-nosed scammers prosper. The only African American character has advanced dementia and is kept tied up.  As Carter Mandible, an unemployed economist, pronounces, “It’s the decent people who always get fucked.” (125)

The Mandibles did prod me to consider the place of the Unites States in history. Shriver puts these same considerations into the mind of my favorite character, Florence, early in the book: “She didn’t think about being American often, though that may have been typically American in itself. She didn’t regard being American as especially formative of her character, and that may have been typically American, too. . .  For years now it had ceased to be controversial to suppose that the era of the ‘American Empire’ was fading, and the notion that her country may already have had its day in the sun she didn’t find upsetting. Plenty of other countries had flourished and subsided, and were reputed to be pleasant places to live. She didn’t see why being a citizen of a nation in decline should diminish her own life or make her feel personally discouraged.” (74)

Pregnancy & Pear Trees

Leaving Lucy Pear     Anna Solomon     (2016)

It seems to me that about half the novels that I read have at the heart of the plot a single woman with an unintended pregnancy. Granted, I read a lot of historical novels, and historically the pregnancy of an unwed woman was a cause of anxiety, grief, distress, secrecy, scheming, and crime.

In the novel Leaving Lucy Pear, Beatrice Haven is the young single woman with an unintended pregnancy. She leaves her newborn daughter in a pear orchard in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, on a night when she expects that pear thieves will be present to find the bundle. All this is revealed in the prologue, set in 1917. The main action of the story occurs a decade later. Unbeknownst to Beatrice, the baby has been named Lucy Pear and has been raised by Emma Murphy, the mother of a large, impoverished Irish American family. Beatrice, who is from a wealthy Jewish family in Boston, continues to be tormented by her act of abandoning her child and spends much of her time at the home of the uncle who owns the pear orchard. The lives of Beatrice and Emma intertwine in complex ways as the plot works toward resolution of some, but not all, of the issues raised about motherhood, womanhood, sexuality, and family ties. 

The setting of the North Shore in Massachusetts is significant. This rocky peninsula between Boston and New Hampshire is rich with literary associations, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to TS Eliot. The time period is also significant, with the political backdrop of the Prohibition era and the controversial 1927 executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, professed anarchists who were accused of robbery and murder. Weaving in and out of the narrative of Leaving Lucy Pear are threads about the temperance movement, liquor smuggling, anarchism, communism, industrialization, labor unions, and social class. 

Anna Solomon’s writing is delicate and introspective. There are many sentences like this: “When she looked at him, her cheeks wrinkled and red from where her sleeves had pressed into them, her eyes pinned him to his chair.” (235) As a reader, I wanted to find out the next component of the plot, but I also wanted to linger on scenes in which character traits are revealed by family members discussing domestic matters. 

Beatrice abandons her baby so that she can move on with her life, go to Radcliffe, and perhaps become a concert pianist. But her plan falters, and that may have been the best outcome for her. Late in the novel, a minor character pronounces, “’Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it’s the extraordinary people what aren’t happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it’s happened to everyone else, too. It’s actually very comforting.’” (313-314)

Rodeo for Russian Americans

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo     Boris Fishman     (2016)

Despite the title, this novel is not primarily about rodeo, but it does have something to do with babies—specifically babies who are adopted. It’s also about the experience of Russian and Ukrainian émigrés in the United States and about a road trip through the American West. Novelist Boris Fishman assembles all these pieces skillfully.

Maya Shulman, a Ukrainian exchange student, and Alex Rubin, the only son of Russian immigrants, meet in New York in 1992. They marry and settle in New Jersey but are unable to have children. Over the objections of Alex and his parents, Maya pushes for adoption. The baby they adopt is the biological son of teenagers in Montana; the baby’s father is a rodeo cowboy. The one request of the biological mother to the adoptive parents is “Don’t let my baby do rodeo.”

By the year 2012, Maya and Alex begin to interpret some of the actions of their eight-year-old adoptive son, Max, as a reversion to his genetic origins. Maya especially becomes alarmed when Max runs away from home and when he “consorts with wild animals.” She worries that he’s becoming “feral” and insists on a car trip to Montana to seek out Max’s biological parents, hoping that they can shed light on Max’s “wildness.”

Readers may not see Max’s habits as particularly unusual for an inquisitive child. Max likes to sleep in a tent in the back yard, chew on various wild grasses, and put his face in river water to look at the pebbles and fish. One scene, in which Max cavorts with some deer in his back yard, could be taken as a bit of magic realism or could simply reflect the ubiquity and tameness of urban deer in New Jersey.

Around the main plot of the trip to Montana Fishman weaves subplots, particularly related to the influence of Alex’s parents on the marriage of Maya and Alex. Fishman pokes fun at his own Russian heritage in his portrayal of Alex’s immigrant parents. The elder Rubins have built a successful business and assimilated into American culture in many ways, but they eat traditional Russian foods, quote Russian proverbs, and oppose the adoption of Max for patriarchal cultural reasons. Maya struggles with her identity as an American wife and mother, always seeking to add new words to her English vocabulary, for example, yet chafing under some of the Old World attitudes of her husband and in-laws. In the end, she rebels against her family in a startling way.

Fishman’s writing is dense with words that are often crammed into tight sentences. This style can be rich, as when he is describing the dawn in South Dakota: “. . .the subfusc prologue of the morning was pushing up the black sky with impatience.” (249) And here is a vista in Montana: “First, there were hills, patchy and tentative, then, all of a sudden, mountains upon mountains. Maya eyed them with gratitude; she willed them to keep rising. Even Max stirred at their sight, leaning into his window. Emerald firs rose off the flanks in neat rows like heads in a choir, the cottonwoods among them so gold they looked like bullion bars.” (260)

My eye did catch occasionally on oddities of English word choice—“custom” instead of “habit, “unexisting” instead of “nonexistent,” “self-made” instead of “homemade,” and so forth. I expected these choices in the dialogue of characters whose native language was not English, but they cropped up in non-dialogue. This is a minor quibble about a book that forthrightly tackles such fraught issues as infertility, parenting an adopted child, and adapting to a new culture.

An Unlikely Marriage

This Must Be the Place     Maggie O’Farrell     (2016)

Maggie O’Farrell trusts her readers to catch on to what’s she’s doing with her oblique plot lines. She trusts that readers won’t jump ship when she suddenly shifts the setting to another hemisphere. She especially trusts that readers will take note of her chapter titles, which include the name of the person whose point of view is adopted for that chapter, as well as the city and year in which that chapter takes place. It’s dizzying at first, but once you get used to it, there’s a bit of a reader buzz at the beginning of each chapter. Oh, now you’re in Donegal, Ireland, in 2010, with Daniel narrating in first person. Then, hello, Brooklyn 1944! It’s a third-person narrative about Teresa, who turns out to be Daniel’s mother. And welcome to Goa, India, in 1996, with a third-person narrative about Claudette, Daniel’s second wife. Decades and continents whizz past as you put the pieces of the plot together.

This Must Be the Place ends up being a character study of two people who both have immense talents and big hearts but also serious flaws. Their lives are messy, peopled by previous lovers and by children with problems of their own. Daniel Sullivan is an American linguistics professor who has lost custody of his children in a contentious divorce from his first wife. On a trip to Ireland to retrieve his grandfather’s ashes, Daniel comes across a young boy on the roadside in Donegal. This is how he meets Claudette Wells, the boy’s mother, who is a recluse in the mountains, having fled a life of international stardom and infernal paparazzi. Daniel and Claudette fall in love.

Readers get the life histories of both Daniel and Claudette through those chapters that flash back and forth in time. Some of the chapters border on gimmicky, especially the one that’s a catalog of Claudette’s personal objects that are put up for auction, complete with inset photos. Some of the plot assumptions are wobbly. I doubt that Claudette could really have kept her presence in Ireland a secret for years—in rural Africa or South America, perhaps, but not in Ireland. And I can’t see how Daniel could get work permits for whatever country he was in. None of that matters, however, as O’Farrell reveals more and more about Daniel and Claudette, drawing readers into their struggles.

Along the way, O’Farrell’s descriptive passages work well. Here is Daniel narrating: “Winter is the best season to see Paris, I’ve always thought, when the pavements are sheer with frost, when the sun in low in the sky, when the Seine is swollen and brown, twisting fibrously beneath the bridges.” (266)

And here is Daniel being described when he is in a depressive state: “He is watching the red digital numbers of his alarm clock mutate into their successors: 5 gains an extra descender on its lower-left corner to become 6; to become 7, the 6 must lose almost all of itself, all its left-hand side, all its lower and middle strokes; the only consolation, he tells the 6-soon-to-be-7, is that you’ll get them all back for the full house that is 8. He watches the numbers tot themselves up, then spill over into another hour . . .” (295)

This Must Be the Place offers particularly excellent insights into the interdependence of partners in a marriage, and the portrayals of Daniel's and Claudette’s children are moving and believable. Overall, it’s a satisfying read. I plan to watch for future offerings from O’Farrell.

Two Views of a Marriage

Fates and Furies     Lauren Groff     (2015)

The characters Lotto and Mathilde, the protagonists in Fates and Furies, are not endearing to me. They are very tall and way too beautiful—a glamorous couple right from the day that they meet in 1991, when both are about to graduate from Vassar. I kept reading Fates and Furies out of weird fascination, or perhaps voyeurism, wanting to know what happens to these exceptionally gifted but egotistical and exploitative people.

The first 206 pages of the 390-page novel constitute the “fates” section, telling the story of Lotto’s early life and then his married life with Mathilde. Lotto’s given name is Lancelot, his father is Gawain, and his mother is Antoinette. Right there novelist Lauren Groff has set us her readers for high drama in the manner of Arthurian legend or French history. Lotto is born to wealth, but he’s disinherited upon his marriage to Mathilde, whom his mother disapproves of. He assumes the struggling actor role in New York, dependent upon Mathilde for sustenance, until, in a drunken stupor, he dashes off the first draft of a play. Behold! Lotto becomes an internationally acclaimed playwright. Mathilde continues to serve Lotto’s needs, handling the business side of his amazing career.

With the shift to the “furies” section of the novel, readers get the seamier side of the couple’s story. We learn that Mathilde was born in France and named Aurélie. At age four, she was involved in an accident that killed her baby brother, so she was sent away to live with relatives, ending up in Pennsylvania with an uncle who is some sort of gangster. Many additional secrets about Mathilde are revealed in this half of the novel, putting her marriage to Lotto in a totally different light. I would note that the entire novel is written in third person, not first person, so it isn’t as if Groff is presenting the personal viewpoint of Lotto (“fates”) and then the personal viewpoint of Mathilde (“furies”).

I found the revelations in the second half of the novel oddly disconcerting, feeling that I’d been cheated of information when I was reading the first half of the novel. I did keep reading, however, to the end, drawn in by Groff’s intensity of language, astonishing metaphors, and brisk narrative pace. A couple of examples:

“The women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.” (341)

“It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloons lowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.” (354)

Fates and Furies was the book that President Obama named as his favorite novel of 2015. I speculate that the novel provided him some insights into how an intelligent, supportive spouse can help the career of a similarly intelligent person, as the two marital partners navigate the difficult shoals of power and fame. But I do hope that Obama’s marriage is working better than the one that this novel depicts!

Lively Short Stories

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories   Penelope Lively     (2016)

“The Purple Swamp Hen” is the title story in Penelope Lively’s recent collection. It’s a tale set in ancient Pompeii just before the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the city in lava, and it’s told from the viewpoint of, wait for it, a purple swamp hen. An excavated Pompeiian fresco depicts this decorative bird that was kept in walled Roman gardens. Lively’s use of the swamp hen as her narrator is clever when you consider that this creature is in an ideal position to observe human shenanigans taking place in the garden, as Lively enumerates: “fornication, incest, rape, child abuse, grievous bodily harm.”

The ancient Mediterranean setting of “The Purple Swamp Hen,” is, however, an outlier in this masterful collection of stories from the octogenarian British author. The remaining stories are mostly set in Britain, in various decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Relationships are the overarching theme, and Lively presents couples in multiple circumstances, including falling in love, making a commitment, deciding on children, surviving divorce, taking revenge, and, of course, dying. For instance, she talks us through the emotions of an argument between a young husband and wife and takes us to Spain with a pair of penurious artists. Once in a while she tosses in the possibility of a ghost, to mix things up and bring the past into the present. Each new story opens up a miniature world for the reader.  

The short story form is highly confining for the writer. Characterizations have to be conveyed in a few sentences, and the plot has to be tight and of the proper scope for the length of the piece. With Lively’s stories, I always feel as if I know the characters, despite the brevity of the pieces (one is only 6 pages long). In their narrative rigor, Lively’s short stories remind me of the stories of Alice Munro, though Munro’s tend to be darker and sadder, to my reading.

Memory and the way the past and the future interact are persistent themes in Penelope Lively’s body of writing, which is large. She’s produced three memoirs that I find somewhat rambling, but her fiction is first-rate. Parallel to her career as an author of adult fiction is her work as an author of award-winning children’s books, starting back in the 1970s. In 1987 she won the Booker Prize for her adult novel Moon Tiger, in which a woman on her deathbed recalls scenes from her life. I recommend that one, but I’ve particularly enjoyed several of her more recent offerings, including The Photograph (2003), Consequences (2007), Family Album (2009), and How It All Began (2011). In this last title, Lively explores how one event affects seven different characters.

If you haven’t discovered Penelope Lively, don’t delay.

Brooklyn Satire

Class     Lucinda Rosenfeld     (2017)

Karen Kipple is a contemporary Brooklynite in her mid-forties, with a listless husband, a third-grader named Ruby, and a job at a nonprofit that feeds hungry children. This setup could be boring, but novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld tracks the story toward the absurd with biting satire and probing questions about progressive politics.

Karen obsesses about everything, measuring her actions, and those of others, against a standard that’s impossible to achieve. For example, she worries about the junk food that Ruby’s classmates eat, but then she overanalyzes: “Along with weight, teeth, and marriage, food had somehow become a dividing line between the social classes, with the Earth Day-esque ideals of the 1960s having acquired snob appeal, and the well-off and well-educated increasingly buying ‘natural’ and ‘fresh’ and casting aspersions on those who didn’t.” (19-20)

So, while Karen gets upset about kids eating junk food, she then internally castigates herself for her classism. And, despite the title of this novel, race looms large in Karen’s obsessions also. The African American kids in Ruby’s school have names that irritate Karen, until she realizes that the purposely antiquated names of the white kids (Prudence, Violet, Silas, Leo, and even Ruby) can be seen as pretentious in a different way.

This tug-of-war within Karen plays out over and over. Karen lives much of her life through Ruby, and she worries constantly about every single interaction that the poor child has with other children. “It alarmed and excited her to think that her daughter was only two degrees of separation away from the kind of people who got evicted.” (87) Karen is both alarmed and excited throughout this novel.

The plot in Class mainly revolves around Karen’s decision to pull Ruby out of the local minority-white public school she’s attending and fraudulently enroll her in a nearby all-white public school. Karen doesn’t even tell her husband about her maneuver. And this act of betrayal of her liberal values is one of a series of outrageous exploits, involving preposterous lies, marital infidelity, and embezzlement. As Karen plunges off a metaphorical cliff, readers may want to grab her by her hair and shake her!

The ancillary characters in Class are stereotypes broadly and often humorously drawn: the non-communicative husband who watches television sports, the obnoxious PTA president, the selfish billionaire. In conversations with them, Karen ranges from timid to frank to confrontational. I found this variability unconvincing, but perhaps Karen vacillates verbally as a reflection of her unease with her social convictions.

I’ve reviewed a number of novels set in New York that wavered on the edge of satire; see one of my posts here. There’s no question that Class is a satire, striking at the shibboleths of the left. It will make you squirm as you think about exactly why you hold the beliefs that you do, no matter where on the political spectrum you sit.

Those New York Novels

The Ramblers     Aidan Donnelley Rowley (2016)

(plus brief notes on novels by Adelle Waldman and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney)

First, a sidebar.

Maybe I should stop reading these inbred New York City novels. Maybe only New Yorkers can sense where the satire starts. But I read a lot of fiction, and I’ve taught fiction to a lot of college students, so I should be able to discern satire, right? Even if I’m a Midwesterner?

I look back at a couple of other New York novels. I’m pretty certain that Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is sardonically mocking the callous, self-satisfied male New Yorkers who wreak havoc on the psyches of brilliant, sensitive female New Yorkers. Waldman’s view into this world is morbidly fascinating but morbid nonetheless.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest (2016) is less clear on the satire front. Four siblings fight over their inheritance, which has been greatly depleted by a payout to cover up a crime by one of the brothers. Should I care about the quarrels of these disagreeable, money-grubbing characters, even if the plot is a tight one? Am I supposed to care, or am I supposed to recoil in horror?

This issue is not settled, but let’s move on to the main review.

The Ramblers, by Aidan Donnelley Rowley (2016), brings us three more New Yorkers who have too much money and too many drinks. Admittedly, Clio Marsh was born middle class, but she’s pulled herself up by the proverbial bootstraps to earn a PhD in ornithology. And she lives nearly rent-free as roommate to Smith Anderson, a daughter of the 1% who declutters the Manhattan apartments of her private clients. The third profiled character is Tate Pennington, who has accidentally made a fortune in the tech world and retired to New York to take street photographs and escape his estranged wife in California.

All three are in their mid-30s, yet they prate endlessly about their undergraduate days together at Yale and enter into petty squabbles about the relative advantages of Princeton. Really? So you’ve read Foucault. I’m not impressed, though I think that the author, herself a Yalie, expects her readers to be.

Because the three protagonists are in their mid-thirties, they all long to be in committed relationships. This is a standard feature of the modern New York novel, though it’s usually only the women or the gay men who crave a long-lasting, monogamous marriage. The entire plot of The Ramblers revolves around the achievement of perfect domestic partnerships, but I couldn’t feel much sympathy for these three privileged strivers. They’re stock characters in a flat drama. Clio worries that the revelation of her mother’s mental illness and suicide will derail her affair with a wealthy bachelor fifteen years her senior. Smith won’t distance herself from her malicious father, even though this creepy father browbeat her fiancé into breaking up with her. And Tate salves the wounds made by his unfaithful wife with excessive amounts of alcohol, but he still shoots stunning photos.

The dialogue of the thirty-something women in The Ramblers does have sparkle, but when I hit some scenes with older women or with men (older or not), I found myself stopped mid-page by the inaptness of tone and the cliché-ridden sentences. Wait, I thought, is the author satirizing this character? We’re back to that issue of inadvertent satire again.

If I’m so irritated by these self-aggrandizing characters and their $30 bottles of organic hair conditioner, why do I keep reading New York novels? Why did I ever get past page 50 of The Ramblers? Simple: I have a weakness for the New York part.

For instance, the title of The Ramblers refers to an area in Central Park called The Ramble, a semi-wild nature area in the middle of Manhattan, popular for those seeking outdoor gay sex, which has also become a favored site for birdwatchers. The character Clio leads public birding tours through The Ramble on Sunday mornings and gets written up in the local press. Tate, meanwhile, is a walking guide book to the poetic and architectural history of the city, seeking out the haunts of Stanley Kunitz and Dylan Thomas. Smith’s sister gets married in the cavernous, barrel-vaulted St. Bart’s Episcopal Church, with the reception at the ultra-glamorous Waldorf. The action of the novel takes place during the week of Thanksgiving, so the author can call up glorious late autumn days as well as the edge of silver-bell cheeriness for the upcoming Christmas season. In sum, the NYC of The Ramblers is more vividly portrayed than its inhabitants.

True, for heavy New York atmosphere, you can’t beat author Jay McInerney, and I’ve acknowledged this in a recent blog post reviewing his 2016 novel Bright, Precious Days. I detect satire in some of McInerney’s characters, but he fleshes them out so well and surrounds them with so much New York detail that I tumble right into their lives nonetheless.

And for a weekly dose of New York, I turn to the New Yorker. I can imagine myself at the openings of art exhibits and plays listed at the front and then settle in for some serious journalism, not necessarily about New York, by writers like Adam Gopnik, Joan Acocella, Jill Lepore, Hilton Als, Larissa MacFarquhar, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kalefa Sanneh, Jane Mayer, and Ryan Lizza. Gotta love it.

McInerney's Manhattan Excess

Bright, Precious Days     Jay McInerney     (2016)

O, Russell! O, Corrine! O, pet ferret!  Bright, Precious Days, the third installment of the Russell-and-Corrine-story (readable as a standalone), finds them hitting age 50, with a TriBeCa loft that’s too expensive and too small for a family with school-age twins and a pet ferret. And note that TriBeCa always has those internal capital letters, so that you’re looking to the etymology and the map, knowing that Russell and Corrine, having consumed another absurdly extravagant and exotic restaurant meal, are heading home to the Triangle Below Canal Street.

The landmarks of Manhattan are as much characters in McInerney’s novels as the human actors. His New York City dazzles with all the expected urbanity and glitz and pop culture references. His descriptions of the turning of the seasons are particularly striking in their tropes of nostalgia. I’m there, at the top of the Empire State Building, wind in my hair, taking in the view.

I do need my regular dose of Manhattan hauteur and pomposity, if only to reassure myself that I’m content as a boring Midwesterner. McInerney delivers Manhattan full throttle: the wine snobs, the gourmands, the anorexics, the cab drivers, the gala attendees, the trophy wives, the crazed artists, the cocaine snorters. Good Lord, how do people ingest that much cocaine and live to tell the story? Well, some of them don’t live, that’s true.

From the beginning, the reader cringes with the knowledge that Russell’s publishing business is not thriving. Print books were in decline even in the mid-aughts, when the book opens, and although Russell may be the Max Perkins of the twenty-first century, his editing skills don’t translate to business savvy. The reader also has the advantage of knowing that the recession of 2008 is looming.

Corrine—who saw the light, sort of, after 9/11—has taken a job in the nonprofit sector, gleaning discarded vegetables to distribute to the poor, so she doesn’t contribute much income to the family. Corrine’s job does allow McInerney to give us a brief view of the 99% in New York City, with descriptions of the long lines of hungry people waiting to receive a dole of carrots or cabbages.

You don’t have to be an avid reader of mystery novels to guess how the storyline involving Russell’s business will play out in Bright Precious Days. The marital storyline is another matter. R-and-C have been married for twenty-five years, during which time they’ve both repeatedly cheated on and lied to each other. I want to shake them and tell them how selfish they are, how superficial and cliché-ridden their conversations are. I want to tell Corrine that to keep her weight down she should reduce her consumption of alcoholic beverages, not diet on lettuce and canned salmon. R-and-C live up to their surname, “Calloway,” in their adolescent ingenuousness and self-centeredness. The coincidences in the marital storyline strain belief, and the characters are on the edge of becoming caricatures. But I understand many of their flaws and want to know their next steps. I love to despise them.

And I love gazing on that Manhattan excess from afar.