Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us  in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn's privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers. At the end of the novel, a successful actress decamps from Brooklyn's Gold Coast to Manhattan; another woman receives her comeuppance when, after putting a down payment on a long-coveted apartment, she discovers that the school district has been rezoned. Her son must attend PS 282, two-thirds black, one-third Hispanic, and "the worst kind of school there was: too bad to be good but too good to be bad."

Sohn, the least self-avowedly serious of Brooklyn writers, is the only one who can afford to be so honest. In a genre that emerged in the 1960s and '70s, when droves of middle-class men and women moved to the borough to restore its Italianate brownstones and Victorian row houses, her more literary peers remain unable to take their eyes off the window-dressing. As Brooklyn has changed, so has the gentrification novel, and today's writers are more likely to romanticize grimy dive bars than cornice moldings. Still, taste continues to be presented as the force that defines city life. In the gentrification novel, questions of wealth and race are rephrased as inquiries into authenticity and what it means to be a true New Yorker. 

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After college I went back to California and took a job at a shop that made customized glassware, like brandy snifters with the names of resorts on them or champagne flutes with romantic quotations engraved around the rim. Most of the business came from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Hawaii, the three capitals of west coast leisure. My job was to tape plastic stencils to the glasses, each with the logo of a hotel or casino—"The Mirage," "The Bellagio," "Kapalua"—or a touristic phrase like "Hang Ten in Hawaii." The glasses were then taken into a garage, where a man in a plastic-lined booth would etch the glass by shooting a high-powered stream of sand through a pneumatic gun attached to an air compressor. The sand bounced off the plastic stencil but gradually abraded the exposed areas of the glass, leaving the text engraved into its surface. Afterwards the glasses were cleaned, boxed, and sent out to gift shops where, to judge by the number of pieces I processed in my nine-month stay at the job, they lined the shelves of liquor cabinets the world over. Read More