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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Mark Rudd. Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. William Morrow. April 2009. 

In New York, they saved.

They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived on the 7 train that year and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes. Read More

One day in Czechoslovakia, not long after I was born, during the gray decade that was the '70s, my 6-year-old brother came home from school and shared what he'd learned: "Lenin was a kind person. He liked children." Those words have acquired the force of a proverb in our family: we assure each other that Lenin liked children whenever one of us lets fly with a statement that seems dangerously optimistic. The following may fall into that category: Czechoslovakia before 1989, when the Communist regime fell, was not a bad place to be a child. For my parents, who spent a large part of their adulthoods in the country, it wasn't all free health care and underground rock 'n' roll. As everyone knows by now, most people had to keep their opinions to themselves, do without traveling abroad, wait in line for bananas, accept overt and subtle limitations in their lives. As soon as kids started going to school, they too slipped under the arm of the state—witness my brother's first-grade indoctrination. In general, though, a political system that thwarted the better instincts and ambitions of adults seems, perversely, to have been mostly congenial and comfortable for children. Read More