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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How can Barack Obama, a man who only recently paid off his student loans and who lives a relatively modest life in Chicago's Hyde Park, a few blocks from one of America's poorest neighborhoods, be more "elitist" than John McCain, the son of an admiral (not to mention the husband of a beer heiress), or more "elitist" than Hillary and Bill Clinton, a couple whose joint earnings since 2000 top 100 million dollars? Yet the E-word, and the charge that Obama is out of touch with the experiences of white, blue-collar workers, first leveled against Obama by the Clintons during the primary race, still hang heavy over his otherwise charmed campaign.

These charges stick around not because of the working-class credentials or commitments of Obama's opponents, but because of a problem inherent in contemporary politics that neither party ever addresses, that highly educated professionals are the driving force, financially and politically, behind both major parties. The Democratic leadership particularly continues to present itself as the best hope for the working class, while sharing few economic interests and fewer cultural experiences (now rebranded as "values") with the people it claims to represent. Read More

You may have seen a small and strange article in last Monday's New York Times, buried beneath the fold in the back of the business section: "Fiction, Hoax or Neither? A Literary Dust-Up." The article reports on an essay by Paul Maliszewski in the April/May issue of Bookforum, in which he argues that a lecture given several times by Michael Chabon constitutes a deliberate and dodgy attempt to hoax his audience. In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known," Chabon describes, among other hoaxsters, a Jewish writer writing under a good Waspish pseudonym, CB Colby, who then publishes a Holocaust memoir in his own name, Joseph Adler. But it seems that Adler isn't his real name either, and the author of the memoir is not a survivor but a Nazi named Fischer. As it turns out, Colby/Adler/Fischer never existed, and the fake Holocaust memoir The Book of Hell, which Chabon says is owned by his father, his father-in-law, and perhaps by members of the audience, and from which he goes on to quote a passage, is a novelistic invention of one Michael Chabon. Maliszewski argues that Chabon is taking advantage of his audience's gullibility in order to show off, and thereby edits out history's CB Colby, a real man with no connections to Nazis or Jews whatsoever. In Maliszewski's eyes, this amounts to unethical fiction writing. Read More