 (Credit: Riverhead Books) In recent days, I’ve seen Celeste Ballard’s 2014 piece “How to Pick a Good Summer Read” circulating a bit, and laughed over her precise, apt taxonomy. “Appropriate settings include weddings, engagement parties, trips abroad, East Coast boarding schools, clambakes, lobster broils, and other crustacean-centric eating parties, where even the anorexic characters can have fun,” she wrote. “Inappropriate settings: rent-controlled apartments, Denny's, highway underpasses. I want to be able to understand the novel half-drunk on rosé. The sentences should breeze by like a handsome man on a Vespa on the Montauk Highway. Speaking of characters, if one of them is a handsome man on a Vespa on the Montauk Highway, count me in! Give that character my number and tell him to call me.” But as funny as Ballard’s piece is, there’s an undercurrent to it that I wanted to take issue with. In between all of these elite, rather white settings and rejection of “anything you read in the world-news section of the New York Times” lingers the possibility that issues of race or class or international politics necessarily pull readers out of the fun zone that beachy summer reading ought to occupy. As a counterexample to that, I’d like to offer Emma Straub’s “Modern Lovers,” a light, lovely novel about two families in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Elizabeth and Andrew live on the same street as Zoe, with whom they played in a mildly successful college band, and Zoe’s wife, Jane, who is also Zoe’s partner in her restaurant business. Race and class don’t line up in entirely predictable ways. Zoe, who is African American, owns her house because her wealthy parents bought it for her. Andrew grew up rich but is eager to divest himself of his parents’ money. And Elizabeth, who wrote the song that made their fourth bandmate, Lydia, famous before she died of a drug overdose, has settled into a role as a real estate agent trying to find families at least somewhat-affordable homes in gentrifying Brooklyn. All of which is to say that the conflicts of race, class and sexuality that come up in “Modern Lovers” are these issues in their mildest forms. But it’s still a nice testament to the idea that you can get half-drunk on all sorts of rosé, and on all sorts of characters and settings. |
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