Thrown together by circumstance, a group of fathers—a sound engineer, a sculptor, a film producer, a chef, a memoirist, a gangster—meets each morning at a local Tribeca coffee shop after walking their children to their exclusive school.
The sound engineer looks uncomfortably like the guy on the sex offender posters strewn around the neighborhood; the memoirist is on the verge of being outed for fabricating his experiences; and the narcissistic chef puts his quest for the perfect quail-egg frittata before his children’s well-being. Over the course of a single school year, we are privy to their secrets, passions, and hopes, and learn of their dreams deferred as they confront harsh realities about ambition, wealth, and sex. And we meet their wives and children, who together with these men are discovering the hard truths and welcome surprises that accompany family, marriage, and real estate at midlife.
Fascinatingly layered and multidimensional, these linked stories, arranged like puzzle pieces, create a powerful portrait of unlikely friends and their neighborhood in transition. Striking chords that range from haunting and heartbreaking to darkly funny and deeply poignant, Triburbia marks the start of a brilliant literary career.
About Karl Taro Greenfeld
Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of five previous books: the much-acclaimed memoir Boy Alone; NowTrends; China Syndrome; Standard Deviations; and Speed Tribes. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Playboy, One Story, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Born in Kobe, Japan, he has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He currently lives in Tribeca with his wife, Silka, and their daughters, Esmee and Lola.
Editorial Review
They’re a not-so-diverse group, the guys who populate the first novel by memoirist/journalist Greenfeld (Boy Alone, 2009, etc.). Thrown together by geography, a group of dads commiserate over breakfast, survey their peers for advice and bicker like little old ladies much of the time. They’re so universal, in fact, that each chapter identifies each man not by name, but by address. 113 North Moore is the Asian-American sound mixologist who studies his daughters like they’re a foreign species. 65 Hudson is the secretive husband who’s having an affair with another member’s wife. 47 Lispenard is the artist whose “punk puppetry” is now old hat in fast-moving Tribeca. “The hurt was three-fold: the art, the money, the girl,” he muses. 57 Warren Street is really the only anomaly in the interconnected stories, starring Rankin, a Jewish gangster who finds his comrades tiresome but serves a vital purpose in their lives. “For most of the men, Rankin also served as the living embodiment of warning,” Greenfeld writes. “Of whom you never want to turn to. Of a desperation you hope you will never feel.” While the stories are well-composed, the novel is often disjointed, and some characters are so bland as to be nearly unnoticeable—the film producer who frets about neighborhood pedophiles, the playwright whose success the others find unfathomable. And others are oh-so-naughties, as is the case with the story of 85 West Broadway, the memoirist with an autistic son whose flashy stories about Japan and his own drug addiction turn out to be fabrications. It’s pretty evident that Greenfeld is mining his life experiences for fiction, but that doesn’t give them the ring of truth. It could be challenging for readers to drum up sympathy for wealthy young men with rich world problems. – Kirkus Reviews
Bobos in Paradise - ‘Triburbia,’ by Karl Taro Greenfeld
The New York Times Book Review – August 3, 2012 (Excerpt)
One view of the novel, the one that E. M. Forster advanced, says it’s “a fiction in prose of a certain extent” — meaning more than 50,000 words, in Forster’s opinion. By that definition Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “Triburbia” qualifies as a novel, which is what his publisher calls it, though I’d be inclined to call it linked stories. I suspect that if “Dubliners” had been published in recent years it would have been marketed as a novel. If Tom Rachman’s “Imperfectionists” and Jennifer Egan’s “Visit From the Goon Squad” are novels, if Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds” is a novel, then so, perhaps, is “Triburbia.” It lacks the sense of closure and the linear narrative drive of more conventional examples of the form, but it’s an artful and casually cohesive work of fiction imbued with anthropological insight.
Greenfeld’s story is set in the bohemian Manhattan neighborhood of TriBeCa (the triangle below Canal Street), which, like SoHo to the north, was a zone of abandoned loft and factory buildings when artists looking for cheap space began colonizing it in the early 1970s. Three decades later, according to Forbes magazine, TriBeCa had become the most expensive ZIP code in Manhattan, displacing the venerable Upper East Side’s 10021. Greenfeld deftly charts this transition from the Mudd Club to Whole Foods, from James Rosenquist to Bethenny Frankel.
The book takes place during George W. Bush’s second term; the attack on the World Trade Center, just to the south, is receding into memory; the financial crisis is just starting to unfold, although most of these culture producers pride themselves on being ignorant of what’s happening on Wall Street. They are for the most part second-generation TriBeCans, not necessarily artists but engaged in the artistic professions, resentful of the bankers and lawyers who are moving in. [Read the full article...]
‘Triburbia,’ by Karl Taro Greenfeld
The San Francisco Chronicle – August 13, 2012 (Excerpt)
The pleasures of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s writing are easy to catalog – a crystalline, terrifically readable prose style; a vast repository of trenchant observations; and a caustic sense of humor that recalls Jonathan Franzen yet with a refreshing economy of speech. But it’s somewhat harder to immediately identify why this author’s smart, intricate debut novel, “Triburbia,” which maps the intersecting lives of couples and families in trendy, affluent Lower Manhattan, doesn’t seem to achieve the dramatic impact that it initially promises.
The difficulty, if that’s what we should really call it, stems from the novel’s early sections, particularly the opener in which a group of elementary school dads in their 30s, who meet regularly for breakfast, argue about a recent sexual assault in their neighborhood. One of the dads, a cynical sound engineer named Mark, bears an uncanny resemblance to a seemingly ubiquitous police sketch of the offender.
As Mark frets about what might happen if he finds himself actually accused of the crime, one suspects that Greenfeld is probably setting the reader up for a Tom Perrotta-style satire of upper-middle-class paranoia crossed with Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” in which a mob of downtowners stalks hapless Griffin Dunne, whom they suspect of murder. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
DOODLEBUGS & SPITFIRES
Memories and Short Stories by Peter Carroll
“Doodlebugs & Spitfires” is a delightful collection of memories and short stories written by Peter Carroll, the author of “Queen of Misfortune,” in his trademark poetic and profoundly thoughtful style.
Most of his stories, previously published in limited form in local English newspapers and magazines, like “Brave New World”, “The Forties Street Tradesmen”, “Doodlebugs”, or “The Christmas of 43” evolve around his childhood in the Northern part of London during and after World War II. He describes the horrors that came with the V1 flying bombs, nicknamed the “Doodlebugs.” Heroic British pilots in their “Spitfire” airplanes would attempt to divert the flying bombs from the populated areas, sometimes successful, and sometimes not.
Doodlebugs & Spitfires is available at Amazon.Com and its Kindle store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle store, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.
