New York's Newest Suburb: TriBurBia

At this point shouldn't it be called QuaBeCa (Quadrangle Below Canal)

Convert warehouses into big lofts to lure Wall Street bonus money. It's that simple.

Sure. That's no secret. It's all anyone ever talks about. Realtors make sure of that. The other reason it's hot, and that is does attact the moneyed types is that it is a genuinely kid-friendly area: nice parks, excellent public schools, lots of places to eat and hasn't so far attracted all of the boring stores that have turned Soho into an outdoor mall.

Has anyone else read this novel? I'm reading it now. Most of the reviews have been favorable, but several are more mixed. below is one review.

A Fictional, But Candid, Look At Life in TriBeCa
– August 7, 2012
Book Review

Conformity, necessary for a functioning society, is, in essence, the process of projecting lies about oneself. You’ve always wanted to be a banker. You love Sunday brunch with your folks. That smile, that smile means you’re happy. You’re faithful, monogamous. You love all your kids equally. That’s what we are supposed to say. But is it what we believe about ourselves?

In his debut novel, Triburbia (HarperCollins), which is available now for $26, author Karl Taro Greenfeld writes of life in the small, increasingly residential TriBeCa neighborhood. Through a series of interconnecting stories—some written in first person, some in third—Taro describes the neurotic, sometimes depraved thoughts and indiscretions of a group of middle-aged fathers and their families as they come to terms with their monotonous lives, all while eating breakfast together and pretending that all is well.

In doing so, Greenfeld provides a scathing critique of yuppie culture and the putridity of conformity in the upper middle-class. His characters—the adulterous sculptor and the ex-wife of a restaurant magnate, the alcoholic, insomniac writer, even the precocious fourth-grade model whose meanness and manipulations make the other girls cry—may be fictional, but they are accurate illustrations of very real people we’ve all known:the malcontents, the narcissists, the sexually frustrated, those clinging to the images of their past selves. In other words, us.

Brooke, for example, the wife of a sound engineer, at one point refers to her husband as a kid, sparking a moment of self-indulgent reflection.

“Why do I say kid,” she begins. “Because I still feel like a kid, that’s why, barley wiser or smarter than our babysitter or even our daughters. I still want to go out, snort coke, pick up boys. I can’t, of course, grown up on the outside as I am, responsible, holder of a mortgage, mother, wife. I try to never ask myself how did I get here, I ask myself why.”

Triburbia, a terse, tightly written 253 pages, is darkly humorous, occasionally lascivious, unsparing in its condemnations of the main characters and intrepid in its honest descriptions of the human conscience.

The book, as it digs through the garbage of the main characters, seems to imply that we are all malcontents, all self-important, all accusatory of others and defensive of ourselves.

One of the main characters, for example, whines early on in the book about TriBeCa culture and residents:

Here’s what’s wrong with us: there’s nothing at stake. That makes us oversensitive to minor transgressions, prone to disproportionate responses, quick to counterattack.

We are a prosperous community. Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better than that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on iTunes playlists, our children in our secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.

… [TriBeCa] became a synonym for a kind of urban living: a little edgy, perhaps, but often safer and richer even than Scarsdale. A certain type of family arrived, drawn by that safety and the faux-bohemianism of Downtown, driving out the actual bohemians. And now, we faux-bohemians find ourselves facing the onslaught of those who don’t even pretend to give a shit about books or theater.

Author Karl Taro Greenfeld. Credit: Esmee Greenfeld
His rant, however, is a result of his resentment toward the mothers and teachers at an elementary school who accused him of being a predator for using sound equipment to record children playing. (He works as a sound engineer.) He provides a defense of himself by accusing them and their lifestyle.

Greenfeld also writes of the decadence of modern culture, and the career, life and sexual fetishes that, if we are entirely honest with ourselves, we all think about. There is even an act of sodomy between a man and his seductive boss that Greenfeld explains understatedly, matter-of-factly.

There are no innocent characters. Guilt and TriBeCa is all that connects these characters. They cheat on their spouses with the spouses of their friends. They end the flings through silence, going mechanically back to their marriages. They have internal monologues denouncing their friends while sharing coffee with them. They mourn the life they should have lived while outwardly beaming about their yuppie existence.

In the end, the tone of the book suggests, there are no clean breaks, no clear consciences. No life lived to the fullest. No smile that is entirely honest. That to conform requires a bit of deception—toward the public and yourself. If that seems bleak, that’s because it is. But, as the trope goes, that’s life.

But it’s not a sad book. It’s a candid one. And a good one. It is reassuring, cathartic even.

“For each man,” writes the author, “saw in the others his own shortcomings. None of them was as successful as they once dreamed.”

Most among us—except, perhaps, the children of the one percent—know the feeling.

—Chris Haire
.
Downtown Magazine NYC (http://s.tt/1kesD)

Great compliment to Candace Bushnell's "One Fifth".

This is the same guy who wrote Speed Tribes, a similarly look-how-decadent-these-people-around-me-are story about young people in Tokyo in the 1990s. Might be worth a look.

We have looked here and like the people in the neighborhoodwith little exception, though in some respects out is a little too forward for our mindset overall. And expensive.