Vintage Contemporaries: a novel
Dan Kois (Harper, 2023)
Dan Kois’s lovely novel starts in 1991, with young Emily Thiel, newly in New York, getting her first job as assistant to a literary agent. Her first new friend is called Emily; in today’s terms, we might call them Lawful Emily and Chaotic Emily. Emily T. keeps jobs, even if they are terrible, and Other Emily is the employee of your nightmares, until she quits on a whim. “She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma. She knew that she was the boring one. But she also knew that Emily depended on her, and that Emily was extraordinary.” (Kois throws us a bone by letting Genius Emily rename Emily Thiel ‘Em’, for the two sections of the book set in the Nineties. In the sections set after the turn of the millennium, Emily takes her name back. To which Emily says, “That’ll confuse the readers, but sure.”)
Em also gets to know her mother’s friend Lucy, a divorced mom with a novel to sell. It’s less ‘literary’, that is, gloomy, than most of the well-received novels of the time, but Em warms to it. It’s about two young women in New York, friends with opposite temperaments… wait a minute, are we swallowing our own tail? Well, waving at it, certainly. Kois is not shy of the theme with variations: he will give us two pairs of sisters, two pairs of friends crying together after pregnancy scares, and plenty of subtle-but-not-secret foreshadowing.
Kois has said in interviews that this book is, in part, an homage to Laurie Colwin, a novelist and food writer of the later twentieth century, who died too young. I’m taking that to mean that Lucy has some of her attributes, especially the ability to write well and seriously, without dwelling in realms of despair and gloom. Lucy’s philosophy is optimism: “I love writing about characters who are living the best they can, who are in love, whose circumstances may be complicated but whose days are full of joy. I love writing about the food they cook, the wine they drink, and the hangovers they don’t regret.” Unfortunately, the occasion for the essay in which she says this is an announcement that she has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease – and her a Mets fan, with a Yankee disease! Colwin left us a couple of great memoirs with recipes, and Emily helps Lucy write one, as well.
We leap ahead to 2005, and find Emily with a husband and a baby, and a much better job at a small publisher, though the babysitter costs nearly as much as she makes. They live in Manhattan, but just barely–they’re in Inwood, up at 207th Street. She encounters Emily again, and they have lunch, but there’s a real question about on what terms they could become friends again. The next chapter, set in 1993, unpacks some of the difficulties that led their friendship to unravel.
That chapter is also a deep dive into New York’s housing situation. Em lives in a dark, damp apartment on the Lower East Side, whose kitchen is “the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now.” Chaotic Emily lives a few blocks away in an actual squat: an illegally occupied building that is as squalid as it sounds, but is also communal and political in some ways we have forgotten about.
We also get a day-to-day view of the publishing industry, and the terrible entry-level jobs it offers bright young English majors. We see Emily progressing through its ranks, beginning with the tedium of slush piles, the casual ogling and sexist comments, the lousy pay, the general sense that this hazing has been going on forever. Later in her career, when she has an assistant instead of being one, she is proud to have survived tough, demanding bosses; she also sees that some of the demanding conditions were genuinely out of line. The general lack of respect for assistants lies too deep in the culture to fix, but she can steer a few people away from outright sexual harassment, before leaving for another job, herself.
Being a mother is a delight for Emily, as little Jane progresses from being a squashable baby to being a three-year-old who believes she can do cartwheels. She also makes time to work with Other Emily’s site-specific theatrical productions, which have somehow progressed from the pipe dreams of their youth to actual shows, with actors and sets and audiences. Emily’s editorial eye is actually just what is needed; her questions and suggestions make the work better, and it’s enough.
Any
Good Books, March 1 2023
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