Given the success of shows such as "Gossip Girl," "90210" and the various installations of "The Real Housewives," there is clearly a thriving albeit lowbrow market for stories about the sordid and indulgent adventures of the privileged. And I suppose it is natural for authors to respond to this demand by writing novels about the fabulously rich and wealthy.
But really, if I read another "My Life in Manhattan" or "Unhappy on the Upper East Side," I am going to flat out scream.
Case and point: the new novel "The Heights," penned by film-industry veteran Peter Hedges.
Although Hedges, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (2002's "About a Boy") and critically lauded director (2003's "Pieces of April"), has received rave reviews for his work in the past, his talent fails to translate to the pages of "The Heights." And while some of the novel's trouble lies in its stilted prose and two-dimensional characters (superficial in spite of their hefty first-person monologues), I believe that its main problem is not form, but content. In contrast to Hedges' raw portrait of a working class family in both the novel and film versions of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" (1991; 1993), the trials and tribulations of Tim and Kate Welch the young urban working protagonists of "The Heights" come off as hopelessly trite and contrived.
Granted, the Welch family is not quite the Waldorfs. Neither old money nor nouveau riche, Tim and Kate don't own a mansion (their apartment, in fact, is painfully small and cramped, at least according to Kate), they aren't chauffeured around town and they don't ship their sons off to fancy private preschools.
And that's okay anywhere but the Heights, a neighborhood that Hedges depicts as brimming with hordes of stockbrokers and business executives wedded to stay-at-home moms (or, occasionally, dads). In another setting, Tim and Kate would be lucky and stable, but in Brooklyn Heights they are out of place, precariously embedded in a world of stuffy parties, pre-planned play-dates and neighborhood-sponsored Yuletide Balls.
This might be somewhat interesting, except that Hedges can't seem to get past his misqualification of Tim and Kate as "middle class." Hedges tries to demonstrate that Tim and Kate are better, more human and relatable, than their callous neighbors, but instead in an age of economic scarcity they come off as ungrateful and just plain silly.
So although the Welches' life in the Heights may appear simple and quaint to Anna Brody Kate's wealthy confidant and Tim's mistress I don't think that most Americans will sympathize with their hardships in the Heights. The majority of readers, in fact, would probably be thrilled to have the relative financial security of Kate and Tim.
Readers may be put off by the obvious discrepancy between how Hedges seems to want us to view his characters and how they come off on the page. Hedges creates dialogue, for example, aimed at convincing readers of Kate's innate goodness. But when approximately half of the novel consists of Kate's whiny first-person narrative, it's hard to take Hedges seriously. Often and, I'm pretty sure, unintentionally Kate comes off as petty, self-centered and just plain annoying. And her willingness to have an affair with her Hollywood star of an ex-boyfriend does not help her case.
In light of such unlikeable characters, I was disappointed by "The Heights." If you want to read a novel about the New York-dwelling elite, I wouldn't suggest this one. Instead, I went on the prowl for superior stories of the City's upper class, and found Wendy Wasserstein's "Elements of Style" a novel I would recommend as didactic reading material for any "Gossip Girl" fan. Unlike Hedges, Wasserstein constructs an apt, nuanced high-society chronicle. She is not captivated or mesmerized by her Upper-East-side protagonists, but amused.
