Triburbia

Tribeca, the posh neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, serves as the background for Karl Taro Greenfeld’s new novel Triburbia. With a large cast of characters, one could reasonably argue that Tribeca itself is another such character, as important a factor in each story as anything else, and certainly vividly depicted.

To be fair, Triburbia is less a cohesive novel and more a collection of oddly intertwining short stories. There is plenty of overlap, often unveiled in unexpected twists and turns. I marked a page in the first story that first introduced the major players, and I proceeded to return to this passage again and again to ‘check off’ who had appeared in subsequent stories.

I see my friends across the street, fellow fathers in their late thirties, prosperous to different degrees, professionals in the arts. There is the sculptor, the playwright, the film producer, the memoirist, the photographer, even the “contractor” — our local thug– most of them ostensibly artists but actually businessmen. They believe their awareness of their own hypocrisies keeps them from being hypocrites. I’m not an artist qua artist, as they are. But most days I join them and we make our way in twos and threes to a steak house recently taken to serving breakfast.”

The narrator of that initial story would be named “the sound engineer” if included in the list, and he helps to set the stage for a look inside this affluent community. As each story unfolds, more is learned about individuals through their histories and the choices that have brought them to live in Tribeca. The history of Tribeca as an artist’s enclave and its development as a community for the super wealthy affects each character in different ways, as well, leaving a non-city dweller of very modest income like myself in wonder at the ways in which even the rich can feel so monetarily inadequate in an environment of plenty.

I found this book to be quite high on literary quality but low on redeemable characters. Honestly, I want fictional characters to be a bit messy and realistically flawed, but this group? No doubt about it, they are a hot mess. I wonder about Greenfeld’s intentions with this novel– Is this social commentary? Are these characters/places/scenarios even realistic in this cultural subset?

That being said, I did enjoy reading their stories, even as I was alternatively disgusted with some of the choices they so freely and easily made in their personal lives. I find Greenfeld’s writing sharp, and even when the events he laid out made me terribly uncomfortable or unable to withhold my judgment, there was never any doubt that I’d keep on reading. Maybe I kept on keeping on in hopes that I’d be presented with meaningful and respectful relationships between romantic partners, spouses, or parents and children. Even though I was frequently disappointed on that front, I still felt wowed by the storytelling in Triburbia.

Have you ever loved a book but hated the characters? Tell us all about it in the comments section!

Dawn’s version of suburbia fits her just perfectly. Her life stories are chronicled on her blog, my thoughts exactly.