THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17IT’S LATE 2016,and Eva Lindquist is dis-
traught. The chilly, exacting Upper West
Side socialite has gathered a circle of syco-
phants at her Connecticut country house to
witness her gnashing her veneers over the
recent election of Donald Trump. Swirling
her glass of wine, she remains puzzled and
furious at the blithe acceptance of this
apocalyptic event by her feckless husband,
Bruce, a wealth manager, and her stand-
ard-issue Manhattan leisure-class coterie:
the bickering artsy couple, the hanger-on
magazine editor with no money, the diffi-
dent gay decorator. (All of the women
seem to be some derivative of Iris Apfel.)
Eva is the kind of perennially aggrieved
cosmopolitan who in movies is depicted
aggressively slapping on body lotion be-
fore bed. Even as she cows the members of
her social set, she remains the sun around
which they orbit; her friends spend all of
their time talking either to her or about her.
She’s a tabula rasa, taut as piano wire as
she tosses out withering rejoinders like
beads at Mardi Gras. But she is also
prescient, warning that Trump will manip-
ulate the media to rip the country to
shreds, even as her privileged petting zoo
shrugs off all the doom and gloom.
“The news isn’t news anymore,” she la-
ments, “it’s just pompous opinionating, the
purpose of which is to keep us anxious, be-
cause these people... know that as long as
they can keep us anxious, as long as they
dangle the carrot of consolation in front of
us, they’ve got us hooked. They’re no dif-
ferent than the French papers in 1940, just
more sophisticated. And more venal.”
Determined not to be caught behind ene-
my lines, she impulsively buys a grand but
tattered apartment in Venice. It’s a deci-
sion that will fling the lives of her self-in-
volved cabal hither and thither, like rain-
drops being shaken off an umbrella.
There is an art to writing about unlikablepeople while still engaging the reader to in-
vest in their indulgence, vanity and, yes,
happiness. Tracking the fallout wrought by
Eva’s acquisition, Leavitt unfurls a droll
drawing-room pastiche that evokes la dol-
ce vitaas “Seinfeld” episode. His boorish
elites argue over the altruism of Barbara
Kingsolver, whether Jean Rhys would
have been anything without Ford Madox
Ford, and the true symbolism of the pussy
hat, all while dropping words like
“ouroboros” and “concupiscence” in ev-
eryday conversation. It’s Aaron Sorkin onsteroids. And surprisingly compelling.
Leavitt has claimed John Cheever and
Grace Paley as influences, and it shows
here: His dissection of the pampered New
Yorkers’ reaction to Trump’s election,
which they treat as a personal affront, is
lethal and also kookily endearing. These
poor rich people, wringing their hands at a
country they no longer recognize, when
what they’re truly mourning is the death of
their own relevance. You can almost hear
Elaine Stritch warbling “The Ladies Who
Lunch” in the next apartment.
At one point, Aaron, a bitter, unemployed
editor in Eva’s circle of faux bonhomie,
tries to look at the bright side of the elec-
tion. “When writers start to feel oppressed
again,” he says, “they’ll start to write books
worth reading instead of all of that idiotic
upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal
navel-gazing crap we got when Obama
was president.” Leavitt, cleverly crafting a
New Yorker cartoon in words, proves there
is still some navel-gazing worth reading.
His autopsy of the current liberal ennui is
not particularly trenchant or surprising,
but it’s certainly amusing. And in this
ghastly year, can’t we all use more of
that? 0First-Class Problems
A novel sends up the Manhattan elite in the wake of the 2016 election.
By MICHAEL CALLAHAN
SHELTER IN PLACE
By David Leavitt
366 pp. Bloomsbury Publishing. $26.
MICHAEL CALLAHAN,a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair, is currently at work on his third
novel.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HAYLEY POWERS THORNTON-KENNEDY
NEARLY HALFWAY THROUGHCorinna Val-
lianatos’s new novel, “The Beforeland,”
Audrey, a young woman who has recently
lost her husband to suicide, reflects on an
episode that helped shape her sense of self.
While working as a theater usher in the
summer after high school, she spent most
of her time reading and dreaming about
how she would devote her life to books in
some way. Then, when she was suddenly
fired by her exacting boss, she realized
“she would never be this kind of woman,
who calmly and with surgical elegance
separated the wheat from the chaff. Aud-
rey was the chaff. She lay scattered.”
Vallianatos fills her novel with others
who might be considered chaff, giving
space and dignity to those plagued by their
failures to launch. There’s Audrey’s older
husband, Wilson, an adjunct poetry profes-
sor who, unable to write his book, finds his
relevance slipping away. Once his bright-
eyed student, Audrey embarked with him
on a dispassionate affair, which led to a list-
less marriage and the kind of sex that Aud-
rey describes as “orifice hunting.”
Audrey’s younger brother, Stone Jay, is a
young man who lives “beneath the surface
of respectability.” (The complexities of
their relationship call to mind Jenny Offill’s“Weather,” and the concern of keeping
your siblings alive.) There’s also Audrey’s
mother, Clarice, who spends her waning
days in an assisted living facility and who
seems to understand that her unremark-
able life has set her children on their own
paths of mediocrity. Their quiet lives are
set against a Southern California backdrop
of nondescript strip malls filled with “wig
stores, gun stores, health food stores” and
a failing desert motel helmed by Elena,
who is also weighed down by her own
hopeless future.
The characters’ lives intersect with
those of a pair of loners who at first are sim-
ply called “the boy” and “the grand-
mother,” who live their lives even further
on the margins. Vallianatos’s evocative de-
scriptions cut to the quick here: The boy
“looked like poverty, a point of inconse-
quence pinned to the earth. He looked like
crooked teeth. He looked like skinny limbs.
He looked like an aluminum scrap of wind.
At 18 he looked 12.”
The grandmother, Doreen, has kept her
grandson on the move, eschewing the
forces of capitalism that order the rest of
our lives. They drive hundreds of miles
from Humboldt County to the hinterlands
of Southern California, where towns pock-
mark the desert and people struggle toleave some kind of mark before they go.
Vallianatos’s gorgeous descriptions of
these Inland Empire communities provide
a dreamy quality to the windswept lives of
her characters, who scheme at building
something bigger for themselves.
Doreen eventually finds a space to stop
running from her memories, in the same
assisted living facility where Audrey’s
mother waits out her own life. The boy
must now navigate his own life, without his
oppressive grandmother.
For all their medium-size ambition, the
characters seem unwilling to reckon with
their present situations, despite the fact
that the novel opens with a gunshot — a
kind of wake-up call for all involved. While
Vallianatos allows them room to chart
their disappointments and try to wriggle
out of the constrictions they face, their
stories remain uneven. With so many peo-
ple to follow in such a slim novel, connec-
tions feel fleeting even as the disappoint-
ments accumulate. And the reader won-
ders: Who are they allowed to be beyond
their failures?
Even so, Vallianatos’s haunting and pre-
cise writing captures the folly of believing
in possibility in a country where capitalism
is king and most are left out of its abun-
dance. 0Desert Winds
This novel follows listless lives in California’s hinterlands.
By KAROLINA WACLAWIAK
THE BEFORELAND
By Corinna Vallianatos
163 pp. Acre Books. Paper, $19.
KAROLINA WACLAWIAKis the author of “Life
Events,” “The Invaders” and “How to Get Into
the Twin Palms.”