Speaking of Cloches

Review of Carnegie Hill by Jonathan Vatner (USA: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019)
by Ho Zhi Hui

Carnegie Hill kicks off with a description of clothes—and what clothes they are! The main character, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, settles on “a heather-gray skirt suit with matching cloche, a raw-silk blouse, nude hose and heels, and a three-carat diamond choker that Rick had given her the past Valentine’s day, two months after they met.” The coy vintage nod to cloches, the invocation of raw silk (reminiscent of expensive sushi restaurants), the Sex-and-the-City-esque syllables of “Penelope Bradford”, and the brutal money-waving of “three-carat diamond choker”: Vatner begins with an introduction guaranteed to set off anyone not in the 1%.

The novel, Vatner's first long-form publication after writing essays for media outlets such as The New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine, is about the inhabitants of the Chelmsford Arms, a building on the titular Carnegie Hill, in New York City. Pepper is portrayed as shiftlessly depressed: in marrying Rick, she hopes to gain access to a kind of delayed adulthood, and she joins the building’s co-op board as a first step. From there, Vatner takes us through the interior lives of the couples who live at the Chelmsford Arms. These include George and Birdie (him, retired and depressed; her, struggling to cope), Carol and Francis (her, depressed but medicated; him, a neurotic martyr with a heart condition), and Sergei and Caleb (him, Russian and closeted; him, black, out, and in love).

Vatner’s novel ostensibly hews to a tried-and-tested formula—reading it, I am most reminded of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. A plucky heroine moves into a new building, makes a new life, surrounded by an intriguing cast of supporting characters, and finds love along the way—it is a story that we all know and love, isn’t it? The problem is that it takes me a long time to figure out if Vatner means this work to be a lighthearted, escapist romp—the brightly-colored cover with its quirky line drawing of a blonde in a red dress entering a building under a green awning certainly suggests so—or a satirical novel of manners in the style of Edith Wharton.

One vital aspect of this confusion is that I can never quite decide if I am supposed to like Pepper or not. As a character, Pepper is thoroughly unlike Maupin’s heroine, Mary-Ann, despite the superficial similarities. Within the first few pages of Tales of the City, the naïve but plucky twenty-five-year-old Mary-Ann defies her conservative parents to stay in San Francisco; in contrast, thirty-three-year-old woman-child Pepper spends the novel alternately resenting her parents and spending their money.

In some passages of the novel, Pepper is the ridiculous caricature of an upper-class WASP liberal. Her femininity comes across as frustratingly helpless and her white guilt as fruitless and performative. Her initial look-I’m-so-free-spirited plans to hold a casual, pizza-party wedding predictably degenerate into a multi-million-dollar spectacle at the Temple of Dendur in the Met, which any Bridezilla would be proud of. In another revealing scene, Pepper is dining at a fashionable restaurant when the maitre’d turns away two black diners who do not have a reservation; feeling "complicit in something ugly," Pepper tries to convince the maitre’d to seat the couple, fails, offers the couple her friends’ table, is rejected, then lamely asks to buy them a drink, and is rejected again. Rick, her snake-oil salesman of a fiance, tells her, in all seriousness, “You have a beautiful heart.” Pepper begins to cry, “hat[ing] herself for being so breakable.” The hilariously cringe-worthy scene deftly reveals her near-total self-absorption.

In other passages, Vatner makes Pepper painfully petulant. Reflecting on her parents’ amicable divorce, she regrets that there was “no yelling, no battles over money or for the loyalty of their daughters, nothing remotely interesting.” She counsels herself “to accept that she would never understand anything about them.” This brand of woeful self-obsession is irritating but understandable in teenage protagonists like Holden Caulfield; it may even be glamorous in the sad narcissists of a Fitzgerald novel. But in a modern novel, in which Pepper ostentatiously goes to therapy to introspect in what feels like every other chapter, such adolescent whining makes it hard to relate to Pepper, or to root for her.

That is not to say that Vatner does not give Pepper redeeming qualities. Her white guilt is fueled by good intentions, and at various moments she displays a working moral compass. On one occasion, her husband Rick—the ostensible villain of the novel—assaults their black porter, Caleb, in a strange attempt to reclaim his masculinity after being mugged by someone else. When he tells Pepper what happened, she “[tries] to imagine Caleb hearing this. Caleb, who almost definitely did not want to be barked at as if he were a servant or a slave. No wonder he had been shaken.” When Rick refuses to take responsibility, claiming that he does not understand why his action is so bad, an incredulous, disgusted, and furious Pepper says, “You scared the living shit out of our staff member. You pinned a black man to the ground and basically told him you owned him. Need I say more?”

Vatner also attempts to complicate Pepper’s personality by having her search for surrogate parents who can provide much-needed guidance for life. As a character, Pepper becomes real when she spends hours lying on the floor of her apartment in order to spy on her neighbors Birdie and George through a peephole at the back of her bookcase. Her hope is to learn from a decades-old partnership how to fix her own marriage. Throughout the novel, Pepper sees her mother in almost every older woman she encounters: Patricia, in her anger, “glare[s] at Pepper exactly as Claudia Bradford did in her cruelest moment”; curled up in bed with Birdie, after a harrowing incident, Pepper “look[s] at her, at that button nose and black pixie hairdo and her tight, tentative smile, and wish[es] this woman had been her mother.” She knows that her spying is a sign of "regressing," and yet she can’t stop it, "eavesdropping for hours each day," even as she admits that she does not hear anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, Vatner glosses this terrible evidence of psychological turmoil in brief sentences here and there, as throwaway lines in scenes with Dr Riffler, the therapist. Without further detail, it is hard for the reader to attach either comic or tragic weight to those scenes.

Towards the end of the novel, it is clear that Vatner wants us to consider Pepper in a more favorable light, as someone who evolves in maturity. She has a revealing conversation with her father, a scene which asks us all to reconsider the validity of our childhood memories, even deeply felt ones. We learn that as a child she used to sleep in the hallway, feeling rejected by the fact that she was locked out of her parents’ bedroom. Her father Lewis confidently claims that the door was never locked, and instead tells her that when they found her sleeping in the hallway, he and his then-wife Claudia were touched, thinking that young Pepper was "trying to protect them from intruders." Stunned, she accepts this new reading of the past, and tells her father that she thinks she was instead "trying to protect [her]self."

Not only does Pepper become dependable to her elderly friends towards the end, she even acts decisively in a dramatic moment, saving her neighbor George from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In that scene, we momentarily see Pepper from Birdie’s eyes: “Penelope push[es] a canary-colored throw pillow into George’s chest to stop the bleeding and with her free hand dial[s] 911.” The detail of the free hand is crucial. Suddenly, Pepper is no longer the insecure teenage girl that she still thinks she is: she is now Penelope, a self-assured grown-up, handling the situation with suave aplomb.

As a satirical work, the novel has fun with the excesses and follies of the rich. An elderly woman dabs a rejuvenating stem-cell serum on her face, made from baby foreskins, and feels a “spurt of youthful energy.” The chefs at Pepper’s Met wedding ran a gourmet destination in rural Virginia, “where the food was styled to resemble dirt and weeds.” Beyond the mocking laughter, however, the novel also tries to show the unhappiness of the rich. We learn that snobby Patricia is actually dirt-poor—so poor that she never gives any tips to the staff. In that light, her pretense at wealth becomes more pathetic than anything else. While buying a present for his wealthy brother at a modern haberdashery on Madison Avenue, Francis agonizes over the cost. Initially he resolves to get a generous present, to be "above reproach," but finally he buys a tie clip on sale for $60, and refuses to buy a $280 tie to go with it. He justifies his purchase by thinking that he wants to show Jacob, in this subtle way, that “simplicity [is] the key to sophistication, and sophistication [is] the Jewish way." The self-defensive, self-delusional thinking here is terribly sad.

Although the novel offers such piercing moments of class critique, it does not pursue the critique through to the end. Instead, the narrative follows the lighthearted structure of a sitcom more than it does the satirical contrivances of a novel of manners. Pepper’s storyline ends as we all expect it to end: she leaves Rick, who was clearly a bad choice from the beginning. The other storylines involving the other couples are happily tied up with a denouement that reaffirms the power of love. Fortified by her decisive actions in the last part of the novel, Pepper embarks confidently on a new career as an event planner for nonprofits. She throws an engagement party for Caleb and Sergei (the only working-class couple and the only ones that I find myself caring about as a reader) and revels in her role as president of the co-op. A New York sunset is seen from the roof of Chelmsford Arms, and the curtain descends.

I get it—everyone’s pain is real, and we are all struggling to find our way, even those of us who live in apartments bordering Central Park. Love is complicated, whether you are married for forty days or for forty years. And yes: at the end of the day, we still believe in love, no matter how battered we are by our history and our difficulties. But by ending on such a pat note, Vatner cheapens his own theses. Even a hint of the troubles that lie ahead—will the love of the elderly couples survive real infirmity? will Caleb and Sergei be able to live together? will Pepper’s event-planning business crumble, as many such ventures do in New York City?—would make the novel’s ending less annoyingly glib. Unfortunately, Vatner’s novel wavers between Bridget Jones’s Diary and House of Mirth, and so it achieves neither.


When not teaching General Paper, Ho Zhi Hui reads and writes both poetry and prose, and is embarking on a master's degree in Translation and Interpretation at Nanyang Technological University in 2020. Her work has been published in the SingPoWriMo anthology and online journals Alluvium and OF ZOOS.