"We are a prosperous community," says Mark, the first narrator of Karl Taro Greenfeld's Triburbia, a set of interlocking stories set primarily in downtown Manhattan's TriBeCa. Prosperous--and cultured: "Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs in our iTunes playlists, our children in their secure little school." All is not well in the neighborhood, however; in this first story, Mark is seething because the drawing on a flyer warning about a child molester on the loose resembles him, and none of his friends understand why he's so upset by it.
That sort of emotional thickheadedness seems a bit more plausible as you spend more time with Greenfeld's characters, who tend to be too caught up in their own worries to pay much attention to anyone else. The stories are told in a mixture of first- and third-person voices, and while Greenfeld's female characters are somewhat more distinctive than the men, readers are more likely to remember the scenarios--one about the memoirist and journalist whose early fictionalizing catches up with him; another about the "gangster" who frets about his daughter being picked on in elementary school--than the people involved. Even the chapter headings emphasize street addresses over the men and women who live there. Like Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, Triburbia is a snapshot of a Manhattan subculture at a certain moment in time--in this case, ultimately more compelling for its field reporting than its storytelling. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com