Carnegie Hill

Penelope "Pepper" Bradford may be rich and unemployed, but she can't be said to be idle. When she and her wealth manager fiancé, Rick, move into the Chelmsford Arms, located in Manhattan's tony Carnegie Hill neighborhood, she immediately joins the building's co-op board. Unlike many of literature's rich folk, Pepper is brutally self-aware: "At least the co-op board was something to distract her from the black hole of her achievements."

At her first board meeting, Pepper meets Francis, who still thinks of himself as "a fatherless Jewish boy from the Bronx... not a retiree in the godless Upper East Side." Francis shares Pepper's progressivism, and they both want to do something about the building's lack of minority representation. They are met with resistance from the old guard, which bristles at anything that gestures toward change.

Carnegie Hill's perspective shifts among Pepper, Rick, Francis and three other halves of the four couples whose lives play out at the Chelmsford Arms. Set in facelifted mid-2010s Manhattan, the book has the signposts of a sudsy drama: when secrets are revealed, it's against a backdrop of brand-name luxury goods. But Jonathan Vatner's debut novel is no soap opera: it's more of a juicy exposé. At one point, Francis tells Chelmsford Arms porter Caleb, who is romancing closeted doorman Sergei, that Kafka's The Trial "will teach you everything you need to know about the politics of this building"; Carnegie Hill can teach readers something about the politics of integrity in an endlessly morphing American city. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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