The Trollope of the Upper West Side

First-time tourists to New York City are often intimidated by its size, its noise, its hustle and bustle but, with the exception of a few brave souls, most fail to experience the city as the natives do: a collection of small individual neighborhoods, each with its own colorful personality.

"New York is a series of different communities with long intimate histories, a reality that is very hard for outsiders to grasp," says author Cheryl Mendelson. "Unless they have friends or relatives who live here, this [New York] is completely invisible to them."

With her fiction debut, Morningside Heights (see review on p.123), Mendelson evocatively renders the Upper West Side neighborhood that has been her home for 12 years. A liberal, middle-class community of musicians, professors, students, and other well-educated professionals, it is now under siege from the corrosive effects of rapid gentrification.

Reflecting this tension are Mendelson's main characters, Anne and Charles Braithwaite. Charles is a "second-rank baritone at the Met." Anne, a once promising pianist who cut back on her career to care for their three children, thinks nothing about spending lavishly (much to her husband's resentment) on private schools, music lessons, and choice delicacies from Zabar's to nurture her family's bodies and souls. But when a surprise pregnancy and an unexpected increase in their co-op apartment's maintenance fees force the Braithwaites to consider leaving their beloved home for the wilds of suburbia, their normally happy marriage is strained to a crisis point.

"My story is completely made up, but the context is very real," remarks Mendelson. "Rents and prices are going up, strangers are moving into the neighborhood. The elderly are being displaced." But she doesn't see this as a purely New York problem. "In an odd way, Morningside Heights is about everyone. It represents the plight of the middle class in a very pure form. The cultural and social values that middle-class people take for granted are endangered. That was the impulse behind the book."

Inspired by "The Barchester Chronicles," Anthony Trollope's series of novels about Victorian provincial life, Mendelson envisions a Morningside Heights trilogy. "The second one is already in draft but I still have a lot of polishing to do. The third novel is just a concept now. Some of the same characters will reappear but there is no continuing plot."

It is no accident that Morningside Heights, with its multiple characters and plot lines, has the feel of a densely textured 19th-century novel. Mendelson read Trollope, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens while writing her book. "They all write with a moral to the story," says Mendelson. "I admire Austen enormously. She is such a spare writer. She advances her story with subtle emotions and clues. And there is Dickens's love of humanity, and his moral and comic sense. With Trollope, you have a sense of a particular community, of how its institutions are interconnected with the private lives of its residents."

Although this is her first published novel, the former corporate lawyer and philosophy professor is not a novice. "I wrote most of a novel when I was 22 but it was terrible and I burned it. And there are two more novels that no one is ever going to see." It took the surprising success of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, an 884-page best-selling tome that Mendelson worked on for eight years, to give her the confidence to write Morningside Heights. "People told me they not only liked the book," she says, "they liked my writing."

In a way, there is a thematic connection between Mendelson's fiction and nonfiction. The author attributes the popularity of Home Comforts to a growing sense among Americans that relearning the domestic arts of their grandparents, of creating a warm, comfortable home, is a worthwhile and meaningful act. With Morningside Heights, she wants readers to connect with her characters' struggles to trust and hold on to their core values. "For the Braithwaites and the other residents of Morningside Heights, the world is not without goodness, morals, and meaning."