DOUBLE- ENTENDRE
CLASS TAKES SATIRICAL AIM AT BROOKLYN GRADE- SCHOOL PARENTS
Class By Lucinda Rosenfeld Little, Brown and Co. 336 pp; $ 34
We are i n Brooklyn or at least a certain echelon of it, which means a crisis has arisen over what constitutes an appropriate snack for a third- grader. One mom has brought Chips Ahoy! cookies laced with Reese’s Pieces into the home of Karen Kipple, another mom.
“That was so sweet of you,” says Karen, seething with revulsion. ( All that polyunsaturated oil.) She tries to delay opening the pack, hoping the danger will pass.
“The truth is that we had a super- late lunch, and I let Ruby have this huge cupcake for dessert,” she burbles, referring to her daughter.
“And, to be honest,” Karen continues, “she goes a little insane when she gets too much sugar! I mean, even more insane than she already is.”
If anyone is insane in Class, Lucinda Rosenfeld’s stiletto- sharp new novel about the quandaries and neuroses of a small swath of privileged white publicschool parents in Brooklyn, it’s Karen. At 45, she works for a nonprofit that provides food to poor children, and is about as self-conscious, selfinvolved and self-questioning a person as you’re likely to meet.
It’s the rare encounter or decision that doesn’t fling her into a whirlpool of semantic, emotional and sociological analysis and second-guessing about whether she (as well as everybody else) is conveying the correct impression and living the correct way. Here she is described, for instance, after trying and failing to imbue her daughter with the requisite degree of empathy for an African- American classmate, Empriss, who lives in a homeless shelter.
“What was Karen doing wrong?” Rosenfeld writes. “She feared the only thing she’d accomplished by sending her child to a mixedincome school was to make Ruby feel venomous toward at- risk children. Or was she expecting too much from an 8-year-old?”
The novel is called Class, but it’s just as preoccupied with race, and Rosenfeld deserves credit for taking on this minefield. Karen and her “chronically underemotive” husband, Matt, a low-incomehousing advocate who is “currently earning zero dollars per week,” try to live according to their values. This effort entails, among other things, sending their daughter to a public school, Betts, where white students are in the minority.
It’s an admirable ideal, but Karen has a hard time with the reality. She’s reflexively dismayed at various elements of the African- American experience that she witnesses among Ruby’s classmates — the “beaded braids, buzz cuts and neon backpacks”; the names, like Sa’Ryah, “with their apostrophes, dashes, purposeful misspellings and randomly added letters”; — and then reflexively worried that she’s at heart a racist.
But Mather, the predominantly white public school a few blocks away — where Karen impulsively enrolls Ruby (with the help of some forged documents) after an unpleasant incident with a bully named Jayyden, and where the children have names like Harper and Hudson — is hardly better. Betts has no money; Mather has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from parents at an auction and is considering hiring a meditation coach.
In a series of skillfully exe- cuted set pieces, Rosenfeld skewers the pretensions and preoccupations of women for whom “parent” is both verb and competitive sport. At a Mather PTA meeting, an extended exercise in passiveaggression disguised as compassionate listening, a plan to buy Ziploc bags as an anti-lice measure is jeopardized when one of the mothers announces that she feels “uncomfortable directing PTA money to the plastics industry.”
Meanwhile, at home, the increasingly preoccupied Karen and the increasingly TV- sports- watching Matt are not speaking and also not having sex, the marital equivalent of the loaded gun onstage in the first act of a play. It all piles up until Karen boils over.
It’s a relief to watch her spin a bit out of control, lying, cheating and saying shockingly rude things to other mothers, and a joy to meet her sexy, hedonistic former college classmate Clay Phipps, a hedge- fund gazillionaire who has a refreshing lack of interest in appearing to be a good person.
At lunch with Karen, Clay whips out his chequebook. “How much does Starving Children or whatever it’s called need?” he asks, referring to Karen’s nonprofit, which is actually called Hungry Kids and features a program in which students learn about healthful eating from actors dressed as vegetables. Trying to entice her into an affair, he says: “The way I see it, we’re both going to be dead soon anyway. What do we have left — 30 years, 35, 40 if we’re lucky?”
It’s easy to make fun of the hipster bohos of Brooklyn, and many have done it before. Luckily, Rosenfeld is an astute anthropologist whose satire reaches fresh levels of absurdity. Thus, the building Matt and Karen live in is a “converted 19th- century macaroni factory,” whatever that is. The dads at Ruby’s new school all wear navyblue ski caps, even though it is hot outside.
At Mather, the “arts enrichment” program includes a fourth- grade trip to La Bohème and, for the third grade, a “kid- friendly version of Schindler’s List” performed by “an experimental puppeteering troupe.”
Rosenfeld does not mean for us to like Karen all the time, and indeed, the character describes herself as a “neurotic elitist.” But as we ponder the bigger questions the book poses about race and class in America, subjects bravely tackled by the author through this flawed character, it can be exhausting to be always inside Karen’s brain, with its ricocheting emotions and kamikaze self- analysis. The unexamined life is surely not worth living, but the overexamined life — that’s a different kind of hell.
You want these characters to stop it with their aggressive parenting; their law- enforcement attitude toward food; their Talmudic attention to even the briefest encounter. And by the end of the book, Karen is learning to relax, at least a little, and to fetishize her emotions a bit less. It would be nice if we could all do that. Shut up. Just do the thing. Give the kid the cookie.