‘Alternate Side’ asks readers to choose
Anna Quindlen captures the angst and anxiety of modern life with a story set in an upper-class Manhattan neighborhood that turns on an incident of parking rage.
Alternate Side (Random House, 284 pp., ★★★☆) is not my favorite Quindlen book, with its sharp social commentary and characters with “firstworld” problems, in lieu of her trademark warmth in depicting family life.
Well-meaning people who enlist others to clean their homes and nanny their children, prepare to be made uncomfortable by Quindlen’s astute observations about interactions between the haves and have-nots, and the realities of life among the long-married.
Nora Nolan is the director of the Museum of Jewelry in New York, so good at her job she is routinely recruited by wealthy people to helm their own nonprofit work. (This reads like mythology to me, but I’ll give Pulitzer Prize-winning Quindlen the benefit of the doubt.) Even Nora’s husband’s boss pursues her, a source of conflict as Charlie Nolan realizes his career has peaked.
Nora tries to do the right thing, donating her discarded clothes and ice skates to her housekeeper, Charity, and the beloved neighborhood handyman, Ricky. But she gets a sharp clapback to her self-satisfaction
Parking is precious in New York, and on Nora’s street. When a lawyer with anger issues takes a golf club to Ricky’s leg over a parking space, the neighborhood is divided. Charlie and the men back the lawyer, to the outrage of Nora and most of the women. The golf-club-wielding lawyer is delicious fodder for the tabloids, but erodes the neighborhood’s carefully cultivated community.
Quindlen’s book reads like a metaphor for our divisive times. Americans seem to live on alternate sides, scrapping any sense of unity in desperate pursuit of a parking space in the Big Apple of life.
There are no answers here, only a knowing look at the damage done to lives and communities when we fail to find some shared values in the middle of the road.