February 2, 2008
By Porter Shreve
Adam Langer shifts settings from Chicago to New York but maintains his empathy and satirical touch
Chicago readers who loved Adam Langer's generous and entertaining "Crossing California" and its charming sequel, "The Washington Story," might be disappointed to learn that his new novel is set not in his native West Rogers Park but in New York City, and takes place not in the '70s or '80s but in the present day. Much of the appeal of Langer's first two books seemed to hinge on a uniquely regional nostalgia. But "Ellington Boulevard" proves that this gifted satirist and storyteller can move with ease from city to city and character to character.
Langer's preferred point of view is third-person omniscient, and here he shifts between nearly a dozen perspectives of characters affected by the sale, at the height of the real-estate bubble, of an ordinary, two-bedroom apartment in a five-story redbrick tenement on West 106th Street, a.k.a. Ellington Boulevard. The novel is loosely patterned after a musical or opera, beginning with an "Overture," followed by four sections, each with epigraphs from a famous New York song, and ending with a "Coda." The book's subtitle, "A Novel in A-Flat," plays on the real-estate and musical themes. And the story begins, appropriately, with a musician, Ike Morphy, virtuoso clarinetist for the R&B group the Funkshuns, who returns from his mother's funeral in Chicago to find a banner outside his rent-controlled apartment: "OPEN HOUSE TONIGHT!"
Ike has lived in Apt. 2B for 20 years, "long enough to remember when Columbus Avenue didn't have any gumbo restaurants or tapas bars or creperies, long enough, in fact, to remember when practically the only white guys around were the ones who drove in from Jersey looking to buy reefer." Though Ike has witnessed the neighborhood's swift gentrification, he is still shocked when Mark Masler, the son and heir of his recently deceased landlord, informs Ike that he's selling the place out from under him. Unlike his altruistic father, who had fixed Ike's rent at $350 per month on a handshake, Mark is a Hummer-driving habitue of anger-management classes whose sole dream is to open the city's first car wash/restaurant. Because Ike can't afford the $600,000 asking price, he has no choice but to gather his stuff and his dog, Herbie Mann, and find a new place to live.
The first couple to put an offer on the apartment are Rebecca Sugarman, literary editor at the once-esteemed, now-failing cultural magazine The American Standard, and her malcontented husband, Darrell Schiff, a teaching assistant and PhD candidate in comparative literature at Columbia University. They've decided to move even further uptown from their cramped, one-bedroom, university-owned walkup to make room for the child they're trying to conceive.
Through Rebecca's and Darrell's points of view, Langer unleashes a withering satire of publishing and academia. When Rebecca's new boss, Chloe, known in the magazine world as a turnaround artist, writes one of her mottos -- EIEIO: "Everyone Is Expendable in Organizations" -- on the dry erase board, "Rebecca suspected that this motto referred specifically to her. Clearly, she was the wrong person for her job; every time she proposed an article idea, Chloe would say, 'Let's move on,' and whenever Chloe made an editorial suggestion, such as cutting down one of Norman Burloff's reviews by 1,500 words or reviewing only books whose publishers purchased ad space, Rebecca couldn't help but sigh or shake her head."
Langer takes equal delight in showing Darrell's frustrations with graduate school and his weariness with academic conferences where "he has to stifle giggles while appearing with other windbag presenters offering insight into such topics as . . . 'Vulvular Ornamentation and The Golden Bowl' [or] 'Recent Letters to Penthouse Forum and the Queering of the American Tall Tale.' "
Feeling fraudulent in his work and inadequate in his marriage to a woman he perceives as richer, smarter and more capable than he, Darrell sets his sights on a young writing student whom he meets while killing time in the library. At first he wonders why Jane Earhart is so quick to say yes to a date when she has noticed he has a wedding ring. But the reader soon realizes that Jane is only entering the affair because her writing teacher has criticized her stories as ordinary and urged her to gather more experience: "88 percent of all first novels are based on one's own life, and as of now, Jane doesn't seem to have had much of one."
Though Langer structures his book around music, and he quotes Cole Porter, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, among others, his characters' relationships are more soap operatic than operatic, more reminiscent of a novel of manners than a musical. The section and coda titles -- "An Offer Is Made," "An Offer Is Accepted," "A Deal Is Closed," "Closing Costs Are Assessed" and "A Property Changes Hands" -- hew closer to a Jane Austen plot than a Stephen Sondheim composition. Everyone in "Ellington Boulevard" is trying to make a match -- even the married characters. Darrell gets together with Jane and flirts with the mortgage broker. Rebecca feels guilty for her part in Ike's eviction and begins to fall for him just as she learns she's pregnant with Darrell's child. Even loathsome Mark Masler finds love, with a girl half his age who's more than his match in brass and libido and thinks he should change his business plan to a car wash/strip club, because "hello, if some pathetic Viagra addict wanted to pay her fifty doubloons to whip off her top and flash her boobies, she wouldn't say no to that money."
"Ellington Boulevard" is not the first book to show how apartment hunting can stir the same passions as looking for love. In her 2000 book, "Sex and Real Estate," Harvard University professor Marjorie Garber argued that a house "often plays the role of lover, partner, significant other -- the dream date and the dream mate -- the one who will realize our desires and give a purpose to our plans and days." Langer's omniscient point of view, which roves restlessly from one character to the next (even on occasion into the thoughts of Ike's dog, and of the two pigeons roosting outside Apt. 2B), might seem jarring or outlandish at times. And the novel's limited use of dialogue and its preference for summary over scene, even at dramatic moments, gives it a compacted, hemmed-in quality. But these formal choices make perfect sense in a book about the most densely populated city in the U.S., the frenzy of the real-estate bubble and the delirium of falling in love.
Yet another player in the swirl of the apartment sale is broker Josh Dybnick, an aspiring actor and theater impresario, the man in the middle of these intersecting lives:
"As a broker, Josh meets people at key moments: getting married or divorced, starting new jobs or quitting them, arriving in New York full of hope or leaving it defeated. He sees buyers' and sellers' lives both onstage and off, sees where his clients and customers live, how much they make, who they think they are and who they aspire to be."
Most good drama derives from just such moments of transition, and this "Novel in A-Flat" proves the point in abundance. One can quibble about how to identify "Ellington Boulevard" -- 21st Century novel of manners or narrative musical -- but Adam Langer leaves little doubt that he is a rarity among contemporary writers: a keen-edged satirist who at the same time is too fond of his characters to dismiss them. Sometimes even fools and sinners deserve a happy ending.
Porter Shreve is the author of the forthcoming novel “When the White House Was Ours.” 
Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
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