Customer Reviews

Morningside Heights: A Novel

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This such an unusual book, that I'm not sure how to categorize it, except to say that it is an extremely subtle, highly enjoyable, satirical view of the Upper West Side of New York City, where opera singers and scientists mingle with shrinks and Hispanic doormen.

Anne and Charles are one such couple: He, an under-rated opera singer, has a studio at home in their rent-controlled Morningside Heights apartment; she, a former concert accompaniest, takes care of their three children while taking her microcosm of the world very seriously indeed. She thinks nothing of purchasing a thousand-dollar violin for her 3-year-old, but dresses her daughters in hand-me-downs to save money; she serves truffles and caviar at her dinner parties, but refuses to take a cab. One should hate such people, but the very subtle way in which each is portrayed makes the reader (at least this reader) love them instead.

Then there is Merritt, an internationally known writer who can't keep a man to save her life, and Morris, a curmudgeonly scientist who thinks it might be time to get married. Both dear friends of Anne and Charles, they hate each other mightily, but can't seem to find anybody else they like better.

Add to the mix a very odd and hilarious assortment of highbrow intellectuals who take themselves oh-so-seriously, and you have a modern-day comedy of manners that reminds one of Henry James.

I loved this book. It's not for everybody, but I found it refreshingly different and look forward to the next by this interesting author!

There are many positive things about this novel. The basic idea of exploring a community and how it shapes, and enhances, the lives of its cultured and intellectual residents is appealing. The characters have ideas and some depth. It's nice to see children depicted in a more or less realistic way. It's also nice to see Mendelson further develop her theme of domesticity and its power over the moods and well-being of those who experience it. Reading Home Comforts encouraged me to invest a little more in the domestic realm myself, although often my goals outstrip my grasp.

On the other hand, the book shows major weaknesses that perhaps are characteristic of beginning novelists. Basically, the plot is clunky. The characters' problems are developed and then--ridiculously--solved by means of an expedient that no one could possibly believe in. They inherit an apartment? In Manhattan? From a neighbor they barely knew? Give me a break!

I also felt that Mendelson wandered far from the economic realism of Austen or Trollope. We're supposed to believe that a family with three children, and expensive tastes, living on the income of one moderately successful person (moderately successful in THE ARTS) is able to send two children to private school and plans to send a third to a costly preschool? In Manhattan private schools cost about $25,000 a year, when all costs are factored in. So, for the two girls, we're at $50,000. Plus, they're planning on a $12,000 a year preschool for Stuart. We're at $62,000 just with tuition! And don't they have to plan for college? This is wildly unrealistic. Let's not forget that their domestic ambitions also require spending a lot on fancy foodstuffs. Plus, their cultural ambitions require much money for artistic endeavors, including expensive musical instruments for their children and private lessons.

I can't imagine how this could be possible, given the economic situation that Mendelson outlines. Given that she sets the situation up this way, though, it's even more ridiculous to imagine that this family will be driven from Manhattan to the hated suburbs in part because of a coop special assessment. Such assessments are time-limited. Anne couldn't take on an extra music student or two a week? She has a mom living in the area who adores her children. Her mom couldn't look after Stuart during those few extra hours? Her older two kids are already in school, but she can't step up her (highly flexible) work endeavors a notch? Instead, the family has to bag it and move to the suburbs?

And why can't they move to Brooklyn? This is never explained. I'm forced to conclude they couldn't move to Brooklyn because it wouldn't work for the plot. There are many cultured, musical, and intellectual people in Brooklyn. This family is depicted as owning a reasonable apartment in Manhattan. If sold, that could easily enable them to buy a very decent apartment with reasonable maintenance in Brooklyn. Why wouldn't they do that, instead of (inexplicably) going to Putnam county, which would require the family's earner, Charles, to commute an hour and a half each way every time he needed to go to the city for his job? This is absurd.

I believe Putnam county figures in the novel only so Mendelson can depict the sharpest possible contrast between the culture of the Braithwaites and the bumpkins who live in Putnam County. They are obese, they are inspid, and they don't even accept that the Braithwaite's daughter, with her appalling academic record, would automatically outrank the local yokels in terms of the school tracking system.

Sad to say, I think Mendelson is a snob. She had to set the novel up this way so that she could portray the full heartbreak of the threatened loss of community by a family so culturally deserving as the Braithwaites. Frankly, they might have learned something by seeing how the scorned people of Putnam managed their lives. But no, they're never forced to do this, because they inherit an apartment--and find the proof of their inheritance in a potato bin! This really is not a good ending. The plot dynamics are labored and it's hard to maintain interest when the reader can see a mile away what's going to happen.

To return to the positive, though, Mendelson does have a strong point of view on modern life and how it can best be lived and she situates her characters in a community that, as others have noted, almost becomes a character itself. In my view, in her future work she should think harder about the plot and try to find mechanisms for advancing the story that don't short circuit her characters' growth by solving their problems without requiring much, or anything, of them.

Thank goodness this is just the first book of a planned trilogy. Once you meet the Braithwaites in this, Mendelson's first detour into fiction, you will want more and more of them, their family, and their extended circle of friends. Delightful Manhattan neighborhood ambiance, urban optimism, marital stress...what's not to love?
Less than great literature, but way more than a good beach read.

Hatred is not the first emotion that one usually associates
with a favorite book, but for the first 250 or so pages of this 336-page
book, I was convinced that I did, indeed, heartily dislike Cheryl
Mendelson's Morningside Heights. The "typical" Morningside Heights
characters that populate this novel can be extremely irritating, with
their relentless self-made problems, inveterate narcissism, and attendant
(and tedious) therapy sessions. Despite all of the promise for annoyance
that Mendelson's first novel initially serves up, the author manages to
offer something wholly ingenious and even brave: completely unadulterated
optimism. I have yet to read a modern literary novel written for adults
that believes so unrelentingly in everything turning out just as it
should, and it is that quality that makes Morningside Heights one of the
more original and memorable books I have read in quite a long time.
Optimism does not normally strike me as a remarkable, or even necessarily
admirable, quality, but Mendelson wields it without irony, shame, or
sentiment, and the result is a story that is deeply satisfying in an
old-fashioned way. Mendelson's application of a type of storyline
(complete with a mystery, a buried treasure, and everyone getting exactly
what they deserve in the end) derived from classic children's literature
to adult literary fiction is absolutely inspired. Morningside Heights
gives us what we all want: profound satisfaction dressed up in literary
ingenuity.

Morningside Heights was truly a pleasure to read. The characters were all well-developed and believable, the plot was clever and satisfying, and the writing was rich and thoroughly entertaining. I'm looking forward to more from Ms. Mendelson in the future.

A certain smugness pervades the pages of "Morningside Heights," Cheryl Mendelson's paean to life on the Upper West Side. I picked up the book in the hopes that it would evoke the late Laurie Colwin, but I was disappointed. In the end, I felt that the self-absorption and entitlement of the ostensible protagonist, the stock supporting characters, and the utter predictability of the storyline made the second half of the novel drag and chafe. It's too bad, because there's a lot of intelligence here and I enjoyed the first chapter, which focuses more on the neighborhood than on any of the characters. But overall the book's tone of entitlement and pretension and its psychoanalytic fervor grated on me while the characters failed to sufficiently engage.

A glowing review in Newsday inspired us to read this funny, insightful, intelligent, compelling and totally entertaining novel. The characters are so well described you feel as if they could be you or one of your friends in true-to-life situations both humorous and challenging. Reminiscent of Jane Austen's novels, the author's description of this NYC neighborhood and its inhabitants will captivate and entertain you thoroughly. One of the best books I have read in many years and I await her next with anticipation. I hope and expect this novel to be well-received and well-loved by many. Very highly recommended.

This novel held me captive, and was missed when finished. This is the kind of book you will want to read from cover to cover, not missing a single word. The characters and the neighborhood (the main character) come alive, and you will want to know them all if you do not already.

In her first novel, "Morningside Heights," Cheryl Mendelson focuses on the various crises that befall a group of friends and neighbors living on the West Side of Manhattan. Charles and Anne Braithwaite's problems are mostly financial. They spend more money than they take in on their three children's music lessons and tuition, gourmet foods, and maintenance charges on their cooperative apartment. Charles is an opera singer who has never achieved stardom, and Anne has given up her career as a pianist to be a stay-at-home mom.

Charles and Anne have a motley crew of friends, such as the neurotic Merrit, a beautiful and scholarly woman who undermines her chances at happiness by always falling for the wrong men. She has always had a special enmity for a scientist friend of the Braithwaites named Morris, and Morris unexpectedly becomes a part of her life when he moves into the Braithwaite's building.

"Morningside Heights" is a psychological and sociological look at a group of quirky, self-absorbed, well-educated, and sophisticated urbanites who have a tendency to overdramatize the events in their lives. Although the characters are lively enough, Mendelson's writing style is stilted and her dialogue does not ring true. Mendelson also goes into each character's rambling inner thoughts in detail, and these passages are often more tedious than enlightening. There are some plot twists involving the estate of an elderly neighbor and Merrit's tortuous love life, but these surprises are not enough to save the book from its own pretentiousness.

The reviewer who noted that Cheryl Mendelson entered the rarified world of Laurie Colwin with this novel hit the nail squarely on the head. Mendelson goes Colwin one better though by adding a mystery to this study of a circle of Manhattan friends and acquaintances.

Anne and Charles Braithwaite are living a life under pressure of the forces of capitalism. Their apartment and belongings take on the air of genteel decay while they stuggle ever more to meet tuition payments for tony private schools and music education for their three children. An unexpected (or was it?) fourth pregnancy threatens to cut the very fragile thread keeping their household together.

Finding both strength and exasperation in their friends, families and belief systems, Anne and Charles confront the unspoken contract of their marriage while trying to maintain their intellectual and, to their view, moral superiority of their way of life.