Cobble Hill

I was delighted to receive the ARC for Cecily von Ziegesar’s upcoming novel, Cobble Hill. I went into this one expecting Gossip Girl for adults, but I found was a more of a neighborhood ensemble novel, like Jonathan Vatner’s Carnegie Hill or Candace Bushnell’s One Fifth Avenue. Cobble Hill’s in Brooklyn, so these neighbors are all in separate houses, not in the same building, creating a wonderfully gossipy, interconnected setting more like in Abbi Waxman’s Other People’s Houses, or Rosie Millard’s The Square.  I’m realizing I read this genre a lot, so maybe my next roundup post will be books about neighborhood secrets and affairs.

The characters of Cobble Hill are all a bit over-the-top, in delightfully Brooklyn-creative ways. The novel takes us into four families: a former pop star and his former model wife, a magazine editor (kinda) and her novelist husband, an artist who works in lava and fake blood, a designer who makes, uh, surveillance equipment? creepy manikins? sex toys? all of the above, really. Next to the wealthy creative types are the struggling Brooklyn creatives, a school nurse who’s also a drummer and her music-teacher husband.

I loved how dramatic the secrets were, with spouses pretending to have a debilitating disease, disappearing for months at a time,  pretending they haven’t been fired, cheating, stealing, lying, etc., etc. Mandy, an ex-model, feels tired, heavy, and lazy. So tired and lazy that she has a bed moved into their living room, and pretends she’s been diagnosed with MS. Somehow readers are led to this with almost sympathy and understanding for her extreme lie. Of course this is a horrible lie, but haven’t we all said “I think I’m coming down with something” as an excuse to lie in bed and watch trash TV? Somehow, this ridiculous and outrageous lie seems like someone a real person would do.

When Wendy gets abruptly demoted from her upscale magazine editor’s role to a maternity leave coverage on more of a middle-class imprint, she doesn’t mention it to her husband. And she keeps not-mentioning it. Again, we’re somehow led to this massive secret with understanding, it’s barely even lying when her husband Roy doesn’t pay much attention to the things she does say.

In Cobble Hill, British author Roy Clark has written a rainbow of similar novels. Orange is the most popular one,  although it seems like no one has ever read it all the way through, not even his wife, Wendy. He’s at work on his new book, Red, or maybe Gold, or maybe Red and Gold, questioning whether his new work — which rambles into questionable sex-in-space scifi pulp territory — is too much of a departure from the rest of the rainbow series.  I couldn’t help comparing this to the departure from Gossip Girl and It Girl found here in Cobble Hill.

But it’s not a total departure, is it? Because Gossip Girl begins with a sharp eye for the fashion and customs of a certain group of Manhattanites, and then softly exaggerates the highs and lows, until it’s less a manners novel than a manners  fantasy. That’s the feeling in Cobble Hill, too only this time with the focus on Brooklyn creatives instead of prep school heiresses.