Our Kind of People

You’ll need to be in the right mood for Our Kind of People, but there’s an easy test to see if you are. If you read the first scene, in which Helen’s about to be late for an important social occasion, while her daughter Jemima worries that her mother might arrive late. Both think a great deal about the potential social consequences of lateness, and then the scene ends before you can see if any of those worries happened and if there was any social fallout from her arriving late. So if you’re in the mood for that level of slow-paced manners novel, the rest of this book will be perfect for you.

I’m frequently in the mood for stories of women going to their dressmakers for an outfit that’s flatteringly eye-catching without being too ostentatious, within the bounds of the style of the season, of course. So I just loved these scenes of who cut who at the opera or who to invite to social events or how to restyle last year’s fashions. It doesn’t quite feel like a manners novel, though, because the characters aren’t engaged in social rituals and following social codes as much as the characters are constantly worried about messing up. Our Kind of People is much more a story about people worrying about potential social consequences, than a book about social customs. Like real worries, a great deal of the characters’ stress comes from things that never come to pass.  All this time inside their heads  helps readers get to know our characters very well.

In a few places, the sense of scale felt slightly off for me. So much of the book is characters saying I couldn’t possibly! Whatever would people say?! about things like an unchaperoned walk in the park but when there are actual shocks and scandals, the family just absorbs them and moves on. There’s a great deal made of Helen’s husband having the wrong background for old New York families, but when he does things that I expected to be scandalous — driving his own family while dressed as a coachman, or losing so much money they lost their house — the family just sort of accepted and absorbed it without much fallout. The same thing happened for a certain romance that seemed shocking and scandalous. There are some real nerves of steel under theseold New York customs.

The slow pace really worked for me with the storyline about the elevated railroad. I imagine that having all the family’s money tied up in a terribly risky new business would have felt tense and grinding for the family. Most readers will know that there’s a train in Manhattan, and that the High Line was an elevated train line, but I didn’t know who built the elevated train or whether one of the founders got pushed out at the last minute or how any of that would go down.

The slow pace also worked for the gradual warming or cooling of relationships over time, or of a reputation changing. Maybe even social class changing? We get to see characters grow and change over the course of the novel, but remember that growing and changing might mean inviting a friend without an old-money background to the opera or holding a coming-out ball at a different venue.

We also get to see amazing scenes of old New York, with wildly different neighborhoods. This the a time where the new train was a speedy, upscale method of transportation around the city, and not dirty and constantly held for signal failure.

Our Kind of People would be a good fit for fans of Debutante, although of course the time period is wildly different.