Reviews for Alternate side : a novel

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A Manhattan comedy of manners with a melancholy undertow.The vagaries of parking in New York City figure prominently in Quindlen's ninth novel, which begins with a moment of parking karma: Charlie Nolan has just scored a permanent spot in the small outdoor lot on his Upper West Side block. Charlie, an investment banker, and his wife, Nora, who runs a jewelry museum, live in a town house surrounded by other town houses owned by affluent types much like themselves; the only blight on the block is a single-room-occupancy building. The Nolans have been married for almost 25 yearsnot unhappily, not quite serenelyand are parents of college-age twins. Nothing much happens in the first 100 pages or so, but the author's amusing digressionson dogs, rats, parking tickets, housing prices, and other city obsessionskeep things moving. Then a violent act shatters the calm on the Nolans' block: Hot-tempered Jack Fisk, partner in a white-shoe law firm, takes a golf club to mild-mannered Ricky Ramos, the neighborhood handyman, who's had the temerity to block the entrance to the parking lot with his van. And simmering issues of race and class boil over. (Earlier, when Nora visits Ricky at his home in the Bronxgetting lost, of course, on the waythere's a whiff of Bonfire of the Vanities.) The golf-club incident also has consequences for the Nolan family. The title of the book, it turns out, doesn't just refer to parking. Quindlen's sendup of entitled Manhattanites is fun but familiar. And though the author has been justly praised for her richly imagined female characters, Nora can seem more a type than a full-bodied woman.There's insight hereabout the precariousness of even the most stable-seeming marriagesand some charm, but the novel is not on a par with Quindlen's best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* By New York City standards, or anyplace else for that matter, Nora and Charlie Nolan lead a charmed existence. Their vintage townhome has appreciated in value; their twin son and daughter are doing well in college; and they each are employed in fiscally, if not emotionally, satisfying jobs. Their dead-end street is populated by an eclectic but mostly homogeneous group of professionals and stay-at-homes, millennials and matrons, housekeepers and handymen. Some neighbors are barely tolerated as casual acquaintances, while others are friends and all turn out for Christmas parties and summer barbecues. Then one day, their idyllic setting is shattered when Jack Fisk, one of their more volatile neighbors, violently attacks Ricky, their beloved jack-of-all-trades caretaker. In retrospect, it would seem to Nora that with each impact of Jack's golf club on Ricky's body, another fissure splintered the Nolans' carefully constructed world. The quotidian lives of Manhattanites have long fascinated discerning writers, from Wharton to McInerney, and with her ninth novel, best-selling Quindlen (Miller's Valley, 2016) takes her place within this pantheon. Though she writes with a deceptive casualness about dashed dreams and squandered hopes, Quindlen's quietly precise evaluation of intertwined lives evinces a keen understanding of and appreciation for universal human frailties. Complex themes and clever motifs make this eminently suitable for book groups. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Extensive, many-faceted publicity efforts will mobilize Quindlen's legions of readers.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2018 Booklist

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