The New York Times-20080127-Your Place or Mine- -Review-

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Your Place or Mine; [Review]

Full Text (865  words)[Author Affiliation] Troy Patterson is the television critic at Slate and the film critic at Spin.

ELLINGTON BOULEVARD

A Novel in A-Flat.

By Adam Langer.

336 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $24.95.

There are eight million stories in the naked city, but, in the realm of fiction, they all tend in one of two directions. There are Gotham novels -- billowing and romantic, built to chronicle luminous dreams and the deferment thereof. Then there are what we might call crosswalk novels. Slathered with local color -- shaped by it, for that matter -- these books nurse obsessions with the daily business of taxis and delis and how much to tip the coat-check girl. The House of Mirth is vintage Gotham. Bright Lights, Big City is narcotic Gotham. The epitome of crosswalk must be Calvin Trillin's Tepper Isn't Going Out, a novel about alternate-side parking.

Ellington Boulevard is an attempt by Adam Langer, whose previous two novels mapped his native Chicago, to boogie-woogie down the line dividing these two schools. The book's action is contiguous with that of an off-Broadway musical written by two of its characters, and a brief opening chapter -- an overture -- pictures extras surging down a Manhattan street, the residue of the dreams that brought them to Gotham all but vanished from their heads. To them, all those years ago, the city was a clarinet trilling Gershwin, a tenor belting out Sondheim. ... But now that they've been here for some time, they have begun to forget the city they had come to find.

That'll happen, especially if you're focused on pulling together a down payment for an apartment. Those pedestrians are bustling toward an open house and into a novel about residential real estate. The apartment at stake sits on a gentrifying stretch of West 106th Street: two bedrooms, asking price of $650,000. Disappointingly -- deplorably, even -- the author fails to indicate its square footage.

What's going on is a condo conversion. The departing tenant, a jazz clarinetist named Ike, gets back to town after months away to learn that his landlord is dead, and their handshake agreement thus inoperative. He's supposed to make way for two of the dreamers in the mix at the open house -- Rebecca, a magazine editor, and her husband, Darrell, a Columbia grad student. Their marriage has its troubles, mostly because Darrell is a jerk. Merely snide and juvenile at the start, he goes on to test his aptitude for philandering, pursuing a flame-haired pixie on campus. Darrell is less of a sleazeball, however, than Mark, who inherited the building from his father and is selling Ike's apartment. It's Mark who brings Langer's wit alive most readily. Mark is conflicted, at first sight, about how to behave toward the woman who will become his third wife: She seems far too young for him to pursue romantically, yet far too attractive for him to consider befriending for any other reason.

It is Jane (Darrell's prospective mistress) who writes Ellington Boulevard (the musical) with her pal Miles, who is kinda sorta dating Josh (Darrell's broker). A mosaic depicting the love lives and housing destinies of 10 major characters, the novel is fitted together with cutesy coinckidincks. For instance, Rebecca's boss lives with Josh's boss in a duplex on Riverside Drive -- though divorced, they've agreed not to sell the place until the market peaks -- and the two of them used to own Ike's dog, between the tilted ears of which we spend an awful lot of time. Langer arranges these daisy chains and six-degrees diversions with finesse, but their eager staginess shows him straining for a particular kind of fun. Ellington Boulevard doesn't try to carry its musical-theater conceit very far in formal terms, but the frequent breadth of its characterizations and the occasional depth of its sappiness bespeak a certain drama-geek quality. At some points, the book gives the impression of coming at you with a headshot grin and manic jazz hands.

At others, the novel's prose is so breathless that it simply looks out of shape, with the narrator spending a good deal of time telling you what people are not observing: He pays no attention when ...; She does not wake to see ...; The dog could have no possible idea. ... The author lays it on thick with anaphora -- a device of rhetoric familiar from the exhortations of Whitman and Churchill, a device befitting the majestic aspirations and grand designs of a Gotham novel, a device that sounds pretty silly when used to describe a mortgage broker getting into the office early.

But perhaps we ought to forgive that last instance (past empty wastepaper baskets, past closed office doors) as an attempt at the mock heroic. At its core, despite its hambone excesses, Ellington Boulevard possesses a streetwise sentimentality that feels authentic. When Ike thinks about why he loves New York, he muses on its sense of possibility and the ducks in Central Park and all that, but, climactically, he thinks of being another face in the crowd: He loves the liberating feeling that this city doesn't seem to give a damn about him and never did.

[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY MAXIMILIAN BODE)