8.16.10: Dark cloud cover waiting to release

Dark cloud cover waiting to release

Empire State Building from West Side Highway. 10:30 PM. Photo: JH.

August 16, 2010. It rained last night in Manhattan after a day of dark cloud cover waiting to release. Not heavy, just light, a garnish on the cooling temperatures of the past three days. Some people said they felt the first of autumn in the air. I haven’t picked that up yet but it has been a pleasant relief.

I had lunch on Friday with Alexandra Lebenthal, author of The Recessionistas, which just came out this past week. Alexandra, as I am wont to boast, began her recent career as a fiction-writer on these pages a couple of years ago. It was after the subprime mortgage crash. I knew her only casually but because of her high profile financial background – coming from a family of three generations of municipal bond dealers and financial management – and considering her high social profile these days, I asked her one night at one of these benefit galas we attend, if she ever thought about writing about what she “knows” was happening to some of these people.

It turned out I asked the right question. Answer: she had. Taking a gamble on the potential, I asked if she’d like to write something for us. Yes, she would. I think she wrote three pieces and the next thing I knew she had a book deal. And the next thing I knew, she’d written a book.



	Click to order The Recessionistas.

She’s a fast writer. That is not a critical judgment but rather an amazement. Once she had the subject in mind, and the characters she was going to portray, she seemed to just sit down and let it pour out. To non-writers this probably sounds like a sensible thing to do, and presumably sensible writers do it. Actually, no. Many writers plod in one way or another. Or get lost along the way so that they have to go back and start again. Many others just put off sitting down at the desk in the first place. Many others don’t know what they’re doing. There are a lot of writers who write as “quickly” as Alexandra. John O’Hara wrote his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, in three weeks in a hotel room.

Several reviewers, I’ve noticed, commented on The Recessionistas wit and humor. Some have called it a “romp.” Others have made the claim that Alexandra is not a writer. As a person who makes his living writing, I can only offer that anyone who publishes a book is a writer, whether you like it or not. The quality and the talent are debatable. Yes, Harper Lee is a writer. And you are not. Writing in most cases depends on one’s intellectual threshold. I have many friends whose reading quotient is much higher than mine. Frankly, they are smarter than I, and interests vary.

I didn’t see this book so much for its “wit and humor.” There were some funny moments where I laughed out loud, but they were moments that were very real in my mind’s eye. People tripping over their self-delusions. Jill Kargman, another contemporary novelist of the same milieu (21st century New York), wrote: “No one but Alexandra Lebenthal – part financial wizard, part keen social observer – could write this unflinching portrait of New York’s neo-gilded age, pre-and-post Wall Street apocalypse.”

Kargman’s being a little self-effacing (she knows those people too), but her words are those of authority. “Unflinching” is the point. The Recessionistas is really not funny at all. Except its characters are naïve to the point of stupidity. Born yesterday with MBS degrees, as well as MBAs. Many still aren’t savvy to the financial tsunami their behavior has produced. Alexandra’s characters are so real you’ll believe they’re based on real people. There are those who can even tell you who the real people are.


Marie Antoniette by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun.

I’d guess a composite in some cases. I asked her about this over lunch. She just laughed. She had a lot of opportunities to observe those girls and boys you see on the party picture pages of the NYSD. Marie Antoinette had nothing on the Boomers with money.

It might be funny because ego trips and greedy behavior have their zany sides. They have their dark sides as well, however. This is the world of the Masters of the Universe, modern man's replacement of the Divine Right of Kings. Many of these Masters, we came to learn, incredibly, have been flying space shuttles without a pilot’s license. And we’re the passengers.

The age range of the characters in The Recessionistas is 28 to 50 range. There are no very young people, nor older people. This parameter of disinterest or exclusion is also another reference to the reality of this world today. The generations are more isolated. Without counselors (only lawyers), or shaman, and no charges (only issue).

There is a distinct lack of consciousness of many things about us these days, with many implications yet to be understood. Many regard it as the result of too much information. However: Stand on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street any weekday and watch the pedestrians. Many (cell phone or not) will walk into oncoming traffic, against the light, never even looking to see if they are in danger.

Presumably they think they’re not. Or perhaps, more credibly, they don’t think. It’s epidemic. It’s a no-risk or lo-risk society, just like Wall Street. And it’s in the book.

They celebrated the 6th Annual Authors Night at the East Hampton Library with the local literary crowd coming out in full force. This is a premier literary event of the summer season in the Hamptons.

The evening began at 5pm but the crowds were lined up at 4 pm for the Authors’ Book Signing Reception under the tent on the Library grounds. Guests enjoyed hors d’oeuvres and wine and had the opportunity to meet and mingle with the authors, buy their books and have them personally inscribed. Proceeds from this special event benefited The East Hampton Library, a private, not-for-profit organization providing outstanding free library services to the East Hampton community.

Founding Chairman was Alec Baldwin. Honorary co-chairs were Ken Auletta, Candace Bushnell, Robert Caro, Jay McInerney, Richard Reeves. The author’s committee chair was Barbara Goldsmith. More than 150 distinguished authors were invited including Gail Sheehy, Dava Sobel, Beth Ostrosky Stern, Florence Fabricant, Katie Lee Joel, Stewart F. Lane, Samantha Bruce-Benjamin, Real Housewives of New York stars Alex McCord and Jill Zarin.