n+1 always takes on interesting subjects… Maybe their next monograph should be an update to David Brook’s “Bobo’s in Paradise.” A lot’s changed since 2000.

capitalnewyork:

“Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us  in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn’s privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers. At the end of the novel, a successful actress decamps from Brooklyn’s Gold Coast to Manhattan; another woman receives her comeuppance when, after putting a down payment on a long-coveted apartment, she discovers that the school district has been rezoned. Her son must attend PS 282, two-thirds black, one-third Hispanic, and ‘the worst kind of school there was: too bad to be good but too good to be bad.’ Sohn, the least self-avowedly serious of Brooklyn writers, is the only one who can afford to be so honest.” - Elizabeth Gumport on gentrified fiction for n+1.