Many of my brownstone Brooklyn mom friends are outraged by Richard Bernstein’s new book, The East, The West, and Sex. I am linking to Laura Miller’s review in Salon because I always enjoy reading her and found this critique fascinating. I also loved/adored Toni Bentley’s review of it. Toni has more fun writing book reviews than anyone else in the Book Review these days. I remember seeing Toni read her paean to anal sex at the Cutting Room several ago. My mouth fell open and didn’t shut for several hours.
So back to the anger at Richard Bernstein. People are mad, if I read the “coverage” correctly, because he basically says that sex with Asian women was liberating to white men throughout history. He also has a Chinese wife. The combination of his thesis and his personal life irks people and I can understand why. The women I know may get a chance to tell him what-for because, apparently, Richard Bernstein is a Park Slope dad. Imagine that - a Jewish man married to an Asian woman and living in brownstone Brooklyn! Go figure!
Because he lives in my neighborhood, I am on the lookout for him too. I’ve seen his photo and I know what he looks like.
But I am not on the lookout so I can take him down; I would have to read the book to do that. The real reason I am on the lookout for Richard Bernstein is so I can finally talk to him about the review he once wrote of my novel Run Catch Kiss. That’s right, he gave us all a preview of his true prurient interests ten years ago when he was assigned, for some mind-boggling reason, to review Run Catch Kiss in the daily edition of The New York Times. My guess was that whoever assigned it to him thought that they would give it to the least likely person to have any interest in the book. Instead of asking a young, single woman, or even a not young, single woman, to review a roman-a-clef about a sex columnist bouncing around lower Manhattan, the editor asked a married middle-aged man known for his highbrow criticism. Bernstein, who probably expected his readers to expect him to tear the book to shreds, wrote a mixed review that called my book “palely imitative” but also contained some positive quotes I have been dining out on for a decade. He also used some ten-dollar words and phrases including, “Spenglerian gloom-and-doom.”
Little did we all know then that the guy was actually a dirtysomething. His Times editors know now that he had his earliest sexual experiences in a Chinese brothel. The sex scenes in RCK were probably light stuff compared to what he had seen. Who knows, he may even have read my book with one hand. And then felt guilty so he looked down at his hand and thought up the phrase “palely imitative.” But the best thing about this review - and the subject of writers and their reviewers has been in the news lately - is that it did what mixed reviews should. It inspired me to be better.
So now, as we near the ten-year anniversary of Bernstein’s review, I have linked to it here.
And for those who miss their SATs, here are the definitions of the ten-dollar words:
concupiscence – desire, lust
acidulous – acidic, sour, bitter
concomitant – existing or occurring with something else, accompanying
Spengler - German philosopher who argued that cultures grow and decay in cycles
Ah, Richard Bernstein, We Could Have Had Something
Fag Stags
Just read the New York Times Styles section story on straight men and gay men, and it reminded me of this. Funniest person I have ever interviewed on any topic: Simon Doonan, hands down. He’s the first person I ever heard use the term “fag stags.”
Michael Jackson
The death of Michael Jackson brought me back to the days of his molestation trial. While the trial was going on in 2005 I wrote an essay about him for New York, in which I reflected on some of the dualities in his identity.
Prospect Park West
My new novel, Prospect Park West comes out on September 1 and is available for preorder on Amazon now. The site also has the final cover, which I am thrilled with - a Park Slope brownstone with Bugaboo passing. The book focuses on four mothers in the Slope, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Insert joke: (As though there is any other kind of Park Slope mother.) I will be touring in September and October to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Decatur, Georgia, and you can see some of my dates now. My novel has been optioned by HBO and Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company, for half-hour television, which is very exciting. I am writing the pilot episode now. There will also be a sequel to Prospect Park West published in 2011. The book has been blurbed by such luminaries as Gigi Levangie Grazer, A.J. Jacobs, Lauren Weisberger and Kurt Andersen.
Recently I gave an interview for the novel in which I found myself talking about my neighborhood and some of the themes of the book. I was asked whether I would always live in the Slope and I said that I hoped to, as long as we weren’t priced out. The good things about the neighborhood far outnumber the bad things. To the extent that my book has a darker take on the Slope, it is because I have observed firsthand the perils of aspirational living in my four years. So many of the businesses on Seventh Avenue are realtors. The Corcoran ads are particularly hilarious - scruffy bohemian dad, adorable baby on Flokati rug. Everything is about moving up in life and boy does that company know how to sell improvement. I am not knocking Corcoran - which found my family its apartment after all - but I do think it’s interesting that the most common pastime on Seventh Avenue is staring at real estate photos imagining how things could be better.
I was also asked about sex in the Slope. I gotta say, I have very little idea which of my peers are banging on a regular basis. In Park Slope it is trendy to pretend to have no sex, but I think this is facile and probably false. It’s a kind of reverse modesty. Mothers like to say what they think other mothers will agree with so they talk about how low their drive is. I think a lot of them are lying. I did have lunch with a PS dad who told me that a male dad friend had said to him, “I’m more attracted to my wife than I’ve ever been before, but I can’t get laid for my life.” To this I say, at least he’s more attracted to his wife than he’s ever been before. And to the wife I say, give it up! Mercy sex is underrated. Use it or lose it. There’s a great book about this that I read in research for an article that never materialized.
My friend’s point in sharing this story was that he would never confide in a male friend about his own sex life. He thinks it’s too personal. Maybe men are more circumspect in this regard than women, or maybe this guy is just particularly loyal to his wife. I think it’s interesting though how shy parents are about talking about this. Myself included. The only parent in whom I confide about my sex life on a regular basis is a gay dad. I have had conversations with women where they discussed the horrifying details of our children’s problems, their precise salary, how much they paid for their apartments, and their preferred method of birth control - but not their sex lives.
In terms of what I guess about sex in the Slope, I imagine that people in Carroll Gardens are shtupping more but I am basing this only on my personal degree of attraction to Carroll Gardens dads versus Park Slope dads. Rob Corddry used to live in CG, for chrissakes. FILF city. If neighborhood-parent hot factors are of any interest to you, you might want to check out this link to a story I wrote about flirting in the playground. The hottest dad I ever saw in an NYC playground was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt in the Bleecker Playground. He looked like Brad in the Nazi alp movie. And the guy would not speak on the record. Come on, Brad, I know it was you.
