Product Details
New Yorkers

New Yorkers
By Cathleen Schine

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An enchanting comedy of manners (with dogs!) from one of our most treasured writers
 
Cathleen Schine’s brilliantly funny new novel revolves around one city block in Manhattan, a quiet little block near Central Park kept humble by rent control. Living on a street like this in New York with a dog is like living in a tiny village, one that has a rhythm all its own. Dogs bring people together unexpectedly, people who would otherwise never meet. And the dogs act as cupids for the quiet, struggling, sometimes lonely, eccentric people, the old and the young, male and female; the people who live on the block, who are, in their ways, romantics, as all New Yorkers secretly tend to be. Walking her dog, Beatrice, Jody falls under the spell of Everett’s bewitching smile. Everett begins to appreciate his postdivorce life only when he falls in love with Howdy, Polly’s puppy. Polly lives with her brother, George, and wants him to fall in love. George isn’t so much looking for a love life as for life direction, and Howdy leads him right to it. Doris hates the trash on her block, she hates the pee on her SUV’s large tires, and, above all, she hates dogs. That is, until she gets one of her own.
 
In The New Yorkers, as in life, canine companions compel their masters to go outside of themselves, to take part in the community they live in, to make friends, and, sometimes, to fall in love. And Schine returns to what she does best: crafting a compulsively readable, elegantly written novel that seduces in the way we were once seduced by The Love Letter, Schine’s beloved classic.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #889925 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-05-03
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 290 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Schine dispatches a love letter to New Yorkers and the dogs who own them in her seventh novel (after She Is Me), an ensemble novel centered on an Upper West Side street. Jody, a lonely 39-year-old musician/music teacher who's lived in the same rent-controlled studio since college, rescues a pit bull mix named Beatrice from the ASPCA. After eight months of blissful pet ownership, Jody bumps into divorced 50-year-old Everett while walking Beatrice and falls in love with the stranger after he shoots her a smile. George, a 28-year-old waiter, moves into the neighborhood when his younger sister, Polly, rents an apartment in Everett's building and acquires the puppy left behind by the last tenant. (He hanged himself; she names the pup Howdy.) Down the street live Simon, a reclusive social worker whose only joy in life is foxhunting, and Doris, an embittered, prep-school guidance counselor with no love lost for pooches. Orbits slowly begin to overlap as winter gives way to spring and then the summer of the 2003 blackout—an event that sends a few characters in unexpected directions. It may not play as well west of the Hudson, but the hometown dog-run crowd will find this heartfelt tribute curiously endearing. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
There's been no shortage of novels about the New York singles scene, but this charming novel approaches the topic from the unusual angle of neighborhood dogs--and the people who love them. The story focuses on an ensemble of characters who all live on an Upper West Side street and eventually become connected. Jody meets Everett while dog-walking. When brother and sister Polly and George move into Everett's building, they find the former tenant's puppy still living there. (The former tenant hanged himself.) Nicole Roberts's narration is suitably upbeat. She adds a light, fast-paced tone that makes this the perfect book for summer listening. R.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review

Newsday
“Cathleen Schine's latest novel is like a comfy chair in a sunny window: soft, warm, with a view of passing dogs, people, seasons. Curl up in it, and a whole afternoon can go by . . The New Yorkers is itself a love letter, its sweetness nicely salted with Schine's deft irony.”
 
Library Journal
“[Schine] captures human joys and sorrows, comedy and drama, beginnings and endings, as the dogs compel their owners to live outside of themselves. A joy for all readers.”
 
The Village Voice
“A swift-moving, gently poignant romantic comedy of manners. . . The breezy storytelling in The New Yorkers is deceptive: The novel offers more than a sweet story of puppy love. Schine strikes a rare, deeply personal, and very loving chord as she portrays the way these devoted pets elicit joy from the depressed (except once, when it's already too late) and humanity from the merciless, and inspire flirtations and encounters between the shy and monastic. Schine may have convinced this reader—a borderline-crazy cat lady who has never owned a dog—that these pets are as much New Yorkers as the people who walk them.”
 
"Cathleen Schine’s new book is her best: a funny, varied, farcical roundelay of people and dogs on a New York block, which somehow manages both to draw a perfect, pointed, and unhysterical picture of New York romantic manners at fragile moment in their history, and to move, as it progresses, into a vein of authentic sweetness and sadness that seemed to have vanished from the American novel." —Adam Gopnik, author of Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York
 
"O. Henry said he wanted to be reincarnated enough times to live a lifetime on every block in Manhattan. The block that Cathleen Schine charmingly immortalizes in The New Yorkers would no doubt be high on his list, complete with all its dogs and their lucky owners." —Billy Collins, author of The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems

"The New Yorkers is so entrancing and droll and downright funny that it made me forget I do not like dogs. How vexatious!" —Patricia Marx, author of Him Her Him Again The End of Him
 
Praise for The Love Letter:

“Rarely less than sublime . . . A sophisticated and witty valentine of a novel.”—People
 
“Wonderfully inventive . . . Delightful . . . A perfect comedy.”—The New York Times