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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: #371916 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-05-03
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 304 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

Customer Reviews

easy summer read3
well written, inoffensive, a good summer read. If you are fascinated by New York, wonder about the people who live there with their dogs, then this is the book for you. Picked it up when I saw a review in More magazine. Wasn't disappointed.

INVENTIVE, SOPHISTICATED AND WITTY4


"New York, New York, It's a wonderful town!" Composers sing New York's praises, poets rhyme its virtues, diarists trace adventures there, and authors set tales in this iconic city. Cathleen Schine, author of The Love Letter, has written another billet-doux with The New Yorkers, a brilliant, comic take on one city block in Manhattan and those who live there.

Said block is just a short stroll from Central Park which, of course, made it a favorite of dog owners and professional dog walkers. "...so the street, not distinguished by great beauty to begin with, was not terribly clean either. And yet, it was the loveliest street I have ever lived on. And the most interesting."

It is, indeed, the most interesting as it is home to school teachers, eccentrics the retired, up-and-coming wannabes, the homeless, and all manner of outre characters, each drawn with perception and precision by this accomplished author.

Jody, known by her colleagues as "Good Old Jody," has lived in her studio apartment for 20 years. It is there that she endures sleepless nights then greets the day with a smile. A spinster, as she sometimes thinks of herself, she decides to get a cat. However, when she visits the ASPCA she finds an aged pit bull mix who had been found somewhere in the Bronx. A female, the dog is huge with a great lolling tongue and Jody names her Beatrice.

On a particularly cold, icy day Jody is walking Beatrice when she sees Everett, another block dweller. He is a man of 50, divorced, bored, depressed, despite Prozac, but possessed of a stunning smile. Jody immediately falls in love, and takes to daily walks with the bow legged Beatrice past Everett's door.

Polly is a young woman who, as a child was awed by the sound of her own voice. She is pretty, demanding and suffering from a love affair gone terribly wrong. She moves onto the block when she discovers an abandoned puppy in an apartment closet. It's not long before her brother, George, shares the apartment with her and the puppy, now known as Howdy.

"George, twenty-eight years old, had been a child prodigy. No one knew it. Except George." When we meet him he still has not discovered his exact area of expertise.

Then, there is Simon, who lives in a ground floor one bedroom apartment. He is 48, and takes the subway to work every day, where he labors as "an asocial social worker in the far-off fields of Riverdale and carried a briefcase swollen with files pertaining to those whom he thought of as the unfortunate, the unhappy, and the unkempt."

There are more characters, of course, each finely painted, all memorable, and very human. As the days pass the lives of these people intersect in different ways, and we are privy to their thoughts and aspirations, their successes and their failures.

The New Yorkers is fun, sophisticated, revealing. Cathleen Schine tells a doggone good story - don't miss it!

- Gail Cooke