Karen Kipple’s Brooklyn is a hipster’s paradise: a land of artisanal sausages, laundromats turned slow-drip coffee salons and parents who take seriously the need for hormone-free milk in the cafeteria. Meanwhile, Karen’s in crisis, her liberal ideals clashing with doubt about the curriculum of her daughter’s “mixed” public school.
Karen is fictional — the protagonist of Lucinda Rosenfeld’s wickedly funny new novel, “Class.” And while Rosenfeld lives in Brooklyn, where her daughters attend public school, she says she’s yet to experience any blowback from “Class”-outraged neighbors. “Everyone’s been very kind so far,” she said. “I keep saying, ‘I’m not Karen!’ and that this isn’t a memoir, it’s a satire.”
Here are four class-conscious books she loves:
Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac
All Balzac’s books are chock-full of social climbers. This is about the greediest, stingiest man who ever lived, the father of the
sweet naive Eugenie. When her cousin shows up from Paris, they fall in love, but he turns out to be a snake and rejects her. This is 1820s France, and people were horrible then, too.
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Wharton’s Lily Bart is a conflicted woman hanging by a thread to high society. She’s part of the Gilded Age crowd but doesn’t quite have the money, so she rejects the man she loves so she can marry up. After a series of terrible judgment calls, she ends up on the street. What resonates with me is how women then were completely at the mercy of men.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
This is a big, juicy novel about pre-AIDS gay life in Margaret Thatcher-era London. Like “Brideshead Revisited,” a naive and socially ambitious young man moves into the home of a college friend, son of a conservative member of Parliament. I loved everything about this book, from the frank descriptions of sex to the gleaming 1980s interiors.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
This is the first and possibly best of a quartet of novels about two poor girls growing up in mid-century Naples. What I love about Ferrante’s writing is its absolute rawness. I wrote a novel about a complicated female friendship myself — “I’m So Happy for You” — so this has particular significance for me!
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
