ISBN: 0374221839
May 1, 2007
To Purchase:
amazon.com
barnes & noble

NOW IN PAPERBACK!

This a novel about living and falling in love on one block in New York City. It’s a kind of love letter to New York City, the New York that I know, which has neighborhoods and seasons and the rhythms, sometimes, of a small town. In The New Yorkers, neighbors fall in and out of love, and it is their dogs– a dignified old white pit-bull named Beatrice, a puppy named Howdy discovered in the closet of a dead man, a boisterous Rottweiler named Kaiya, and Jolly, a vicious little mutt– who act as cupids.
I very consciously thought of the block as an English village, an almost timeless place that could have existed in the age of Jane Austen or Mrs. Gaskill or Trollope or that of Barbara Pym, and yet it is at the same time unmistakably New York City: New York City in the 21st century.
And…it’s illustrated. See those pen and ink drawings of dogs above? They’re an example of some of the drawings of dogs in The New Yorkers by Leanne Shapton (a wonderful artist and writer–check out her book, Was She Pretty? here).

Reading Group Guide

Do you have a book club or other reading group? Picador Books has provided this reading group guide.

Reviews of The New Yorkers …

Doggy Affections
The New York Review of Books
By Jennifer Schuessler

In two decades and seven novels, Cathleen Schine has made a specialty of creating spirited if mildly depressive heroines in search of a brainy conceit to live by, whether it’s birdwatching (To the Birdhouse), French Enlightenment philosophy (Rameau’s Niece), Darwinian theory (The Evolution of Jane), or Flaubert’s famous dictum about Madame Bovary (She Is Me). But in Schine’s latest zingy domestic comedy, The New Yorkers, the characters don’t have conceits. They have dogs. Or they don’t—and the novel’s own conceit is that this makes all the difference. On the slightly down-at-heels Upper West Side block where the story unfolds, happiness—or the closest Schine’s brightly downbeat characters can come to it—is next to dogginess.

The block is located somewhere just around the corner from Nora Ephron territory and a few income brackets off the posher avenues familiar from Woody Allen movies. “It was never one of New York City’s fashionable blocks,” the omniscient (and occasionally intrusive) narrator tells us as the book opens. “There are no mansions there, no narrow houses of historical importance, no plaques attesting to former residents of consequence. It was not even a particularly beautiful block.” But thanks to rent control, it’s still full of quirky New York characters, “struggling musicians and actors and secretaries and window washers,… some of them growing successful, some simply growing old.”

Most of Schine’s characters would count themselves among the latter. There’s Jody, a “self-styled spinster” approaching the ominous age of forty, who spends her days teaching music at an elite private school, her nights battling hovering dissatisfaction, and the rest of her time, it seems, walking her aging white pit bull, Beatrice. In a brownstone apartment across the way, Simon, a middle-aged “asocial worker,” loses himself in novels and thoughts of his annual fox-hunting vacation. A bit further down the street, Everett, a bored fifty-year-old divorced empty nester, tends his loneliness and his obsessively neat midcentury modern décor, while a few floors below a bossy twenty-six-year-old copyeditor named Polly shares a two-bedroom with a puppy named Howdy and her slacker brother George, a former child prodigy who can’t remember what he was supposed to have been so prodigious in. Rounding out the cast are an impeccably dressed French widow with a three-legged mutt, a Holocaust-survivor divorcée with a pug, and a gay couple with two cairn terriers (not to mention five kids and two nannies), owners of an upscale corner eatery called the Go Go Grill—Chinese for “dog,” of course—where the locals and their four-legged companions gather regularly to relax and flout city sanitation rules. There’s even a withered old black-clad lady with a cane who can periodically be seen tapping her way down the block, muttering in Italian. When one of the characters spontaneously starts humming the theme from the TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, he isn’t kidding.

Except that Mr. Rogers was never overly concerned with the ins and outs o midlife romance—not to mention pooper scoopers, leash laws, and the TV dog-whisperer Cesar Millan, matters of much concern in Schine’s novel. Indeed, The New Yorkers is not for the canine-averse, or perhaps even the canine-indifferent (though Schine’s block is puzzlingly low on children, that other scourge of the urban curmudgeon). The neighborhood dogs— captured in charming line drawings by the graphic novelist Leanne Shapton— aren’t just the unwitting cupids that set the various meandering romantic plots in motion. They also end up serving as the measure of each character’s emotional depth, and perhaps even their moral worth. Schine, through her faintly fairy-godmotherish narrator, can’t help scratching her characters behind the ears with approval each time they bend down to accept a sloppy canine kiss or otherwise start warming to their furry neighbors. When Polly spontaneously comes to the rescue of Howdy after his former owner’s suicide, the narrator declares, “I like her all the better for it.” Clearly, we’re meant to as well.

The Village Voice:
Bark Victory
In The New Yorkers, the Upper West Side goes to the dogs
by Kera Bolonik
April 30th, 2007

In her 2004 New Yorker essay “Dog Trouble,” author Cathleen Schine describes the harrowing experience of trying to tame Buster, the adorable, helplessly mad mutt she rescued. Her noble adoption coincided with the recent breakup of her marriage. But Buster quickly began to reveal a volatile, destructive temperament—he was prone to biting himself and nearly everyone around him. Schine’s determination to keep Buster eventually alienated her from friends, family, and even the sympathetic dog owners in her Upper West Side neighborhood. Together with her new lesbian partner, Schine sought out dog trainers, dog shrinks, psychopharmacologists, and a pet psychic, making every effort to soothe his disturbed soul. The distemper Buster had suffered as a puppy, however, doomed him to a life of violent behavior, and as Schine’s vast galaxy of bruises and bites continued to expand, and her fear of the Cujo-like canine became paralyzing, she arrived at the inevitable: There was nothing inhumane about putting Buster down. Months later, the author would discover the more pleasurable realms of dog ownership when she brought home a healthy cairn terrier named Hector.

Schine delves into that very world in her new novel, The New Yorkers—a swift-moving, gently poignant romantic comedy of manners set on one of the last remaining blocks of rent-stabilized apartments on the Upper West Side. Romance develops among the Homo sapiens, to be sure—this street, like the city itself, is a veritable island of misfit toys. But the real love in these pages emerges between the misanthropic bipeds and their furry four-legged friends.

An unnamed narrator introduces us to a cast of lonely hearts, starting with 39-year-old music teacher Jody and her ghostly white pit bull, Beatrice, who share the studio apartment she has lived in for over 20 years. Jody, whose chatter is as delightfully filterless as a Lucky Strike, is proud to call herself a spinster—until she becomes embroiled in two love triangles after many sexless years. Jody falls for her across-the-street neighbor Everett, a middle-aged, recently divorced chemist whose gorgeous smile clashes with his curmudgeonly personality. As she waits for him to return her affections, another neighbor, Simon—a 46-year-old self- described “elderly young man” and “asocial” social worker—finds himself totally smitten with her. Neither man is a dog owner; in fact, Everett believes dogs are “inconveniences.” “The very word,” he thinks, “was used in phrases that were exclusively negative: Someone dogged your steps or there were dog days on which you were dog tired. . . . You lay down with dogs and woke up with fleas, after which you went to the dogs.”

Everett is intrigued by Jody, but his thirst for youth draws him to his ebullient, recently heartbroken, and very attentive young neighbor, 26-year-old copy editor Polly, who moves into the building on the heels of a bad breakup. The previous occupant had given up his lease by way of suicide, leaving behind a brand-new puppy. Polly names him Howdy, and he quickly endears himself to everyone who crosses his path—even Everett. Meanwhile, Polly’s brilliant slacker brother George-—living in squalor in the East Village-—is spending more and more time at Polly’s to rouse her spirits, and to play with the dog. He quickly discovers there’s no better babe magnet than a cute pup, so it becomes easier for Polly to convince him to move in with her.

One neighbor proudly resists the charms of canines: Doris, an angry schoolmarm who launches a crusade to all but rid the block of the hairy creatures. She especially despises Beatrice for peeing on the front wheel of her white SUV, and also Jamie, the gay proprietor of neighborhood hangout the Go Go Grill, for allowing dogs (including his own pair of pooches) to enter his dining room.

Urbanites share a unique relationship with their dogs. With square footage at a premium, and a yard practically unheard of, even the most reclusive dog owner has to leave his or her apartment several times a day. The friendly nature of dogs forces their masters into social situations as their charges bark at and inspect intimate body parts of other dogs; sniff, lick, and leap on other people; or simply elicit the affection of passersby who can’t resist petting them. Like true New Yorkers, Jody, Jamie, Everett, and Simon lived side by side for years without ever having spoken, but their dogs ensured their lives would eventually intersect. Schine uses the historic heat wave of 2003 to get a quiet storm roiling, landing Jody and Polly into the wrong (for them) lovers’ beds—Jody into Simon’s, Polly into Everett’s. At least there’s an end to their respective dry spells, some self-discoveries to be made, and pleasant company during some particularly trying times.

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.