(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in February 2008)
In “Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat”(Spiegel and Grau, $25), Adam Langer’s witty take on real estate and gentrification, the jazzman Ike Morphy comes home to his New York after burying his mother in Chicago to find a real estate broker in his rental apartment and that his world is being sold out from underneath him. Ike and his dog Herbie Mann lives are thrown into a tailspin, as are the lives of a dozen other New Yorkers, including the buyer and her husband, her real estate agent, the seller and the mortgage broker.
Using the touches of a 1940s Broadway musical, Langer explores the tumultuous changes to one block and one apartment in Manhattan through Ike, who has lived their for 20 years, and Rebecca Sugarman, a literary editor buying his apartment. With chapters with titles like “An Offer is Made” and “A Deal is Closed,” Langer pulls in characters like a real estate agent obsessed with musical theater, a mortgage broker having a secret affair, a bitter magazine editor who hates dogs and the seller of Ike’s apartment who dreams of opening a high end restaurant/car wash. In the novel, characters perform solos about their lives and also act as members of the ensemble as the catchy writing pushes romantic couples together and the story to its (almost) inevitable, Broadway-style happy ending.
Langer, 40, was raised in Chicago and educated at Vassar College. He was a playwright and has written the critically acclaimed novels “Crossing California” and “The Washington Story.” Langer lives in New York City with his wife and young daughter on Duke Ellington Boulevard, and spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a coffee shop near his home.
Q. What inspired the story of Ike Morphy finding a realtor in his apartment?
A. It happened to me, but I took it to its logical extreme. I came home from vacation with my pregnant wife to find a realtor in our apartment. We open the door and there were four people in the apartment--a realtor, a quote unquote nice young couple in their twenties and the dad who was buying the apartment. The real-estate agent was slick and unctuous. I don’t really have a temper, but I pretended to have one and had a swearing argument with the realtor in front of his clients. I thought the whole thing was so rude.
The story I wrote extrapolates the situation into a really serious one. What if the tenant had no place to go? Ike Morphy had been able to call his own financial shots, but now he can’t.
Q. Most of the characters are outsiders coming to New York. Why?
A, I didn’t realize that until I had gone through the book again. A lot of what I am writing about in an outsider’s perspective on what people come to New York expecting to find and what they actually find. It’s like the musical “Wonderful Town,” where there is the song about people coming to New York to sing opera, but they wind up selling fish at the Fulton Fish Market. It’s not a new thing. New York can also be a very liberating place. There are a lot of things you can do here that you can’t do elsewhere. You may make it or not, but there is always that possibility. Because of the real estate situation having become so unaffordable, a lot of people who come for artistic reasons can’t afford to do their art.
Q. The two extreme view of gentrification are that it either rips apart the fabric of a neighborhood or it raises up the standards of a neighborhood. How did you approach the subject?
A. I didn’t write a treatise on gentrification. I wrote about a lot of different people’s view on gentrification. Obviously, when I started the novel, my sympathies weren't with the ne’er-do-well son of the late owner of the apartment kicking the jazz musician out, but it is his apartment. I go between logic and naiveté on the changes in my neighborhood. In my life and work, I have been somewhat resistant to change. My mother still lives in the Chicago home my parents bought in 1960. I come from a place where change is viewed as dangerous.
Q. With most of your characters paired up at the end, your novel is almost like a Broadway musical. Why?
A. I was working with the idea, how would people get what they want and what would they pay to get what they want? A lot of people have called this book a real estate novel, and that is true, but I also like to think of it as exploring the concept of home. How do you define home and how do you find a home when you’ve lost what you considered your home? I wanted to go from the specifics of New York to the abstract of home. That’s why I ended with Herbie Mann, the dog. He sees his home as not necessarily a place, but where he finds love, where he’s taken care of and where he’s happy. That’s what home is and that is what all the characters find in the end.
In the past several years, American publishing has been battered by literary frauds, from the bestselling drug-rehab memoir of James Frey to the fake gangbanger autobiography of Margaret B. Jones. Meanwhile, instead of being a male teen prostitute, the novelist J.T. Leroy turned out to be a middle-aged mother named Laura Albert. In Adam Langer’s witty new novel “The Thieves of Manhattan”(Spiegel & Grau, $15), the writer takes on the fictional literary deceptions perpetrated by Ian Minot, a failed and bitter short-story writer who signs a memoir deal with the devil.
Ian is working as a barista in a Manhattan cafe when his writer girlfriend leaves him right before she gets a big book contract. A natty-dressed patron named Jed offers him the chance to commit literary fraud to wreak revenge on New York publishing. Ian agrees, and finds himself immersed in the intrigue and violence involving a beguiling artist and a counterfeit copy of the priceless Japanese book “The Tale of Genji.” Langer sends up pompous literary agents, editors who don’t read their own books and the dying brick-and-mortar publishing world. In a film noir twist, Ian is double crossed, with enemies and saviors in unlikely places. As a murderous duo bears down on him, Ian will either find love and literary acclaim or will wind up buried in a lonely field somewhere.
Langer, 43, is the author of “Ellington Boulevard,” among other novels. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by cell phone from a mall in Bloomington, Indiana.
Q. America has been swimming in a sea of literary fraud. Was there one aspect of this that interested you?
A. I was swimming in it with everybody else. I had watched a movie on Clifford Irving, the one who had the literary hoax in the 1970s, “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes.” Then there was J.T. Leroy, but that’s a different kind of hoax. I’ve always been intrigued by con games and have interviewed con artists. I wanted to do something set in the exploding world of publishing. I wondered what it would take to commit the perfect literary crime. If you wanted to scam the publishing industry, how would you do it?
My last book was a memoir on my dad. I tried to tell the most true story I could., but it was really tempting to tell the most outlandish story.
Q. Do you think it is an immoral or amoral act to lie in a memoir?
A. I don’t want to make moral judgments, but I think there is a contract between reader and writer that when you are telling what is allegedly a true story, you are doing your best to do that. People do a lot of things in memoirs--they condense time and put particular thought processes in a particular moment. If it is to get at a larger truth, it is one thing. If it is to sell books, it is another.
Q. Do you see Ian Minot, your main character, as an angry and principled writer?
A. He’s angry and principled, but he’s wrong. He buys into the b.s. of the publishing world, that there was once this venerable publishing world that would have published his stories, but now this world is full of liars and con artists. By the time this book is done, most of his assumptions have been flipped around.
Q. Your book is blurbed by Laura Albert, who wrote the novel “Sarah” and invented the J.T. Leroy hoax. How do you view her?
A. I cut a break for Laura. A lot of people were offended, but I saw it as a kind of really cool performance art. We’ve talked on the phone and had crazy conversations. Do I know her? No. If I called her this minute, I’d either never hear from her again or we’d have a three-hour conversation, with no middle ground.
(This interview ran in the Newark Star-Ledger in August 2010)
Gentrification, the Musical
(Originally appeared in the New York Post, February 2008)
by Dylan Foley
After burying his mother in his hometown of Chicago, jazzman Ike Morphy comes home with his dog Herbie Mann to New York to find a real estate broker and two buyers standing in his battered rental apartment on West 106th Street in Manhattan. Ike's whole life is being sold out from under him. He starts a fight with the realtor and thus begins "Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in B-Flat," Adam Langer's glorious comedy of gentrification, rent control and love.
Langer's witty novel is an ode to a gritty stretch of Manhattan real estate on the Upper West Side. Like the old Broadway musical comedies, like "Wonderful Town' he introduces the readers to his cast: There is the buyer, Rebecca Sugarman, an earnest literary editor; her husband, Darrell Schiff, a snide grad student; the renter Ike, an embattled jazz musician ; Josh Dybnick, a realtor with musical theater dreams, and the seller, Mark Masler, an ex-cocaine, ex-sex addict who wants to open a high-end restaurant/car wash. Like all musicals, there are the lead characters’ trials and cliffhangers: Will Rebecca's marriage survive? Will Ike and Herbie Mann find a new home? Will Mark find a nice Jewish girl? Can Josh realize his dream of becoming a theater impresario?
In the novel, Langer excels at digging into the nitty gritty of West 106th Street, which he calls by the obscure moniker of Duke Ellington Boulevard, where the novelist actually lives. He chronicles the loss of local bodegas, replaced by breakfast nooks and nail salons.
Langer is gleeful in using the plot tools of chance, coincidence and happy endings that were the backbone of old Broadway musicals. Rebecca's boss, who is gutting the venerable literary magazine Rebecca works at, once abused the dog Herbie Mann, but the pup will get his revenge. Darrell's lover Gigi is the writer of bad, angst-ridden short stories, brilliant children's books and is writing a real estate musical with the boyfriend of Josh, the realtor that is selling Ike's apartment. And who is the mystery woman that Josh's boss is screwing and what is her relationship to Rebecca?
With much of the action in the book framed in the three-month closing on the apartment and its tumultuous aftermath, Langer’s chapter have titles like “An Offer is Made” and “Closing Costs Are Assessed.” Herbie Mann runs afoul of the law and the NYPD is in hot pursuit. Ike Morphy must chose between his new, surprise romantic interest and the city he loves and the dog that he promised always to protect.
On the musical stage that “Ellington Boulevard” becomes, New York City itself plays a starring role, with its name above the title. Langer’s characters, like Ike and Rebecca, and even the once-sour Darrell, are mostly outsiders who came to the Big City to follow their dreams. The City can be a cold brutal place at first, but when the spotlight picks them up and they start to sing, the audience knows that everything is going to be all right, that the girl will get the boy, and the dog Herbie Mann will find a new home.
