Friendship is definitely an urban novel, but there's little in it that is particular to Brooklyn. Certainly not to my Brooklyn. It's a modern, contemporary coming-of-age novel, but, unlike prior-century works, adolescence is delayed or postponed, because the two thirtyish women about whom it revolves would have solved their problems when they were a decade younger if they weren't so rich and spoiled. It's healthy that they try to maintain a profound friendship in a world of meaningless temp jobs, bad boyfriends, inchoate ambitions, voluntary poverty, and impulsive and irresponsible sex.
It's an amusing novel, well-plotted but written without much in the way of flair or style. Not weighty. Perhaps I was a little put off by the indulgences of first world difficulties.
For one of the characters, Williamsburg was a "hotbed of youth and culture." For another, it was a "hotbed of European tourists and restaurants with thirty-five dollar entrees." Wow, Williamsburg is two distinct hotbeds. It's hard to imagine how Daniel Fuchs would have reacted. Is there another part of the U. S. so fundamentally altered in a couple of generations?
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