FICTION: UPPER WEST SIDE STORY

UPPER WEST SIDE STORY. 2015, HARVARD SQUARE PRESS.

This book began with a disturbing conversation. Over a Thanksgiving dinner, my brother exclaimed gleefully that four “disadvantaged” black children had been admitted to his son’s class for gifted children; he was delighted that his son would be “enriched” by meeting kids he did not ordinarily meet.

How, I wondered, would my brother respond if his son were one of four white children in an all-black school, providing black children with an opportunity to get to know kids who were not like them?

I lay awake that night wondering about this well-intentioned parent. Well into the wee hours, I thought about what could go wrong. Mostly, what I came up with had nothing to do with the children involved; I thought children could become the colorblind people their parents were hoping for. But the adults, their parents: Could they abandon old resentments and distrust? If a crisis developed, would the parents be as advanced in their thinking and actions as they hoped their children would be?

The next morning, I began this novel.

The story is narrated by Bettina Grosjean, a professor of Women’s History, whose husband is a high-ranking environmental policymaker in the New York City mayor’s office. Once a pair of student radicals, they are now raising their two brainy children on New York’s Upper West Side.

The book opens with Bettina having discovered her son’s diary from his thirteenth year, a year of enormous crisis in the Grosjean household. She is looking back on that year, recalling what the crisis did to her family; interspersed in her narration are succeeding entries in a diary her son, Zack, kept that year.

Upper West Side Story is the tale of fierce parental love as it is tested in a startling eruption of racial hostility and political chicanery within the very community the Grosjeans have long loved and helped to build. Despite the deep love and affection they have for each other, their domestic life suddenly explodes because of a shocking and tragic event: During a school field trip, Zack and his best friend, Cyrus, are horsing around when, in a freak accident, Cyrus falls down a flight of stairs, and dies a few days later.

The fact that Cyrus is black, that Zack is white, that Cyrus’s mother, also black, is Bettina’s closest friend–that jealousy, suspicion and resentment have long been simmering in the community, and that there are powerful political forces at work as well–all conspire to reveal an ugly underbelly of the community the Grosjeans have worked so hard to fashion into a model of an enlightened, multiracial world.

Bettina tries hard to organize her community–the parents whose kids are in the special enrichment program she and her best friend organized at the kids’ school, the teachers who have loved both Zack and Cyrus and their close friendship—to defend Zack against charges that he deliberately pushed Cyrus. Her efforts fail utterly, leaving her to come to grips with the fact that she has never really created the colorblind society she had hoped for.

For what seems an agonizingly long time, Zack is locked away in a dangerous juvenile detention facility, the victim of a political scheme on the part of a community leader who is trying to strike a bargain for the release of three black kids who shot up a school cafeteria. Zack’s father knows what is going on but, despite pulling a lot of insider strings, is unable to get his son released.

In the end, it is Viola Nightingale, Cyrus’s grieving mother, who comes out of her cloud of grief and uses the threat of an expensive lawsuit against the city to bargain for Zack’s release. As she explains to Zack, she loves him if he were her own son. He’s all she has left now that her own son has died.

So, Upper West Side Story is, in the end, the story of a remarkable multi-racial friendship, a love of two women united by their social ideals and by their devotion to their children. The distrust in their community works hard to divide them but love and friendship finally win out.

I was beaming with joy as I watched Barack Obama stride out onto that platform in Chicago on the glorious night he won his first presidential election. But, tempering my pleasure, was the thought that the election of America’s first black president probably spelled doom for the book I’d begun to write. Racial tensions would soon be resolved; the era of racial strife was about to end.

I am not happy to discover that we are no closer now to a colorblind society than we were when I started this novel. We have raised our children, as the novel’s narrator says, “in a whole new way,” but the grown-ups have simply not caught up with the ideals they so hopefully taught to their children.

REVIEWS FOR UPPER WEST SIDE STORY

Listen to NPR’s Joan Baum Review Upper West Side Story:

“Susan Pashman’s book does what Sue Miller’s The Good Mother did for an earlier era. It exposes the tensions beneath polite, contented liberal society and how they can explode when something goes wrong. Well observed and heartbreaking.” – Hanna Rosin, writer at The Atlantic and Slate; author of The End of Men: And the Beginning of Women.

“What if The Bonfire of the Vanities was set in the present time and told from a woman’s perspective? Upper West Side Story gives you an irresistible answer.” – Lara Vapnyar is the author of Memoirs of a Muse; There Are Jews in My House; and The Scent of Pine.

“Susan Pashman handles a tough and vital subject with unusual daring and sensitivity. Upper West Side Story is a gripping novel.” – Hilma Wolitzer, best-selling author of An Available Man, Hearts, and The Doctor’s Daughter.

“New York neighborhoods, New York parenthoods, race…Susan Pashman’s powerful story of a fracturing family in a fractured city is fraught with understanding.” – Peter Behrens, award-winning author of The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens.

“In this powerful novel, Susan Pashman picks up the most delicate–but most pressing–subject in our national discourse and sets it down in the surround of a heart-rending tale of parental love and tender friendship. Everything is here: domestic disruption, generational divides, urban and academic politics, and, most courageously of all, racial resentment and distrust. Pashman knows her way through it all and handles it with intelligence and lovely writing.”  – Joann Miller, former Editorial Director, Basic Books.

SEE WHAT READERS HAD TO SAY ON GOODREADS:

BOOK SPOTLIGHT FOR UPPER WEST SIDE STORY

At readings, the question is inevitable: How much of this book is based on your life?

The answer is complicated. Upper West Side Story is pure fiction that began with my shock at hearing a parent express joy at the way his son was to be introduced to black children at his school.

What could go wrong, I wondered? Suddenly, I imagined the inciting incident from which the book’s plot spins out.

But, as any fiction writer does, I visualize my characters as I write them, and for this I rely on people I know. Who can say why a particular acquaintance comes to mind when I need a very upright District Attorney and want a female for the role? Who can say why another acquaintance’s two adorable kids popped into my head when I wanted a young boy and his sister for the family at the center of this novel?

The book is not “about” these acquaintances. As characters, they’ve been assigned features they don’t have in real life. And—most important—they’ve been set inside a plot that in no way resembles their actual lives.

Apart from characters, there are small events that flesh out the main story line, and sometimes these are drawn directly from my life. Or, in the case of this novel, from the lives of my own children.

I raised two boys on my own in Brooklyn, a bit of a hairy experience. When Zack, they young boy at the center of this book, tells of having gotten locked inside a neighborhood church with his best friend, and having gotten home that night by jumping off the roof of a wing attached to the church, this is a story my son actually told me once enough time had passed so I could endure the harrowing details.

Another real experience my son had I attributed to the father in the book. When my son received his first grownup bike as a birthday present, he told his classmates. One of them followed him home, begging to try out the bike. When my son agreed, the child drove off with the bike and was never seen again. It broke my heart to have to explain to my son why a kid takes a bike and hands it over to older kids who will disassemble it for parts they can sell when the two younger boys would have had many good times with it together.

In Upper West Side Story, I use this story to explain why the father grew up determined to help bring about the social change that could help children of different races trust one another.

I told the story exactly as it happened. You can read this story for yourself starting at page 148 in Upper West Side Story

WRITER’S DREAM INTERVIEWS AUTHOR SUSAN PASHMAN

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN PASHMAN, AUTHOR OF UPPER WEST SIDE STORY

Q. Why did you write this book?

A. I had a conversation with my own brother who had a son in junior high school. He was so excited because four black children were going to be entering his son’s all-white class. It was a special program to introduce the white kids to black children so they could get a firsthand idea of black children; it would, in my brother’s words, “expose” his son to other kinds of kids.

I went home from that conversation enraged. I had asked my bother how he and his son would feel if his son was “used” in the same way to educate black children. I thought kids were being used to give their parents a sense of moral superiority that I found obnoxious.

So that night, I found myself wondering how many things could go wrong in the scenario my brother was setting up. Immediately, I envisioned what is the inciting incident in this book: one of the children being injured and how the parents, both black and white, would react.

Q. When you write, do your characters come to you fully formed or do they unfold and develop along with the story?

A. Characters always develop lives of their own as you put them in one situation after another. For me, though, it is important to start with an idea and the easiest way to do that is to model each of my characters, even the very minor ones on people I know. This is not always the nicest thing to do to friends. But in this book, the characters based on friends are very nice people in the book so I don’t worry.

I start out with people I can visualize, and I have some idea how they sound when they speak. After a while, the characters take on their own lives as I get to know them and move them through the book’s plot.

Q. One of the main characters in your book is a black woman. In fact, several of your main characters are black. As a white writer, did you find writing these characters a particular challenge?

A. The challenge was not to rely on stereotypes. What I always try to imagine is the inner person, the feelings my characters have. Everyone’s emotions run pretty much the same way. So I just imagine myself in the place of the person I’m writing and I know the way that person will feel. For Viola, the black mother who is central to the plot, I was not imagining any particular person I ever knew, but I was sure of how she must feel in each of the circumstances the plot placed her in.

Q. Do you think unconscious racism is as big an issue now as when you began writing?

A. Well, this is the place to mention that this book was revised many times over a period of fourteen years. Unconscious racism was not even a phrase when I began writing this. We all knew that we harbored a certain bias against others; what we didn’t know– or what we denied–was what many studies reveal now: that we all tend to

trust people who most resemble ourselves more than we trust others who do not. What the police shootings all over our nation have shown us is that the people we most respect often harbor the worst racist bias, and that when people who have been taught to BEHAVE properly are under duress, their deeper feelings are revealed in their actions.

Q. When did you first start writing?

A. I began this book in 1999, before nine-eleven and, significantly, before Obama became the first black president. In that glorious moment when he and his family stepped out on the platform in Chicago to accept the victory, I was deliriously happy as so many others were. But lurking in the back of my mind was a terrible worry that the book I had almost finished—in its first draft—would become irrelevant because I thought this would be the beginning of a new post-racial society. Of course, that did not happen. But it places my book at the center of the current national conversation.

Q. Did your background in law help with the research for your story?

A. There’s a lot of legal knowledge that went into the twists and turns of this book, but what really surprised me was how much I learned from an internship I did while I was in law school. As an intern at the New York City Council President’s office, I picked up—by osmosis, I think—so much about the tone of New York’s City Hall, the mayor, the city politics. And that figure quite a lot in the plot of this story.

Q. To what extent does this book reflect your years as a philosophy professor?

A. I have taught philosophy for so long and in so many contexts that a philosophical viewpoint has got to be part of my DNA by now. The fact that unanswerable questions intrigue me and never let go of me is probably evident in this book. But on a more concrete level, it was not so much the subject I taught but the academic atmosphere that I have come to know so well that worked its way into the book. The main character, the mother, is a professor of women’s studies and the academic politics of the school she teaches at figure in the story and in her marriage.

Q. You’ve described this as a book about “urban parenting.” Do you think that’s different from parenting outside of cities?

A. I’m actually very disturbed by parenting patterns in both cities and suburbs. I have always been concerned about raising kids in the suburbs and, in fact, sold a lovely suburban Victorian to move my kids back into the city when I saw how dependent suburban kids are on their parents, how slowly they develop a sense of independence compared with city kids. Suburban kids need to be driven everywhere in cars by their parents. I think it must be humiliating to be driven to a school prom by your folks.

Q. You raised your own two children, two sons, as a single urban parent in Brooklyn. Do you think urban parenting has changed in recent years? We hear so much about helicopter parents these days.

A. I now see so many urban parents hovering over their kids and I have the same problem with what’s going on in cities as I used to have with suburban parenting. I am dismayed that parents send their kids to school with cell phones so they can always stay in touch. I am horrified that they send kids away to summer camp with phones so they can text message their kids every day. The whole point of camp is for a child to grow up and find himself and to discover his own private self.

My kids took the subway in NYC from the time they were in third grade. My younger son used to travel to Greenwich Village and break-dance under Washington Square arch while he was still in elementary school. Of course things happened. One day, on the way to school, some kids stopped him and stole his sneakers right off his feet so that he had to go to school in his socks. Another time, he had a kid come up behind him in McDonald’s and take the money I’d given him for dinner. He learned a lot about people and the world from those experiences. I’m not sorry he had them.

There are a number of adventures my kids had in the city that are woven into the book, things they did that were dangerous and that I did not know about at the time that might have given me a severe headache had I known. But they developed a sense of privacy and a sense of how to care for themselves, and I think that is the most.

Q. This book raises a lot of tough questions about race. Do you think it provides answers as well?

A. Well, you see, this is where the philosopher in me comes to the fore. I am better at raising questions than I am at answering them. In writing a novel like this one, the important thing is to be true to reality. The characters, their situations, their feelings have to ring true. Once a reader sees these characters as who they are and understands that their problems are real problems, the conversation can begin about how to solve problems.

These are huge social issues, probably the most difficult issues confronting our country at this time. I would be foolish to pretend to have the solutions. But if this book raises consciousness of these problems and gets people talking about what they think will solve them, then the book has done enough.

BLOG REVIEWS FOR UPPER WEST SIDE STORY

This book should be required reading in every high school English class, if only the NEA would have the *ahem* let’s just say courage – to ‘make it so’….

Upper West Side Story is probably the most worthwhile, uncomfortable book I’ve read in a long time. Sometimes I could only read a chapter before I’d have to do something else and give my mind time to digest what I had read. But I always came back.

(T)he book is an eye opening portrait of how bitterness breeds hatred, the enormous gap between the races , the skewed ideas of equality and how to achieve it, dirty politics, and how in times of crisis we may find ourselves utterly alone, fighting an uphill battle against strong and powerful forces. But, in the end, the power of friendship, of good moral people, and love, brought about healing and forgiveness, and thwarted injustice by working together as a team.…Very disturbing on one hand, very thought provoking on another… we can all learn from this type of story. 4.5 stars

This book grabbed me and kept me enthralled till the end. I felt for both the mothers and the helplessness, the utter loneliness of the characters. Love, forgiveness, redemption, isn’t that what we want? This novel delivers those and more.

(A) book that will change your perspective on a lot of things, including those things you believed would remain as they always have been. ..(t)he book is all about love, loss, legal tangle and how forgiveness is a necessity not only for those who have sinned, but also those who have been victimized. …this book needs to be treasured. RATING: 4.8/5

There is racial unrest, political nastiness and friendship. The story is phenomenal. The themes are perfect and the characters seems to leap off the page. This is one engrossing experience. Well done. 

I really enjoyed reading Upper West Side Story. I kept forgetting I was reading fiction. To me, this is one sign of good writing. Thanks, Susan Pashman for sucking me into your story. Pashman does an excellent job of pulling from the various races within this NYC neighborhood to showcase their concerns. As if racial tension isn’t enough, she throws in political motives and all the scurvy things municipalities and people with political ambitions do to their communities in the name of “justice.” Oh, I was fuming. I noted this simile because I enjoyed the visual it created: “The snow had started forming a crust on her coat and hair, making her look like a bit of Christmas candy.” Isn’t it a nice image?

This is an excellent book, a very emotional one. …The author deftly weaves the threads of jealousy, simmering resentment, racial prejudice and suspicion to produce a tapestry of modern-day life in America…. It is a novel that is of the moment, and touches on some very delicate topics, race and poverty among them.