In Search of Lost Metropolitan Fiction

Proto-Little Red Glasses novels, anyone?

I don’t know who stays up regularly to watch Saturday Night Live when it’s actually on anymore. Certain guests can get me to tune in if I’m up and have nothing else going on, but this past week I figured if Lady Gaga did anything especially good that I’d see the clips on Sunday morning. I have nothing against Lady Gaga, and I think it’s great she’s had sustained success for this long that she’s been able to grow from singing to acting, but I just don’t pay enough attention to modern pop music to care that much. Her one redeeming quality over other hit song makers is she’s very New York City in a way I find charming. Like how I can’t hate on Timmy Chalamet no matter how good looking he is because he’s really just a acting nerd from Hell’s Kitchen, and I’ll always cheer for Adrian Brody (Brody Boyz hive, stand up) because he’s from Queens. A Jewish, Catholic son of Hungarian aristocracy from Queens. The famous New Yorker is my favorite trope next to the Chicago Guy, so I went and found Gaga’s SNL clips and found the “Little Red Glasses” sketch first. My friends, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so perfectly done and reminded me of a certain type of person I’m familiar with since I spend a lot of time on the Upper West Side, but never thought could be parodied so well.

Even though I live in a city and constantly kvetch about the things people who live in cities complain about, I’m forever interested by seemingly mundane metropolitan lives since I’ve learned a person you could pass without a second thought on the sidewalk could end up being absolutely fascinating. Little Red Glasses lady might have an amazing story like…she went down on Leonard Cohen. That will only make sense if you watch the sketch, but the joke really does hit on something I’ve always loved about New York and a few other cities where you’ll find cool lifers with stories to tell just walking around, how you can be talking to somebody and they’ll be taking about the scarves they knit and how they blew Leonard Cohen once.

That’s why I’ve always loved very Metropolitan Fiction, specifically books written by women. I know, I know—sounds like Mr. Friend to All Ladies trying to win points by being like, Fellas, it’s cool to read books by the girls, but it just happens that I think women have made the most interesting stories and observations of living in big American cities. I don’t know why this is, and I’m sure there is somebody who can explain this to me (womenwritersplain?), but I have this very specific batch of books that feel like they belong together on my shelf and they’re almost all by women. It includes fiction and non-fiction by some of the all-timers (Nora Ephron, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Cookie Mueller, and Fran Lebowitz), a few of the modern ones (Meg Wolitzer, Emily Gould, Jami Attenberg, Sloane Crosley, Melissa Broder, Emma Straub, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner), and also books of illustrations and comics by Roz Chast and Maira Kalman) but then there are the ones who I think have been overlooked or forgotten. A few guys also make that list (Edward Lewis Wallant, Leonard Michaels, Wallace Markfield), but it’s dominated by women, many of whom fell under the radar decades ago. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise since, well, you know…history, America, the world, etc., but I’m constantly waiting for other people to start asking me if I’ve heard of the writers and books I stare at from my desk all day.

But the Metropolitan Fiction I love the most tends to be the stuff that came out in the 1970s and usually dropped off the map by the ‘80s. A few of my favorites from the era have had their work put back out to good press and critical reappraisal (Other People's Houses and Lucinella Lore Segal, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin), but there are a few other works of Metropolitan Fiction from the 1970s that I always push on people with the note that these are all classics to me and should be to you.

Fran Ross was a Black woman, but I think she wrote one of the great American Jewish novels, and her genius is criminally overlooked. The Fran Fan Club has been growing steadily in recent years, but her 1974 novel Oreo is one of those books I expect everybody to know and I’m shocked when they don’t. So shocked, in fact, that I’ve bought several people copies of the edition New Directions put out a few years ago and explained that Ross had such a beautiful understanding of how fun and funny the Yiddish language is, and she blends it into her one and only novel that still reads like nothing else before or since.

I watched the 1975 adaptation of Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York recently and had a similar reaction to seeing the 1972 film version of Portnoy’s Complaint: “What the hell was that garbage?” The ‘72 adaptation of Roth’s most famous novel does get points for a great cast that includes Richard Benjamin, Karen Black, and Lee Grant, Sheila Levine is tolerable as a film because Jeannie Berlin (who also has a small part in the Portnoy film) as the titular character is brilliant.

The book, on the other hand, is excellent. What I can never tell is whether it would find a new, wider audience today, or fall prey to so-called “book lovers” who take fiction and art way, way, way, way too literally. I could see some Goodreads review about how this book “makes light of suicide” or something like that, and it would miss the all-important context of the thing that made this book such a massive success when it first came out in 1972. Even in 2015, when Emily Meg Weinstein wrote a great tribute to the book for The Rumpus, I recall thinking, “Woah, curious to see how people react to this.”

The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf is another novel that good editors have tried to get people to pay attention to, and I hope the latest edition by the Modern Library with an intro by Melissa Broder will get more people excited about this book that makes you feel like you’re seeing the world from the narrator’s delusional eyes. Originally published in 1979, people weren’t writing about mental illness like this back then, and few have done a good job of coming close to it since.

I’d only been familiar with Johanna Kaplan’s name because I saw it on the list of Edward Lewis Wallant Award winners, but I’d never read her work until Ecco put out an anthology in 2022, and the only reason it caught my eye at the bookstore is because of the Maira Kalman illustration on the cover. Her 1976 story collection, Other Peoples Lives, is included, and shows Kaplan is the missing link between Grace Paley and Deborah Eisenberg, two of the writers I consider American masters of the short story. Kaplan is also on that list.

Harriet, the narrator from After Claude, is one of my favorite assholes in literature. These days you can’t escape kvetching about unlikable characters, but I try to block those people out since the worst people are often the most entertaining ones in a book. Why do you want to like fictional people, anyway? It’s so weird. I want to like people in my real life, and keep a safe distance from toxic people like the woman Iris Owens created in this 1973 novel. But reading about them? All day.