Marjorie Kernan has written the sort of totally charming, mood-elevating novel that you finish quickly and then want to pass along to all of your friends.
Indeed, if I could, I would reach out to you from cyberspace right now and put a copy of “The Ballad of West Tenth Street” (Harper Perennial) into your hands.
It’s a first novel, but you would never guess that fact from the assured comic tone, the freshness of the characterization and the completely original way that Kernan turns life in contemporary downtown Manhattan into a hip fable that a reader wants to believe could be true.
There is no way that I could convey Kernan’s style or boil down her daffy plot in this brief review. The book did remind me a bit of the distinctive charm of the “Tales of the City” novels by Armistead Maupin; Kernan gives her urban neighborhood a small village feeling that echoes Maupin and most of the story hangs on a fantastically charismatic middle-aged woman (in the vein of Maupin’s Anna Madrigal) who seems to embrace life in any form that crosses her path.
Kernan shares Maupin’s belief that city living can be truly cozy because every inhabitant eventually carves out their own little corner of the vast metropolis.
“The Ballad of West Tenth Street” is set in a very realistically detailed Greenwich Village, but Kernan uses the architecture of the place and the neighborhood’s history of eccentricity and bohemian acceptance to spin a tale that is just a bit larger than life.
Sadie Hollander is the widow of a legendary Golden Age of Rock figure who overdosed after fathering three children, but left Sadie with a very comfortable income from royalties and the other spin-off revenue surrounding iconic baby boomer music.
Sadie presides over an elegant old brick townhouse that she shares with her precocious 12-year-old son Hamish and 14-year-old daughter Ondine. An older daughter, Gretchen, is in an expensive Connecticut institution after cutting herself and deciding to cease speaking.
The manner in which Kernan blends the downs and ups of family life into her story — while keeping the reader assured that the Hollanders will be OK when they come out the other end of their tragedies — is quite amazing.
Things begin to change radically on West Tenth Street — and more magic is added to Kernan’s narrative — when a rich old Southern man mysteriously buys the townhouse next door and eases his way into the lives of the Hollanders.
That’s all I will say about the plot and the many changes the cast of characters go through on their way to the final paragraph when our omniscient narrator simply moves us away from the two houses on West Tenth Street and into the teeming life of the city: “Back to the noise and traffic on Seventh that thunders and roars like a great river, past sushi joints and newstands, head shops, book shops, and solid brownstones, their shutters prudently closed against the curious gaze of those passing by.”
