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. 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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