The Good People of New York
By Thisbe Nissen. Alfred A. Knopf, 289 pages, $23.

Thisbe Nissen has followed her shimmering collection of short stories, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, with a delightful novel about a New York family that at once smacks of cutesy Brady Bunch schmaltz, saucy 9-1/2 Weeks sexiness, and neurotic New York Woody Allen angst. In short, Nissen’s debut long-form fiction aptly incorporates all of the sizzle, sorrow, and sporadic elation that a screwed-up family encounter.

The Good People of New York starts with the meeting of Roz and Edwin at a mutual friend’s party. He’s a vanilla-ice-cream type from Omaha, she’s a butter-pecan Manhattanite, and together they form an unlikely union. So it’s no surprise that a few years later, when their daughter, Miranda, has entered the latchkey phase of her sped-up upbringing, Edwin heads back to the homeland, to form a new family.

At that point, precisely page 101, the novel takes off, jumping from the never-quite explainable Roz-Edwin match to the tell-me-more story of prematurely sexy, theatrical, and enigmatic Miranda, a girl who’s able to “make braces seem fashionable, a broken arm look sexy, and her parents’ divorce sound like a Woody Allen screenplay. Miranda could make dental floss enticing.” But it’s her mom who’s brought to her knees by the inner workings of mouths, falling for Miranda’s orthodontist, the man responsible for turning the inside of Miranda’s pink cheeks into “a shredded-pork schwarma.”

After shacking up with him and their combined offspring, Brady Bunch–style, in a peeling brownstone in Brooklyn, Roz discovers that the orthodontist has been drilling elsewhere, and their perfectly joined families break up. Roz and Miranda take in a boarder, a fresh-out-of-college teacher named Wing from Miranda’s school, and form a pseudo-family in which they finally find the community they’ve been searching for.

Nissen has spun an enticing story one wants to lap up whole, but it’s more than just a juicy plum. She has a loose and familiar way with words, and a knack for telling description. When seventh-grader Miranda joins a high-school theater production of Pippin, she internalizes all she can from the older students. Having a cold, she notes, is cool: “They’re all sick, but they relish their colds. They’re like branded martyrs: flourishes of horrendous nose-blowing; a take-out cup of tea with lemon and honey always in hand; a diet of herbal cough drops, Chloraseptic spray, and Marlboro Reds.” She also discovers that, like colds, well-placed tears are a signature of those in the know. “Her eyelashes are gummy with tears, and this is a source of pride: here at camp — so unlike home and school — here, crying is very cool. To come to breakfast Monday morning after Campfire with red, puffy eyes is enviable.” Finding herself in an awkward romantic relationship, “Miranda tries to maintain a sort of perky oblivion, but she sounds like a simpering pep rally when she speaks.”

Nissen is on the money with her depictions of teen angst, but she’s also astute across generational lines. Probing housemate Wing for details about Miranda’s love life, Roz feels “vaguely criminal in a rather delightful way.” Later, falling back into her unavoidable neurotic-mom persona, Roz “could hear her own voice bleeding into a whine, and [she] knew that all Miranda could be thinking was: Lame.”

Throughout, Nissen displays the same keen, mature, mesmerizing voice she showed in her short stories. At times, however, it appears she’s still finding her long-form pace, and that can make The Good People of New York seem a bulky leap for the young writer — some of the chapters seem to work better as short stories than as part of the larger work. But though the novel may lurch momentarily, sometimes jumping and lilting in the gaps between chapters, by the end Nissen has flashed her piercing eye, stuck her nose in the stinkiest relationships, and told the tale with seasoned grace.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001