Morningside Heights
By Cheryl Mendelson
352 pages;
Random House Trade Paperbacks
2003
Love and the City: Morningside Heights is a sprawling, old-fashioned novel of
urban entanglements.
Morningside Heights, the setting of Cheryl Mendelson's rich,
romantic novel of that title, is an actual neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper
West Side. I lived there for more years than I care to say, so the book held a
special fascination at first, an affirmation of some of my most intimately
known local truths. But soon enough, the entire urban wash faded to the
background in favor of a world peopled with emotionally intriguing characters:
Anne Braithwaite, her husband, Charles, and their three children, financially
and spiritually near wit’s end; Anne's old friend Merrit, a beautiful,
successful academic writer who, approaching 40, realizes she might never find
the lasting form of love she'd forgotten until too late to long for; Charles's
friend Morris, in his early 40s, a seemingly permanent bachelor-scientist and
curmudgeonly critic of all that passes before his eyes; and Lily, the
27-year-old psychotherapist who charms Morris and becomes engaged to him. There
are ancillary characters, priests, lawyers, and the like, on whom much of the
detailed but never overwhelming plot rests, and their roles help Mendelson
create a stage akin to those of Jane Austen and George Eliot, the great 19th century
novelists who made palpable all the details of money and real estate and
gesture and expectation that we call society. Like them, Mendelson goes on to
expose, to our deep satisfaction, the precise links in that system that join
together artifice, neurosis, morality, and love.
— Vince Passaro