2009_06_08_p154
The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue includes St. Louis native Jonathan Franzen’s “Good Neighbors,” his first piece of fiction in the magazine since May of 2005. It’s a cautionary, satirical tale of gentrification on a street in St. Paul, Minn. Walter and Patty Berglund, the “young pioneers of Ramsey Hill” who “paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it,” initially seem akin to Colin and Joan Diver in Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s classic 1985 work of nonfiction: young white urban professionals who have committed themselves to refashioning a neighborhood in their own image. Like the Divers, the Berglunds eventually move out of their neighborhood, but for very different reasons. The Divers are ground down by an endless and uphill crusade against neighborhood crime, but the Berglunds are torn apart by dissension among their own family.
One of the more remarkable aspects of “Good Neighbors” is its scope—Franzen’s ability to cover nearly twenty years in a little over 9,000 words while still creating finely grained portraits of his characters. His details and dialogue are devastatingly sharp, as in the following exchange between Patty and her neighbor’s boyfriend, who has chopped down his backyard trees and is in the process of building an ungainly addition:
“Hey, Blake, how’s it going?”
“Going just fine.”
“Sounds like it! Hey, you know what, that Skil saw’s pretty loud for eight-thirty at night. How would you feel about knocking off for the day?”
“Not too good, actually.”
“Well, how about if I just ask you to stop, then?”
“I don’t know. How about you letting me get my work done?”
“I’d actually feel pretty bad about that, because the noise is really bothering us.”
“Yeah, well, you know what? Too bad.”
“Good Neighbors,” in both its title and its subject, seems also to be a response to “Bad Neighbors,” (registration required) Edward P. Jones’s story from the August 7, 2006, issue of the magazine. Both titles are ironic—the “bad” neighbors in Jones’s story turn out to be good in unexpected ways, and the neighbors in Franzen’s story, even those who are outwardly friendly towards each other, are a vicious bunch, full of only partially concealed resentments and jealousies.
In Jones’s story, the Benningtons, a lower-class black family, move into a neighborhood of blacks who are striving for the bourgeoisie and loath to associate with those they consider not to be “their kind of people.” The conflicts that arise between the new neighbors and the established residents mark the beginnings of middle-class flight from the neighborhood, a process that concludes when “the first contingent of whites had come back and planted their flag.” In this way, “Good Neighbors” picks up right where “Bad Neighbors” left off.
Lately, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about segregation, gentrification, and patterns of neighborhood racial succession. I can see their effects as I sit on my porch in the Southwest Garden neighborhood, drive my car or ride my bike around St. Louis, or look at websites that chronicle the city’s evolution. Jones’s and Franzen’s fiction zooms in closely, dramatizing the human struggles and conflicts that occur within the movement of these larger demographical forces and within ever-changing neighborhoods. --Frank Kovarik
Editor's P.S.: The New Yorker offers a Franzen twofer this month with a web-only audio recording of the author reading Veronica Geng’s “Love Trouble Is My Business” and Ian Frazier’s “Coyote v. Acme,” followed by a discussion with fiction editor Deborah Treisman.
