THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Triburbia depicts the one-third-life crises of NYC’s bourgeois bohemians – and it’s surprisingly compelling.originally published by Fully Booked Zine, September 2012
Triburbia is structured like a narrative mosaic; its intersecting pieces are tinted with various hues of ethical grey, dollar green, and mostly Caucasian. The novel’s perspective shifts among a loose-knit coterie of neighbors in New York's gentrified Tribeca area. Most of them are young(ish) parents, belonging to what sociologist Richard Florida calls the “creative class”: a sculptor, a photographer, and a sound engineer, among others. On paper, they’ve got it made – some earn handsome professional fees to do creative work; others make art subsidized by their affluent partners’ paychecks. Expectedly, the severity of their personal issues is proportional to their household income. Domestic squabbles and marital crises are inextricably fraught with aging scenester insecurities: status anxiety, self-doubt over compromised aesthetic sensibilities, and the diminishing returns from “selling out”. It's all too easy to dismiss these as #firstworldproblems, so it's a testament to Karl Taro Greenfeld's storytelling prowess that he's able to make readers care about these characters, as real people.
What holds their narratives together is the cultural milieu of Tribeca. In the period covered by the story, including extensive flashbacks, the neighborhood has gone from low-rent industrial ghetto, to artists’ enclave, to a veritable self-contained yuppie bohemia. Many of the characters have bought in – literally and figuratively – to the fragile illusion of an arts-fueled community, one that remains dependent, however begrudgingly, on the volatile capital being traded elsewhere in Manhattan. The gradual breakdown of the characters’ personal lives coincides with the looming threat of financial decline. Recent history has already given away the context for Triburbia’s ending: nigh collapse, bailouts, stimulus packages, then Occupation. Finding out how these events impact our well-fed artists results in a heady mix of schadenfreude and reluctant sympathy.
Triburbia combines wry cultural observation and earnest character studies with the promise of juicy details and veiled insider gossip. Call it The Bonfire of the Vanities for the Gawker era.