You've probably noticed I haven't posted anything lately. That's because I've been hard at work on my new novel, All the Lovely People.
I'm almost done!
For grins, here's another sample chapter:
Dina Campbell stared at her laptop, willing the ideas to come. A weekly deadline didn’t seem too onerous to an outsider, but it crept up on you like a silent cat.
Her specialty was longer-form features, mostly on city culture, which the Daily Sentinel ran every Sunday in its expanded edition. She was expected to come up with something fresh each week. God, it was so much harder than people thought.
Perhaps another glass of chardonnay.
She walked to her refrigerator, which was mostly empty. Some leftover condiments, and several bottles of budget wine, and some leftover Chinese takeout; the cliched refrigerator items of any single New Yorker. Home was a small one bedroom on the Upper West Side, so it wasn’t a long walk. Filling her glass two-thirds of the way she then returned to her desk, now occupied by her rescue cat, Ruth, named for one of her personal icons. She shooed her off. Why she got the thing, she still didn’t know. She didn’t even like cats.
Dina was working on a piece about climate-conscious food choices, but knew it was journalistic piffle. (Vegan, basically.) It lacked edge. Staring out the window didn’t help much either. Once, she could just make out part of the Hudson River between two other buildings. Now, she looked about twenty feet into a brick wall. Somehow a developer bought the air rights, and her view was now of the backside of a condo tower. Her apartment was rent controlled, though, and she could never leave, even if she could afford to.
The wine made her maudlin.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Once, she’d been a rising star, a wunderkind fresh from the Crimson, her ticket stamped for journalistic glory. She got hired by the Times and sent to their Paris desk, a plum post. There, while covering other assignments, she met some Muslims, the North African ones who lived in the notorious estates. She painstakingly cultivated the relationships, earning their trust, sensing it would pay off.
She saw they were a community adrift, allowed to live in France, but never be allowed to be French. France bitterly held on to its cultural self-image and American notions of a “melting pot” were not welcomed there. Post 9-11, she could feel tensions rising as the police turned a sharp eye towards the Muslim populace, or in some cases, did the opposite, and allowed estates to virtually self-govern, looking the other way as they adopted Sharia law.
In the sweltering summer of 2005, things boiled over. Police, responding to a theft report, arrived to arrest several Muslim boys who may or may not have been responsible. Two of the boys tried to hide in a nearby power substation and were electrocuted. The electrocution caused a wide power outage which, combined with the news of the boys’ deaths, sparked widespread rioting. One group attacked a police station, forcing an evacuation. The subsequent occupation of the station lasted over two weeks.
The occupiers decided they wanted someone to tell their side of the story, and, through their network, they reached out to Dina. She was invited to the station and ended up embedded there for the duration. Her daily dispatches were dictated over her phone as all power to the station remained shut. It made her feel like a war correspondent.
The series, appearing under her byline, won wide notice for its compassionate portrayal of a desperate generation of young Muslims who saw no future for themselves. It scored her a Front Page Award, awarded to achievement by women in journalism.
If she was giving an honest account of things, it was that moment, that exact moment, when she flew to New York and rose to the podium to accept her award, that was a high water mark after which began a slow, almost imperceptible slide to her current station, writing for a tabloid from a cramped one bedroom. The Times, cutting back like everyone else on international coverage, let her go in a year after the award. Americans were too insular, and frankly too stupid, her editor told her, to care about what happens in France or Yemen or Indonesia.
After Paris, Dina moved around the globe with the wire services, accepting diminished assignments in different posts. It had the patina of glamour, but also made it impossible to keep relationships. She had dated a series of men over the years, most from her own profession. They tended to be rakes and far too impressed with themselves. There was an Al Jezeera correspondent with a fetish for mild bondage and later a CNN anchor whose amorous attentions could only be consummated while watching tapes of himself. That one had lasted a few months.
Perhaps more than anything, the pay was a source of resentment. This was not a journalistic phenomenon limited to Dina, of course. The rise of the internet also gave rise to thousands of news sources, most of them free. This led to a steady decline in compensation for the entire industry, at least relative to other professions. That there was still a constant supply of over-educated Ivy League trust fund brats willing to work for next-to-nothing didn’t help.
The worst part, for Dina, was tracking the careers of her Harvard classmates, particularly the ones she considered idiots, those eating club swells. Many had pursued investment banking or private equity and were making millions, and for what? Moving money around? Others had gone into law. She’d once respected that cadre somewhat more; they’d gone to law school with high ideals. But then they ended up at Skadden or Cravath or Simpson Thatcher just doing the bidding of the bankers—and still making millions, although perhaps a few less.
Many had houses in the Hamptons and Dina burned with resentment that she would never be more than a weekend guest, deposited there on an overcrowded Jitney because she didn’t own a car.
Dina’s salary from the Sentinel was $90,000. $91,250, to be exact. She’d gone to Harvard, and here she was, the wrong side of forty, making ninety-one thousand and two hundred and fifty goddamn dollars. Surviving in New York on that was next to impossible. Her banker classmates could take that free market bullshit they spouted and shove it out their asses because it clearly wasn’t rewarding intelligence the way it should.
Dina looked down from the brick wall and noticed her wine glass was empty. She got up to take the six steps necessary to get back to the kitchenette. Perhaps inspiration would be found there. At age forty-eight, it felt like it was all just slipping by. She needed something to rescue her from the bitterness that was becoming all-consuming.
She needed a story.
A big one.
