Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat

Clarinetist Ike Morphy, his dog Herbie Mann, and a pair of pigeons who roost on his air conditioner are about to be evicted from their apartment on West 106th Street, also known as Duke Ellington Boulevard. Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord; and now that landlord's son stands to make a killing on apartment 2B.

Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during, and after the height of New York's real estate boom, Ellington Boulevard's characters include the Tenant and His Dog; the Landlord, a recovered alcoholic and womanizer who has newly found Judaism and a wife half his age; the Broker, an out-of-work actor whose new profession finally allows him to afford theater tickets he has no time to use; the Broker's New Boyfriend, a second-rate actor who composes a musical about the sale of 2B ("Is there no one I can lien on if this boom goes bust?"). There's also the Buyer, a trusting young editor at a dying cultural magazine, who falls in love with the Tenant; the Buyer's Husband, a disaffected graduate student taken to writing bawdy faux-academic papers; and the Buyer's Husband's Girlfriend, a children's book writer with a tragic past.

With the humor and poignancy that made Langer's first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics across the country, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. It's the story of why people come to a city they can't afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love, and eventually become the people they never thought they'd be — for better and for worse.

"An apartment on West 106th Street (aka Ellington Boulevard) links a disparate group of New Yorkers in this intricate tale of life, love and real estate. Ike Morphy, a rent-controlled tenant at 84 West 106th Street, learns his apartment is being sold by hard-luck magnet Mark Masler, who, after inheriting the building from his deceased real estate developer father, learns Ike never signed a legal lease. Ike isn't happy about giving up the cheap digs so close to Central Park, where he walks his adopted pooch, Herbie Mann. (Herbie has his own history with the ensemble that swirls around the apartment.) Columbia 'veteran teaching assistant' Darrell Schiff and his ambitious magazine editor wife, Rebecca Sugarman, meanwhile, are looking to move out of their cramped student housing apartment and into somewhere with enough space for 'an as-yet-unconceived child.' Their broker, part-time actor Josh Dybnick, is hot to make a commission that'll put him closer to his dream of opening his own theater. Langer (Crossing California; The Washington Story) takes his time in developing the characters and the depths of their interconnectedness, rendering the twists, doubts and heartbreaks that afflict the milieu highly affecting. For readers who turn first on Sunday morning to the real estate section, it doesn't get much better." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"It would be hard to find a more ingratiating novelist than Adam Langer, whose books are an enjoyable mix of broad social satire and one-on-one emotional entanglement. Langer set his first two novels, 'Crossing California' and its sequel, 'The Washington Story,' in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of his native Chicago. There he examined the upheavals of three families — two Jewish, one black --... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) within a 1980s-era milieu that included the Iran hostage crisis and the mayoral election of Harold Washington.

Exploring his characters' preoccupations with race, religion and sex, Langer showed deft comic timing in both books, knowing just when to pour on the shtick and when to undercut it. He also managed to imbue those characters with an affecting dignity, even in their most slapstick moments.

A new Langer novel, then, promises to be a lot of fun. Instead, 'Ellington Boulevard' turns out to be a lot of work.

The author has turned his attention from Chicago to New York, where he's been living for a few years now. The book's central figure is not a person but an apartment, a nothing-special two-bedroom unit on West 106th Street in the quickly gentrifying Upper West Side area known as Manhattan Valley.

So far, so good: One way or the other, most novels about New York are about money or real estate, and giving center stage to an apartment (technically, it's a condominium) is an attractively honest choice. The problems begin with the herd of characters nervously circling apartment 2B in the renovated five-story prewar tenement known as the Roberto Clemente Building, which recently has been listed for sale. There's Ike Morphy, ace clarinet player and former member of an R&B group called the Funkshuns, who returns from his mother's funeral in Chicago to find that the apartment he's been renting for a song for 20 years is about to be sold out from under him. He'd had a handshake deal but no lease with the building's owner, who recently died; the owner's son, a twice-divorced club freak turned synagogue Man of the Year named Mark Masler, dreams of selling off his father's assets in order to build his not-altogether-plausible dream business, a combination car wash and restaurant. Mark's in love with Allie Scheinblum, whose nice-Jewish-girl facade hides the heart of a hooker. But he's worried about Allie's teenage brother Caleb, a 'trenchcoat mafia' wannabe who spends too much time alone in his dark Riverdale bedroom, doing suspicious things on the computer.

The apartment's prospective buyers are a magazine editor named Rebecca Sugarman and her husband, Darrell, a shiftless Columbia grad student. Their broker, Josh Dybnick, came to New York to pursue acting but has found more success running open houses for the Overman Group, whose founder, Brad Overman, just happens to be getting a divorce from Rebecca's boss at the magazine, Chloe Linton, and who was also the previous owner of Ike Morphy's dog, a black Lab mix named Herbie Mann.

Of these characters, the most fully formed is Ike, whose dedication to music and to his dog during a period of hard luck is believable and poignant. But because Langer has imagined the novel as a jazzy symphony rather than a solo work (his punning subtitle is 'A Novel in A-Flat'), he never lingers long on Ike's story. Instead, he strives to give equal time to all his characters and to map the intricate ways in which they're connected. It's a scrupulously democratic but also a distractingly impersonal choice: Where should the reader's loyalties lie?

The same difficulty arises with the book's other credible male figures, Darrell, Mark and Caleb. Langer takes mostly successful pains to humanize these wayward schmucks, but he never encourages the reader to endorse them.

No one receives more cursory treatment here than Langer's women, though. It's been a while since I've seen a sorrier gaggle of female caricatures, and I'm not just saying this because one of them, an absurd chimera named Liz Fogelson, is a book critic, though she's the worst of the lot. Langer's failure is especially surprising considering the remarkably nuanced female characters of his earlier books; their complex personalities were among those novels' most admirable features. Not so in 'Ellington Boulevard,' in which Chloe is a tired Tina Brown knockoff, Rebecca is far too vague to be at all convincing as an editor or a wife, Allie is a cut-rate princess and the young woman Darrell falls in love with, a budding writer named Jane Earhart, is flat-out incredible (and not in a good way).

What Langer does manage to get right are mostly big-picture successes: the dissonant music of the city; the time-lapse rise and fall of neighborhood fortunes; the eternal Manhattan polarities of aspiration and failure, wealth and poverty. What he doesn't seem quite ready for are the close-ups, which are not vivid or distinct enough to sustain a reader's attention."

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who reviews regularly for The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"I loved this book, but then I've always been a sucker for quality. Adam Langer lifts the lid off the top of New York City and lets us see, close up, and terribly personally, the cosmopolitan complexity of the city that never sleeps alone. In his fugue-like charting of their lives — lives that cross, lives that double-cross—he reveals his love of all things New York: its people, its dogs, and, even more remarkably, its pigeons. The composition and orchestration that Mr. Langer has gifted us with would have delighted the Duke himself." Larry Gelbart, creator of M*A*S*H, co-screenwriter of Tootsie, and Tony Award–winning author of City of Angels and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

"Adam Langer's new novel, Ellington Boulevard, captures all of Manhattan's quirky insanity with great style and a huge amount of fun." Barbara Corcoran

"Adam Langer took me on a wonderful trip all over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The reader will meet musicians, actors, and even a dog named Herbie Mann — open the cover, read, and enjoy! This is his best book yet." Eli Wallach

"Adam Langer, who is either a genius or a schizophrenic, inhabits his characters — from a pregnant woman to a pigeon — with brilliant stealth and lovable insouciance. Finally a book has come along that has gotten me excited about reading and even New York again." Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance and Little Stalker

"I laughed out loud throughout this simultaneously cynical and sentimental New York fairy tale with a love for off-Broadway musicals and the seventeen-key clarinet, and a profound understanding of the importance of dogs." Stephen Schwartz, Academy Award–winning lyricist and composer for Wicked, Godspell, Pippin, and The Prince of Egypt

"The reader is treated to a glimpse of life in a small corner of a giant American city, which turns out to be much like life anywhere else. Highly recommended." Library Journal

"Langer writes beautifully about the city and how it is stunning and crushing at the same time." St. Petersburg Times

"A New York City novel par excellence." Kirkus Reviews

Adam Langer, the author of Crossing California and its sequel The Washington Story, earned his brokerage certification while writing Ellington Boulevard. Born in Chicago, he now lives on Manhattan's Duke Ellington Boulevard with his wife, daughter, dog, and a pair of pigeons who roost on his air conditioner.