Synopses & Reviews
An electrifying debut novel that unfolds in the course of a single day inside one genteel New York City apartment building, as tensions between the building's super and his grown-up daughter spark a crisis that will, by day's end, have changed everything.
Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege, having grown up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that is full-on gentrified, and getting more so with each passing year. She wasn't by any measure privileged herself, but her close childhood friendship with the daughter of wealthy tenants named Caroline, and the mere fact of living in a lovely neighborhood, close to her beloved Natural History Museum and just across the park from the Met, brought with them certain real advantages, even expectations. Naturally Ruby followed her dreams and took out large student loans to attend a prestigious small liberal arts college and explore her interest in art. But now, out of school for a while, she is no closer to her dream job, or anything resembling it, and she's been forced by circumstances to do the last thing she wanted to do: move back in with her parents, back in the basement apartment of the building. And Caroline is throwing one of her parties tonight, in her father's glorious penthouse apartment, a party Ruby looks forward to and dreads in equal measure.
With exquisite narrative control, The Party Upstairs distills down worlds of wisdom about families, great expectations, and the hidden violence of class into the gripping, darkly witty story of a single fateful day inside a single Manhattan co-op. Told from the alternating perspectives of the super, Martin, and his daughter, Ruby, as they are obliged, one way or another, to interact with the various species of inhabitant of the little ecosystem of their building, the novel builds from the spark of an early morning argument between Martin and Ruby to the ultimate conflagration that results by day's end. By the time the ashes have cooled, the facade that masks the building's power structures of dominance and submission will have burned away, and no party will be left unscathed.
Review
"Conell...ignites this suspenseful novel, taking place over a single day, with a passion, psychological insight, and a keen sensibility about class and economic difference." The National Book Review
Review
"Conell's smashing debut creates a vivacious microcosm of life inside a tony Manhattan co-op building." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Conell's debut perfectly captures the co-op's ecosystem and the ways class informs every interaction, reaction, and relationship inside it...A slow-burning debut that keenly dissects privilege, power, and the devastation of unfulfilled expectations." Kirkus
About the Author
Lee Conell is the author of the story collection Subcortical, which was awarded the Story Prize’s Spotlight Award. Her short fiction has received the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and appears in the Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow as well as the recipient of creative writing fellowships from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.