Before I started working at Lemuria I was a shopper. The day after the Pulitzer Prizes were announced in 2011 I came to Lemuria, bought A Visit From the Goon Squad, and began reading it in the atrium while I ate a decent reuben. It didn’t take me very long to conquer Jennifer Egan’s instant classic, as it was both enthralling and a vision into the future of storytelling. If you are not familiar with the book, A Visit From the Goon Squad follows a record executive and his one-time assistant. Egan takes us through their lives by way of different characters that have come across the two main characters. 
This concept produced a novel comprised of thirteen chapters that span fifty plus years. The reader sees Los Angeles in the 1980s and Africa in the 1960s. Time and place shift in no particular order throughout the novel. If that sounds radical, it is. The thirteen chapters cover as many characters as it can, leaving the reader to understand that each chapter can easily stand alone as a short story.
And that is what brings me to Triburbia.
Triburbia follows the lives of a group of fathers who meet in the same cafe in Tribeca after dropping their children at the same school. They are wealthy people, but pride themselves on steering away from a bourgeoisie lifestyle. There is a photographer and a sculptor and a sound engineer and memoirist, etc. As the novel unwinds the reader quickly learns that Karl Taro Greenfeld followed suit from Egan. It is split up into chapters that could stand alone as short stories, bouncing between characters and time periods. If the structure weren’t enough to catch my eye (and the cover is what brought me in in the first place) I found that I loved the different voices I met. The characters are displayed in a fashion that allows the reader to understand them three dimensionally. The reader watches as these people with more means than necessary witness their lives crumble around them. Without Greenfeld’s wit this book could have been a real bummer, but the wit is there. If you take a blase stance on the emotional lives of the rich, consider Greenfeld’s tongue-in-cheek coy attitude to be sympathetic of the everyman.
“Triburbia, should share space on the shelf next to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children and Jeffery Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides.” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh )
“The excellent Triburbia brings to mind such modern masters as Cheever, Updike, and Salter, but Greenfeld delivers his own wonderfully sharp-eyed take on recent American life. . . . This is fiction of the first rank–intense, suspenseful, and relevant in the most urgent way.” (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, )
“I loved Triburbia, loved dropping in on these wonderful characters with their outsized appetites and ambitions . . . Most of all, though, I loved Karl Taro Greenfeld’s deft satirical touch, the searing empathy with which he offers up his privileged, damaged people to the world.” (Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets )
Triburbia, Karl Greenfeld, Harper Collins, $25.99
by Simon
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