None of the Bad Ones

Book excerpt: Andrew Brown's rendering of New York in the late aughts feels ahead of schedule. There is a sense that one is reading a novel whose incubation took decades rather than a few years. And it is only the details--all exquisitely drawn--that betray his accelerated pace . . . Whether describing clubs, skating or women, his sentences are scraped free of waste and sentimentality. What remains are raw, incisive lines that laugh and rail and cry simultaneously. It is, then, that rare novel that avoids flourish without sacrificing the sort of sensitivity needed to capture a period and community in time. And capture he does. Readers are given a world in which glitz and glamour are shown to be smudged and imperfect and even still, or maybe because of this imperfection, full of longing and feeling and life.