Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois
It’s 1991. Em moved to New York City for excitement, adventure, and possibility. The Big Apple, though, isn’t quite what she thought it would be. Working as a literary agent’s assistant, she’s down to her last nineteen dollars but has made two close friends: Emily, a firebrand theater director living in a Lower East Side squat, and Lucy, a middle-aged novelist and single mom. Em’s life revolves around these two wildly different women and their vividly disparate yet equally assured views of art and the world. But who is Em, and what does she want to become?
It's 2004. Em is now Emily, a successful book editor, happily married and coping with the challenges of a new baby. Though she barely thinks of her early days in the city, the past suddenly comes back to remind her. Her old friend Lucy wrote a posthumous work that needs a publisher, and her ex-friend Emily has reached out and is eager to reconnect. As they did once before, these two women—one dead, one very alive—force Emily to reckon with her decisions, her failures, and what kind of creative life she wants to lead.
A sharp yet reflective story of a young woman coming into herself and struggling to find her place, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel about art, parenthood, loyalty, and fighting for a cause—the times we do the right thing, and the times we fail—set in New York City on both side of the millennium.
Review: Thank you to HarperCollins for the copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
In this beautifully crafted novel about friendship and identity and books, Em has moved to New York City after college in 1991. She is working as a literary agent's assistant and has two close friends, the wild and artistic Emily and Lucy, a writer who was a good friend of her mother's in college. The novel then jumps to 2004 where we see that Em, who now goes by Emily again, is a successful book editor with a husband and a baby at home. But she is no longer friends with Emily and Lucy has passed away. As the novel moves back and forth in time, the gaps in the reader's understanding are filled in and the reader sees how Emily found her place in the world.
It is little surprise that the author comes from an editing background, because the world of literary publication and a love of reading is beautifully wound through this book. In a very meta way, the book is about writing and reading, and the characters not only are written about but love to read and write and then also occasionally find themselves being written about by other characters as well. In fact, the characters refer to themselves as book characters such as when Em tells Emily she also wants to be called Emily again: "That'll confuse the readers, but sure" (124). The title itself is constantly referred to in the text and called a "beautiful contradiction" (13). Em is a constant reader, spending her literal last dollars on books and delighted to be a part of the literary world, which has been her dream for ages. The beautiful friendship that emerges between her and Lucy rely heavily on books. Lucy is a writer and Em uses her job to help Lucy get published and ultimately helps her posthumously publish her memoir. Similarly, the friendship between Emily and Em is described by Em herself as being created in the mold of many famous literary duos: "Em most clearly saw their friendship fitting into a neat template. It was one she knew well from a lifetime of reading: She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O'Hara; she was what's-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma" (56).
In a greater sense this book is also about art and creation in all its forms - the creation of community and communal space with Em and Emily's obsession with their squat apartment to Emily's playwright aspirations to Em's parenting and watching her daughter emerge as her own being. The novel is also about the ability or choice to rewrite the script - or not. Lucy stands by her novelistic choices and in many ways, Em stands by her life choices. But when it comes to her friend Emily, who over time she has fallen out with, she does decide to rewrite the script and make amends.
In choosing to move forward and backward in time, Kois has made an interesting choice to reveal the ending well before the end of this novel. It is filling in the gaps in understanding that tension is built. It functions surprisingly well but I am still a little unsure of why particular time jumps were made or why the novel continues to move back and forth instead of being chronological. In some ways, it allows the reader to be reflective on her past along with Em. From the perspective of what Em and the reader now know about her life as an editor and mother, we can look back at her life years before and see how she ended up where she has. Kois has beautifully captured female friendship and predominantly feminine voices very successfully in this novel. From hectic Emily to the dependable and caring Em, his characters feel true to life and believable. This was a beautiful coming of age story with the backdrop of New York City. Kois skillfully blends in current events of the time periods he writes about and includes major themes such as the AIDS pandemic, housing in NYC, drug addiction, the struggle of juggling parenthood and fulltime jobs, sibling relationships, racism, and sexual harassment in the workplace. A book that writers and readers can truly appreciate.
Stars: 4
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