JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

How many times have I thought, “I just want to lie in bed all day reading books”? I’ve been staying at home for five months, and I had not done so. Why? I have the time, I have the books, so yesterday I read all day and night, stopping only to feed cats and self.

First: The Party Upstairs, the first novel by Lee Conell. Excellent cover art by Stephanie Ross—a brightly-hued diorama of an apartment building. As Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite reminded us, multi-storey buildings are a clear metaphor for socioeconomic class disparity. Here you have Martin, the super of an Upper West Side NY building, his librarian wife Debra, and their daughter Ruby, an aspiring diorama artist who’s lost her barista job and moved back into their basement apartment, next to the garbage room and the boiler room. Upstairs are the tenants: the one who believes himself egalitarian because he meditates with the super, the ghost of the eccentric voice actress in Martin’s head (could be an actual ghost, could be he’s losing his marbles), the finance guy with “the Manifest Destiny glaze in his eyes” who owns the penthouse.

Martin’s workday, which doesn’t really end since he lives on the premises, consists of chores, negotiations, micro-aggressions and embarrassments. He’s got a bad heart, a bad back, and he’s constantly aware that it takes just one pissed-off tenant to get him fired and his family kicked out of their apartment. Ruby’s position is less clear to Ruby. Her closest friend since childhood is Caroline from the penthouse, and her lifelong proximity to privilege has given her unrealistic expectations. She majored in art at a prestigious university, leaving her in debt and eating up her parents’ savings. Unlike Caroline, she doesn’t have a trust fund to live off while she builds her reputation. Now she has to deal with the ignominy of moving back in with the folks. Ruby likes to make big gestures, but she doesn’t think them through, and her “solutions” spawn new problems.

The Party Upstairs is told from the alternating viewpoints of Martin and Ruby, and everything happens in a single day, from the arrival of a homeless person demanding to be let in, to the party Caroline is throwing in the penthouse. It reads exactly like a thriller. I kept expecting the super to have a heart attack or Ruby to be accused of a crime or a dead body to turn up. Instead of death, violence, and police investigations, the novel keeps you riveted with its portrayal of class, family, over-gentrification, and the absurd inequalities of the present world. Conell has created two protagonists who are utterly real: sometimes you want to hug them, sometimes you want to kick them in the head.

The novel is extra-sharp in its exploration of entitlement and its hypocrisies: the tenants who take pride in their charity work while demanding that the super get rid of the homeless person outside the lobby, the people who claim to be one with all living creatures but yell at the super to destroy the pigeon’s nest near their terrace because the birds might shit on their tiles. The Party Upstairs is thrilling and wise.

* When I read the blurb I was worried that The Party Upstairs had the same plot as my novel, which comes out in September. The premise is similar—strange relationship to privilege—but that’s about it. Whew.