'Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat' by Adam Langer

A Novel in A-Flat

Adam Langer

Spiegel & Grau: 336 pp., $24.95

BUYING an apartment in Manhattan, where it would appear that quite a number of people want to live, often becomes a drama flush with too much money, overwrought emotions and class warfare. Perfect material for either tragedy or farce. Adam Langer has taken the latter route in this novel, whose subject is the sale of one particular apartment -- 64 Ellington Blvd., No. 2B -- on the far Upper West Side.

The story opens on the apartment's longtime but leaseless tenant, Ike Morphy, a clarinet player recently departed from a jazz group called the Funkshuns. Ike has spent the last months in Chicago at his dying mother's bedside, and he returns to New York to find that his benevolent landlord has died, leaving matters in the hands of his more ruthless son, who is in the process of selling 2B out from under Ike. Ike and the potential buyers -- Rebecca and Darrell -- quickly become action figures in the larger game of Urban Gentrification, along with the Seller, the Broker, the Buyer's Husband's Lover, the Tenant's Dog and so on, down to the pigeons on the apartment's window ledge, who have troubles of their own.

By making Rebecca an editor at a prestigious magazine, Darrell a perennial grad student, his lover Jane a fiction writer and Josh, the real estate broker, an aspiring actor-playwright, Langer has set himself up to take potshots at the subcultures of real estate, academe, book publishing and magazines. Sometimes his aim is hilariously accurate. For instance, Darrell. As a teacher, he lectures from CliffsNotes; as a student, he clings to the mast of a sinking thesis.

He spends his days in the sort of deep avoidance offered by Google, tormenting himself by looking up the accomplishments of others by the time they were his age, 31. "F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote 'The Great Gatsby' . . . Orson Welles made 'Citizen Kane' . . . Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse . . . Janis Joplin was dead . . . the Beatles had already broken up; Andrew Cunanan had already killed three people." Darrell also looks himself up on RateYourTeachingAssistants.net, and it's a dismal moment when "the red pepper near his name signifying that he was a 'hottie' has been replaced by a green frownie face; a new review authored by someone calling himself 'C.S.' has been posted: 'Avoid this slacker like the plague.' "