BOUGIE IN NEW YORK

A gossip columnist comes of age in Calbert’s debut novel.

Tina West grew up in an affluent, conservative African American family outside Washington, D.C. Raised on her parents’ beliefs in education and hard work, Tina was a classic high school overachiever. After a year at a state university to save money—during which Tina learned just how uncomfortable many White and Black people were with each other—she transferred to a school in the city she’d wanted to live in since she was a child: New York! Tina immediately fell in love with the grit, danger, excitement, and romance of the Big Apple—even if one of her formative experiences involved yelling at a masturbator on the subway. In New York, she discovers a talent for writing, one which, years later, will cause her to leave behind her lucrative career as a financial analyst to pursue her true calling. “I was privy to tons of juicy gossip. I was a writer and I was sick of working for someone else. I had enough savings to live for quite a few years. So, I decided to go in a different direction, freelancing as a gossip columnist and moonlighting as a novelist.” We watch Tina’s metamorphosis from a high school student afraid of attending a coke party to a society snoop with a line on America’s most glamorous—as well as the loves, fights, and oddities she finds along the way. Calbert’s prose reads like a long, incisive monologue: “Do any of these people sound familiar? Well, they should. You know all of them. You may not know the name of the specific person I am talking about, but you know the archetype. Because in some way, shape or form they represent everyone in Hollywood.” Calbert calls the book a roman à clef, and it reads like a memoir, hopping around by topic rather than presenting a sustained narrative. This structure ultimately makes the book a bit weaker than it should be—the reader gets neither the reality of nonfiction nor the immersive story of fiction. Even so, Calbert has a knack for describing compelling incidents and character-revealing moments, and the reader looks forward to seeing what future volumes hold.

An often entertaining, if uneven, tale about the rise of a writer.