THE BALLAD OF WEST TENTH STREET

Debut novelist Kernan excavates a small parcel of Manhattan turf and dissects its host of eccentric inhabitants: old and young, rich and poor, artfully rendered and not.

Middle-aged Sadie Hollander should be enjoying her position of monied bohemian splendor. As the matriarch of a Greenwich Village townhouse, she’s free to pursue whatever she pleases, thanks to the funds left by her late husband, Ree, a famous British rock musician. But life is a struggle for Sadie. Her eldest daughter, Gretchen, is institutionalized; her growing drinking problem is alienating her from her two youngest children, Hamish and Deen; and she’s receiving unwelcome romantic overtures from Ree’s old bandmate, Brian. Though it all sounds dour, Kernan generally gives Sadie’s predicaments a light, almost fantastic touch. Indeed, the book’s cast is stuffed with comically idiosyncratic characters, from Deen, a 14-year-old piano prodigy, to Colonel Harrington, a new neighbor with a genial high-tea demeanor, and Cap’n Meat, a homeless Vietnam vet cared for by both the Harrington and Hollander households. The novel has a decidedly Victorian air, with its sprawl of characters and episodic plot—Deen tries to escape a belligerent piano teacher, Cap’n Meat eludes a stalker, Sadie tends to Brian after an accident—and Kernan isn’t shy about stressing the point by referencing Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit. Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were never so sloppy, however, and as the story hastens to a close it becomes decentralized, with main threads left hanging in favor of one of the weakest subplots. Many of the secondary characters are constructed out of the flimsiest cardboard, not least the housekeepers (consistently kindhearted foreigners) and the fellow employed to fix Harrington’s plumbing system (constantly grousing about union labor). Kernan devotes too much space to these supporting players, presumably hoping to evoke Dickens’s deep understanding of the entire class ladder. She lacks the chops and seriousness to pull off anything so ambitious.

Blurry panorama of an unrealistic city.