Raising children in New York City isn’t exactly easy. Small apartments, subway stations without stroller access, and a complicated public school system make parents’ lives challenging. These aren’t the problems facing Annie Lewin, protagonist of Sophie Brickman’s new novel Plays Well With Others. Lewin belongs to the super elite class of wealthy families living in upper Manhattan, and so is worried about finding her eldest son, Sam, a kindergarten spot in a top-tier private school where tuition rivals the most expensive colleges. Plays Well With Others explores the challenges facing wealthy women in New York City as they jockey for their children’s future.
Brickman’s novel, with a colorful cover featuring an apple stabbed with a yellow number 2, superficially presents itself as a fun beach read following the trivial lives of rich families. The book’s marketing comes across as Gossip Girl, but with toddlers. To some degree, the book succeeds at achieving this goal. The playful back-and-forth email messages hint at levity. And there are moments, particularly when Sam is administered an IQ test, written for laughter as much as drama. Sam blows away the instructor with his refusal to participate, the kind of self-assertion adults long for themselves. However, the bigger strength of the novel is in satirizing the super rich and offering a class critique.
Annie cares for two other younger children, Claire, who is potty training, and Max, who is still an infant, while her husband Dan is building some kind of financial investment firm involving crypto currency. Annie’s primary rival throughout the novel is Belinda Brenner, a divorce attorney whose son is enrolled in the same preschool as Sam. Other parents float in and out of the narrative, and for a time it seems as though Brickman is setting us up for a love triangle or romance gone awry. Read as a funny women’s fiction or a light summer read, and the novel is unremarkable, but as a satire, Brickman is pitch perfect in many ways.
Where this book shines is in capturing the alienation of parenthood, particularly in New York City where class and wealth are constantly creating tension. Annie, who grew up in suburban New Jersey, is constantly put on the spot for this blemish, and lives in fear of failing out of her life in Manhattan leading to a forced return to the suburbs. Suburbia is the safety net, but a mark of failure.
Applying to private schools in New York City involves a similar process as applying to college, but with the added complications of applying for a mortgage and joining a private club. There are professional coaches, test training, essays to write, interviews, assessments of income and financial giving, and of course the occasional solicitation. Annie wants Sam to have the best, every edge possible. They exploit the fact that Dan graduated from one school, and he promises to obtain a letter of recommendation from Elon Musk.
The Elon Musk letter plot is woven throughout the book, and eventually obtained. It highlights the gleeful ridicule to which Brickman satirizes the fintech class in New York City. The letter of recommendation written by Musk is a hoped for asset, but Annie and Dan immediately question the authenticity of the letter citing all the ways it’s probably not actually from Musk. The situation drags Musk for all his weirdness in the real world. He should be embarrassed, and Brickman skewers him for pretending to not own a home and giving up all physical possessions, pointing that he is neither homeless nor without property. But it’s a send up of the characters, so caught up in their own drama they fail to see the absurdity of their lives contemplating whether the recommendation letter is legitimate.
The novel also exposes the alienation of parenthood. The social circle Annie is limited to includes only parents of other children in Sam’s preschool class. She is in a group chat thread with the other parents in the school. Meanwhile, Dan’s career takes him to far off trips away from the family leaving Annie home alone. Despite the links to other parents, she is lonely and slowly cracking under all the pressure.
While Annie is the primary caregiver, she does work, although as a writer. She primarily writes a parenting advice column and it appears throughout the novel. However, despite offering responses to concerned parents, and writing from the position of an expert, Annie begins to question her own self worth. She worries she’s a bad parent. It’s also clear her salary as a writer is not paying tuition at private schools. Her husband’s high salary is what allows their lifestyle and for her to write. It’s an acknowledgement of a fact that often goes unnoticed by privileged writers, especially those in New York City, that pursuing their craft often is tied to the success of a spouse.
Dan has a solution. He suggests she might pursue a career in psychology, relying on the column she writes for notoriety. Here we see Brickman’s satire in perfect form. Dan explains why he thinks psychology will be AI proof, citing a futurist from Twitter with a long convoluted simulation involving Jeff Bezos as president and Elon Musk as a technology czar, and why its likely AI powered psychology would eventually be outlawed. It’s an absurd scenario laid out but the delivery makes it seem entirely plausible. Absolutely, I can imagine certain people prattling on about such a weird scenario, and that there are real people, genuinely powerful and rich people, who follow internet conspiracy rabbit holes.
Eventually, Annie and Belinda find themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma. One of the remaining elite schools is willing to take both their children provided they both commit. Annie begins gaming out the scenarios wondering what her best move is, and ultimately the two women go tit for tat in an escalating series of pettiness.
Brickman successfully builds suspense around the question of where will this wealthy, privileged woman send her child. Will they end up in public school, or worse, New Jersey? As satire, it works.
Brickman is also very much tuned into modern parenting. She speaks the language of Peppa Pig and MagnaTile–these are plastic blocks filled with magnets to help them together, a modern improvement on wooden blocks that are synonymous with childhood today. She makes plenty of Millennial triggering pop culture references, like the Eyes Wide Shut, known for over the top sex, since neutered by the internet.
The text itself is also trying to participate in a contemporary dialogue. If there is one flaw, it’s grasping too hard to be current by shoving emoji-filled text messages into the text. These asides seem more appropriate in a summer beach read and undermine the novel as serious satire. Emails and other written materials are interjected into the narrative, and while a handful of them are successful, like the Musk recommendation letter, they primarily serve to pull the reader out of the story. They are jarring in some ways, and maybe a shortcut to narration.
Sophie Brickman has teased a light, summer read, but delivered a satire of the American ruling class. Underneath the petty, Gossip Girl-like promise of a catty, back-stabbing novel, Plays Well With Others is actually a deep criticism of class and wealth mocking the fintech rulers who walk among us.
FICTION
Plays Well With Others
by Sophie Brickman
William Morrow and Company
Published August 6th, 2024