Triburbia

Triburbia (2012) by Karl Taro Greenfeld. This novel takes a variety of different points of view as it tells the stories of a group of disparate people who live in the Tribeca borough of New York City. Each character is identified by his or her address, and a handy map at the beginning of the book shows where all the addresses are in relation to each other. The characters include a sound engineer, a photographer, a sculptor, a puppeteer, a gangster, a chef, a playwright and a memoirist. Some of their stories are interesting; some are less so. All of them are fully developed in their given section of the book, and many of them are interconnected (the sculptor's wife is having an affair with the chef, etc.). I found the book intermittently engaging, although in the end I just couldn't keep all the characters straight. When I got to the end of the book, the author was referring to various characters by name, and I couldn't remember who was who. This is a pretty interesting novel about the kind of people who live (or lived) in Tribeca, but that's about it for me. It wasn't hard to get through this book, but in the end I felt that I came away with little increase in my knowledge or wisdom. Just OK. Grade: B