The Class Novel Gets a Makeover: “The Party Upstairs” by Lee Conell
By Ethan Chatagnier
We meet Martin and his daughter Ruby, the two central characters of Conell’s debut novel The Party Upstairs, miserably failing in their attempt to meditate together. The two are downstairs in the basement, where all the machinery that runs the gentrified Manhattan Residence is hidden: from the boiler room to the elevator cranks, to Martin himself, the building’s super. Martin, whose work “often involved trafficking in the small embarrassments of others,” is the engine who eliminated the dead rats and tampon-clogged toilets of Conell’s high rise.
His home in the basement is something that Ruby was supposed to escape, and her failure to do so reveals the novel’s central class tensions. Ruby and Martin’s morning meditation session commences their consistent inability to find peace. As soon as Martin is seated across from his daughter, his mind, which he intends to empty, contradictorily fills with fantasies of her telling him that “even though [he] was just a building super, he was smarter than any of her college professors.” Humiliated by his own neediness, he counters it by telling Ruby that life is far from the tranquility they are attempting to instill. With sharpness, Ruby coughs and offers up a dismissive slice of filial psychoanalysis: “Oh, Dad,” she tells him, “If you were self-aware you’d recognize this whole enlightened-guru thing is just your secular Judaism deteriorating into some New Age muck.”
In the course of one day, they are only driven further from the meditative state that they initially were pining for. The two may share a living space, but Ruby’s expensive college degree has placed the two in different narratives. Martin has always been ensconced in the working class and similarly, the university education that was supposed to be Ruby’s stairway up has led her right back to the basement with nothing to show for it but a coffeehouse job and a sack of debt. “I’m not your human daughter anymore,” Ruby says when she moves back in. “It turns out you birthed a living, breathing think piece.” Ruby’s self-deprecation masks a real insecurity about spending her family’s resources and coming away feeling useless.
The novel’s additional faultline is also an economic one: Ruby’s oldest friend, Caroline, is the daughter of one of the building’s wealthiest tenants, and thus one of Martin’s many de facto superiors. Caroline could be a flat antagonist—she has some of the faults of one. For one, she can’t help seeing Ruby as a charity case; nor can she understand the constraints that debt puts on Ruby’s life. Caroline’s blindness about class issues positions her as a foil to Ruby—but there’s also a living, breathing friendship, sustained by their shared troubles as budding artists. “It was only on the phone with Caroline, for whatever reason, that she felt comfortable enough to talk about her love of dioramas, to talk about how she hoped to do something with the form someday. It was only with Caroline that she could say ‘Do something with the form’ and not feel stupid.” Ruby, in turn, was Caroline’s immediate comfort when a professor told her the fingers on her sculptures looked like “a most painful priapism.”
Although this central friendship creates a bridge between classes, the novel’s characters can largely be sorted into those who live downstairs and those who live upstairs. Class novels inevitably have their sides of the tracks, their East and West Eggs. This can be a pitfall, and the hovering ghosts of Fitzgerald and Steinbeck can sometimes lend the genre an aftertaste of assigned reading.
Conell is keen to this danger, and the novel spends its pages in sly avoidance, dancing around staid class commentary with humor and self-awareness. “If she couldn’t own good Manhattan real estate,” Ruby thinks, “she could at least own some of the inequality she’d experienced. She could at least own a solid upstairs/downstairs story to be trotted out at the appropriate times.” Ruby’s art form is the diorama, and as she analyzes scenes from the building, from her life there, she conceptualizes a project showing what’s been lost as the building went upscale. “Are you telling me there’s been changes in New York City?” an ex-boyfriend tells Ruby, in regards to her art project, “I’ve never heard a native New Yorker address that before.”
There’s some authorial play here. Conell herself is a native New Yorker and the daughter of Manhattan superintendent, but you can tell she knows she’s not the only author to have staked out a claim on this topic. Writers from Charles Dickens to Donna Tartt have explored working class characters in proximity to wealth, and Conell works to avoid rehashing the truisms of the genre. Ruby wants her diorama to neatly encapsulate the economic changes that have overtaken the building, but Conell is constructing her own diorama of the same building at the same time, one that says you can’t encapsulate anything so neatly. Conell has created a building which has its static locations—its basement, its penthouse, and all the tenant condos in between—but the characters are dynamic, and their complexity emerges as they move through those varied spaces.
Despite this class related ambivalence, The Party Upstairs does not refrain from dissecting the evident socio-economic rifts. A blinking light on Martin’s answering machine can mean two things: a demand from a tenant, or a warning from his boss after a tenant complaint. Martin is keenly aware that too many of the latter can put his family somewhere lower than the basement: the street. Nonetheless, from their vantage in the basement, Martin and Ruby can see with greater clarity, the class fissures behind all the entitled demands, privileged assumptions, and condescending charity their cohabitants have to offer. For the two of them, there’s no greater insult than being told you’re acting like one of the building’s residents. “I was wrong before,” Martin tells Ruby when their simmer comes to a boil, “You’re not acting like a child. It’s worse. You’re acting like a tenant. You’re acting like an entitled trustfundian fucktard.” This is only one of several slights they trade throughout a day that sees each of them making an escalating series of unforced errors that bring an element of farce into the novel.
The book sees the theft of a taxidermied rhinoceros head and the ghost of a Marxist rent-controlled tenant who narrates Martin’s actions in the manner of a TV-ad voiceover: “The super stands in the courtyard, eyes the pigeons, raises the broomstick to knock free the nest, it’s the invisible hand of capitalism making him do it, economic ghost forces that will lead to benefits for all, they say.” Chapters have whimsical titles like “thanx Martin gr8!1” and “Edward Hopper Meets Godzilla”—another way that Conell dodges the potential stodginess of the class novel. Make it funny. Make it fun.
The humor brings the book to life, but doesn’t turn it into a simple comedy. Besides the elements of farce, there remains a complex father-daughter relationship at its core. Martin has some of the gruff qualities one might expect of a building super, but is hurt by Ruby’s dismissal of his meditation and bird-watching as “Quirky Dad Activities.” Ruby can’t take the way her father “always seemed to view any inkling of moral certitude she had as the misguided product of an expensive liberal arts education.” Despite their criticisms of one another, the two evidently share a strong affection as Ruby protectively takes umbrage at the tenants who view her father as an “extra-Authentic” curiosity. Martin wants Ruby to find her dream job as badly as she does.
The underlying tension of this book is less about the party upstairs than about the two downstairs, and whether the basement is big enough for the two of them and their baggage. The demands and expectations of the tenants weigh on Ruby and Martin, but not as much as Martin’s need for approval or Ruby’s doubts about her usefulness. The characters may be ready to say good riddance to many of their relationships by the end of the day, but the reader will want to keep reading to follow the fraught but loving father-daughter relationship at its center.
The Party Upstairs is a nuanced, heartfelt novel that offers righteous anger spiked with enough good humor to keep the cocktail balanced, and a refreshing twist on an old genre: it doesn’t try to disentangle character from class. The tangle, it suggests, is the point.
Ethan Chatagnier is the author of Warnings from the Future (Acre Books, 2018). His stories have been awarded a Pushcart Prize and listed as distinguished in the Best American Short Stories. His reviews, interviews, and critical essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, The Millions, TriQuarterly, and CRAFT. He lives in Fresno, California with his family.