A Manhattan comedy of manners with a melancholy undertow.The vagaries of parking in New York City figure prominently in Quindlen's ninth novel, which begins with a moment of parking karma: Charlie Nolan has just scored a permanent spot in the small outdoor lot on his Upper West Side block. Charlie, an investment banker, and his wife, Nora, who runs a jewelry museum, live in a town house surrounded by other town houses owned by affluent types much like themselves; the only blight on the block is a single-room-occupancy building. The Nolans have been married for almost 25 yearsnot unhappily, not quite serenelyand are parents of college-age twins. Nothing much happens in the first 100 pages or so, but the author's amusing digressionson dogs, rats, parking tickets, housing prices, and other city obsessionskeep things moving. Then a violent act shatters the calm on the Nolans' block: Hot-tempered Jack Fisk, partner in a white-shoe law firm, takes a golf club to mild-mannered Ricky Ramos, the neighborhood handyman, who's had the temerity to block the entrance to the parking lot with his van. And simmering issues of race and class boil over. (Earlier, when Nora visits Ricky at his home in the Bronxgetting lost, of course, on the waythere's a whiff of Bonfire of the Vanities.) The golf-club incident also has consequences for the Nolan family. The title of the book, it turns out, doesn't just refer to parking. Quindlen's sendup of entitled Manhattanites is fun but familiar. And though the author has been justly praised for her richly imagined female characters, Nora can seem more a type than a full-bodied woman.There's insight hereabout the precariousness of even the most stable-seeming marriagesand some charm, but the novel is not on a par with Quindlen's best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* By New York City standards, or anyplace else for that matter, Nora and Charlie Nolan lead a charmed existence. Their vintage townhome has appreciated in value; their twin son and daughter are doing well in college; and they each are employed in fiscally, if not emotionally, satisfying jobs. Their dead-end street is populated by an eclectic but mostly homogeneous group of professionals and stay-at-homes, millennials and matrons, housekeepers and handymen. Some neighbors are barely tolerated as casual acquaintances, while others are friends and all turn out for Christmas parties and summer barbecues. Then one day, their idyllic setting is shattered when Jack Fisk, one of their more volatile neighbors, violently attacks Ricky, their beloved jack-of-all-trades caretaker. In retrospect, it would seem to Nora that with each impact of Jack's golf club on Ricky's body, another fissure splintered the Nolans' carefully constructed world. The quotidian lives of Manhattanites have long fascinated discerning writers, from Wharton to McInerney, and with her ninth novel, best-selling Quindlen (Miller's Valley, 2016) takes her place within this pantheon. Though she writes with a deceptive casualness about dashed dreams and squandered hopes, Quindlen's quietly precise evaluation of intertwined lives evinces a keen understanding of and appreciation for universal human frailties. Complex themes and clever motifs make this eminently suitable for book groups. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Extensive, many-faceted publicity efforts will mobilize Quindlen's legions of readers.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2018 Booklist

in real estate, there's more than a semantic difference between a dead end and a cul-de-sac. A dead end can be a trap; a block that stops at an inaccessible barrier, backing up to a park (best case), a commercial building, a police station, a hospital, a school. A cul-de-sac, French for "bottom of the bag," connotes coziness: a safe place for a child to learn to ride a bike or play street hockey. A home on a block visited only by those who live there or those who are lost has a cachet that's hard to put a price on. There aren't many residential cul-desacs in Manhattan, which, to foster easy navigation, was laid out on a uniform grid north of Houston Street, beginning in 1811. Rarity is a quality that drives housing prices beyond astronomical to the real estate equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket. Which means that Charlie and Nora Nolan, the couple at the center of Anna Quindlen's exquisitely rendered ninth novel, "Alternate Side," are sitting on a gold Anna mine. The home they bought two decades ago on the Upper West Side is where they raised their twins, but the "kids" are now seniors at Williams and M.I.T. Charlie, a disaffected investment banker, is ready to cash in and trade New York winters for a home on the back nine somewhere in the Sunbelt. Nora, who runs a museum devoted to fine jewelry, can't imagine living anywhere but New York. So it's good news, at least temporarily, when one of Charlie's dreams comes true: He has finally secured that most precious of Manhattan commodities, off-street parking. There's a brownstone-size gap between two of the buildings on the cul-desac. Long ago, fire gutted a home on the site and the owner never redeveloped it. Instead, the lot has been divided into six parking spaces. When Charlie finally scores one, Nora hopes he'll stop talking about selling the house. If a novel about "first-world problems," as Nora's daughter calls them, already has you rolling your eyes, remember that Quindlen, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary while a New York Times columnist, is one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life. This novel may be too quiet for some, too populated with rich whiners for others, but it has an almost documentary feel, a verisimilitude that's awfully hard to achieve. There's no moment that feels contrived or false, except perhaps to non-New Yorkers who may find it impossible to believe that anyone would consider $350 a month for a parking space a bargain too good to pass up. The story is told from Nora's point of view. Much like Quindlen, she's a sensitive and introspective observer of people and what makes them tick. She's also keenly aware that the residents of her tightknit block are white and the nannies, housekeepers and handymen who work for them are not. This factors into the story when her handyman, Ricky, inadvertently blocks access to the parking lot and a neighbor with well-established anger management issues takes a 3- iron to his van, shattering the handyman's leg when he intervenes. Charlie witnesses the incident; Nora happens upon it, returning from a jog. And when Charlie sides with the neighbor, a crack develops in the neighborhood's facade, affecting everyone, but none more than the Nolans. Charlie isn't, by any stretch, a terrible husband. He isn't having an affair with a much younger woman and he's not engaged in financial shenanigans. When the twins were younger, he was an attentive father. But he can't shake the feeling that Nora settled for him when they married, and he's frustrated by his inability to be somebody in the business world. Perhaps only in New York would a man's climb up the ladder be permanently halted when he's thought to be too decent: "Over the years his colleagues had waited for the shark to emerge from behind the nice guy, the wolf in sheep's clothing to make an appearance, the open-faced mask to drop. Nora suspected that when they realized it was not a mask at all, they had begun to value Charlie less." Nora's Achilles' heel is passivity. She has let life happen to her rather than make the life she once wanted. She didn't choose a career so much as allow it to choose her. When a pregnant supervisor was put on bed rest while Nora was working a summer job in the development office at Williams, she was asked to take on more responsibility, and when her boss was later hired in New York, she brought Nora along. Nora's current job "had literally fallen into her lap" at a luncheon. Now, finally, Nora realizes it's past time to take control. "People go through life thinking they're making decisions," she tells herself, "when they're really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all." She has a decision to make. Is life on her cul-de-sac worth fighting for? Or is it, in fact, a dead end? SUE CORBETT is the author of the novels "12 Again," "Free Baseball" and "The Last Newspaper Boy in America."

Bestseller Quindlen's provocative novel (after Miller's Valley) is a New York City drama of fractured marriages and uncomfortable class distinctions. Nora and Charlie Nolan, married 25 years, live in a posh neighborhood in Manhattan. She is a museum director, he's an investment banker, and both are lodged in a passionless marriage of silent tolerance. Simmering class, economic, and racial tensions boil over when an arrogant, rich white lawyer neighbor hits a local Latino handyman with a golf club for blocking a parking lot entrance. This forces Nora, Charlie, and their neighbors to decide how seriously to take the crime. Suddenly, the neighborhood's veneer of acceptance and inclusion is peeled away, revealing resentment and bitterness among neighbors and spouses. Nora and Charlie argue openly, revealing just how little they really care about each other and prompting Nora to conclude there are only three kinds of marriages: "happy, miserable, and acceptably unhappy." Quindlen's novel is an exceptional depiction of complex characters-particularly their weaknesses and uncertainties-and the intricacies of close relationships. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.