I read the entire 379 pages of Prospect Park West, Amy Sohn's roman a clef about Park Slope moms, yesterday by the pool in California.

It's a quick read that's for sure. Especially if you're intimately acquainted with all the people and places Sohn satirizes in the book.

Is it insulting to Park Slope moms? You bet.

Is it mean spirited?  You bet. At times gratuitously so. I lost count of the number of times she referred to the woman of Park Slope as fat, ugly and uninteresting. 

Is the book insulting to Jennifer Connelly? Not really. Sohn
takes major poetic license with the character I thought was based on
Jennifer Connelly. Melora Leigh is definitely not the smart, talented, Brooklyn-born Connelly at all. Sure there are some bits of Jennifer's bio in
there (yes, she is married to a handsome, tall Austrailian actor and she lived in a PPW mansion, etc) but
maybe Simon and Schuster's lawyer scared Sohn and her editors into
making up the character out of whole cloth. Hey, Sohn had to use her
imagination.

Is it truthful? The book is filled with cliches about the Bugaboo culture in Park Slope and the parents that live there. And you know what they say about cliches…

In my Smartmom columns, I have written about just about everything Sohn covers in the novel: envy and obsession with neighborhood celebrities and real estate; sexless marriages; the way that moms give over their power to their children; the tendency for women to go frumpy after childbirth; the thinly veiled racism that accompanies the obsession with certain schools;  the zany culture of the Food Coop and on and on.

Prospect Park West is chock full of real people, places and things (restaurants, playgrounds, Park Slope Parents, schools, etc.) about Park Slope and that makes it a fun read. The book works as well as it does because Sohn grounds it in an accurate and up-to-date Park Slope landscape (it's Park Slope circa Fall 2008).

Truth is stranger than fiction and you don't have to make this stuff up. It really exists.

Is it insightful? Sohn's portrayal of Rebecca Rose does contain some insights and psychological truths about a not very likable, non-maternal stroller mom with iffy parenting skills, who feels smarter, sexier and prettier than all the other moms in Park Slope.

How about the celebrity character, Melora Leigh? To me, she was the weakest and
most superficial character in the book. She not really Jennifer Connelly at all. More like Brittany Spears and every other celeb who's had a public meltdown. Frankly, I just wasn't that interested in the faux and real celebrity name dropping, the made up movie titles and plots, and the US Magazine crap.

How about Lizzie (the former lesbian or "hasbian")? She's probably one of the most likable (?) characters in the book, though Sohn takes her through a weird—and out of character—sexcapade that includes a meet-up at The Gate with a couple of swingers, who happen to be the only good looking couple in Park Slope. Turns out they're really dumb and boring. Rebecca and Lizzie's brief sexual encounter is also turned into cliche fodder when Rebecca fears that the "needy" Lizzie will enact a "Single, White Female" scenario.

And Karen, the frumpy Park Slope mom? We all know many like Karen and Sohn writes good and nasty about this pathetic, unattractive supermom who is obsessed with buying a coop and getting her kid into PS 321. Karen ultimately morphs into a really scary psycho who is obsessed with the local celebrity.

How about the stuff about the Food Coop? Sohn does a great job satirizing the Food Coop (called the Prospect Park Food Coop in the book) by painting a truer than true (and only slightly amped up) portrait of what goes on in there, including a great take-off on the Linewaiter's Gazette.

How's the story? The plot, which strains credulity, reads like it was written to be a movie or a TV show. In fact, there are so many episodes in this silly narrative, the TV writers should be set for quite a while. 

Is it exasperating? You bet.

–Painting an entire neighborhood in broad, unflattering strokes is, well, a little nasty.

–Leaving out everything that is positive about Park Slope and its own culture of self-criticism and satire is a bit disingenuous. Saying that no-one in Park Slope makes fun of sanctimonious motherhood is pure nonsense. What about the Edgy Mother's Day readings that Sohn herself has helped to curate for two years? And are those moms ugly and frumpy? I don't think so.

–An OTBKB reader already wrote in to say that "It was like looking at a train wreck and after a while, complete with
all the tacky racism tossed in for effect, it just made one disgusted."

–The book is a tad superficial unless you think that wearing Marc Jacobs and your prowess giving blow jobs is a true measure of your worth as a person.

So What Did I Like? 

–Sohn exposes some of the crazier examples of Park Slope parenting and highlights the "New Victorians," the current generation of parents who are like "factory workers on the same assembly line, watching the clock and thinking, Only eighteen years to go."  

–I liked all the references to "iconic" 1970's movies like The Stepford Wives, Klute, Coming Home, Blume in Love and The Tenant.

–The first chapter in which Rebecca mastrubates using a Babeland egg vibrator (good product placement) is well done. The moms kissing over white wine during a play date was also a nice touch. 

–I think Sohn puts to bed the notion that sexless marriages are always a woman's fault. Probably the biggest insight in the book is that men, after fatherhood, become less interested in sex. And it's not because their wives are a turnoff. It's because the pressures they face at work and home are a buzz kill. Theo, probably the most interesting character in the book, is an adoring father (and better at parenting than his wife). He loses interest in his wife sexually because she doesn't share his interest in parenthood.

"Rebecca saw what she'd been doing wrong all the time: She had been trying to go through the front door when he wanted to be appraoched from the side. He needed to be approached through the door marked Father becuase the one marked Husband was locked.

"…In so many ways, their relationship since Abbie's birth had been gender-reversed; he wanted her to touch him more, while she wanted him to have sex with her. It had never occurred to her that there might a a through line between touching him and sleeping with him. She had been so angry with him for witholding sex that she never felt affectionate enough to kiss him lovingly."

So Did I Like the Book?   I haven't decided yet. Stay tuned while I mull. But in the meantime I am wondering what the reaction in Park Slope is going to be. 

It arrived by Fed Ex this morning on the farm. You can't imagine a more out-of-context place to read Sohn's roman a clef about the mommy life in Park Slope.

Or maybe's it's not a roman a clef. More like a dramady/satire about Park Slope moms of many stripes, including a character more than loosely based on Jennifer Connelly, a character more than loosely based on Amy Sohn….

There's mommy mastrubation, mommy-to-mommy tongue kissing while drinking wine (with the kids in the other room) and a crush on a celebrity co-worker at the Food Coop.

Sound like fun? Stay tuned…

…and the novel by Gustav Flaubert, the story of a law student in Paris, who is infatuated with an older married woman, is now on my top ten list of great books.

In 1864, while writing Sentimental Education, his last novel, Gustave Flaubert wrote:

And remember Woody Allen's narration in Manhattan? Sentimental Education is the only book he mentions in his list of things that make life worth living:

There are many great passages in this book, which is a sweeping blend of love story, history and satire.