Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of literary fiction, which unfortunately tends to be moored to the class of the author’s origin. Since most American novelists, in the 2020s, belong to the upper middle class, this leads to a lot of solipsism. I am happy to report Atta Boy is much more ambitious than that. The novel follows Rudy Coyle, a working class twenty-something Irish Catholic from Flushing who ends up the doorman at a tony Park Avenue apartment building. He becomes embroiled with the Cohen family, particularly Jake, their Jewish Donald Trump-supporting patriarch who has buttressed his rags-to-riches wealth with some ill-begotten gains. Jake is a millionaire taxi mogul and his industry, in the 2010s, is about to tank. Rudy becomes embroiled with Jake, and legal trouble looms. As I mentioned in my blurb, Atta Boy recalled The Bonfire of the Vanities as one of those scintillating social novels which deftly ranges high and low. Fiedorek made an intriguing point to me about New York novels—there are many novels about Brooklyn in contemporary times, but fewer about Manhattan. This, then, is a Manhattan novel—and a notable one.
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