Since F Scott Fitzgerald first described the view from a West Egg mansion, the lives of the American 1% have been of keen interest to the rest of us; whether we love them, love to hate them or want to know where they buy their shoes. And these days, with Succession and The White Lotus streaming to record audiences, the power struggles, moral dilemmas, interior designers and dirty secrets of the obscenely wealthy are big business.
This, then, is the train to which Jenny Jackson’s entertaining debut novel Pineapple Street hitches its wagon. Her focus is on the Stockton family of Brooklyn, high net worth Wasp buccaneers of New York real estate. They consist of air-headed matriarch Tilda, obsessed with tennis and tablescapes; her husband, the amiable Chip, who quietly manages the empire; daughters Darley and Georgiana; and son Cord. Pampered, naive Georgiana works for a charity and Darley and Cord have both “married out”. Darley has renounced her trust fund because she refused a prenuptial agreement to wed tender-hearted nerdy Malcolm, aviation whiz and a second-generation immigrant of colour, while Cord, who works alongside his father, has just married Sasha, a graphic designer from a rough and ready blue-collar Rhode Island family.
Sasha is our witness to the lives of the wealthy, parachuted into the family townhouse on the titular Pineapple Street when Tilda and Chip decide to downsize to a mere penthouse. Sasha’s sisters-in-law call her “the gold-digger” behind her back, because she was shocked by the idea of signing a prenup. The ripples surrounding the move soon widen, taking us from Sasha’s profound sense of not belonging in Pineapple Street to Georgiana’s unease at being a trust fund baby working to combat poverty in the developing world. Darley is trying to manage motherhood alongside a feeling of having been ousted from the family nest and, when Malcolm is betrayed by Wasp colleagues in the workplace, the prospect of not being rich at all. And when actual tragedy intervenes, the question is whether lives cushioned – or numbed – by privilege can survive it any better than the rest of us.
Smart and clever, minutely observed and packed with one-liners, Pineapple Street is a more complicated read than it looks. But while Jackson regularly checks her characters’ privilege, The Bonfire of the Vanities this is decidedly not. The author insists that we give the super-rich a chance, and this approach risks softening the narrative’s centre. The White Lotus and Succession are largely popular because they are packed with satisfying villains; Pineapple Street has none. From the cars they drive to the delis they favour, the granular detail of the Stocktons’ lives is happily catalogued with what Edith Wharton, queen-chronicler of New York snobbisms, called “the minute statistical information of a gazetteer”. It can sometimes feel as if we are drowning, like Sasha, in possessions and signifiers of affluence.
There’s a queasy line to be trod, too, when arbitrating between good and bad wealth: real estate good, arms dealers – who crop up late in the novel – bad? And in a climate emergency, good guy Malcolm’s career in aviation can hardly be said to be saintly. Jackson sticks her neck out by keeping the focus largely on spoilt Georgiana while leaving the more decent Sasha and her regular family on the back burner; this pays off, giving the narrative redemptive possibilities and some much-needed edge. Tilda’s superficiality teeters on the verge of one-dimensionality, but her relationship with her daughter, conducted entirely on the tennis court – “competition was their love-language” – is surprisingly poignant in its limitations. And though we have to wait a little too long for Sasha to have her say, when she does, it’s blistering.
• Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
