Like Manhattan, a Tale That's a Little Crowded

ELLINGTON BOULEVARD

A Novel in A-Flat

By Adam Langer

Spiegel & Grau. 336 pp. $24.95

It would be hard to find a more ingratiating novelist than Adam Langer, whose books are an enjoyable mix of broad social satire and one-on-one emotional entanglement. Langer set his first two novels, "Crossing California" and its sequel, "The Washington Story," in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of his native Chicago. There he examined the upheavals of three families -- two Jewish, one black -- within a 1980s-era milieu that included the Iran hostage crisis and the mayoral election of Harold Washington.

Exploring his characters' preoccupations with race, religion and sex, Langer showed deft comic timing in both books, knowing just when to pour on the shtick and when to undercut it. He also managed to imbue those characters with an affecting dignity, even in their most slapstick moments.

A new Langer novel, then, promises to be a lot of fun. Instead, "Ellington Boulevard" turns out to be a lot of work.

The author has turned his attention from Chicago to New York, where he's been living for a few years now. The book's central figure is not a person but an apartment, a nothing-special two-bedroom unit on West 106th Street in the quickly gentrifying Upper West Side area known as Manhattan Valley.

So far, so good: One way or the other, most novels about New York are about money or real estate, and giving center stage to an apartment (technically, it's a condominium) is an attractively honest choice. The problems begin with the herd of characters nervously circling apartment 2B in the renovated five-story prewar tenement known as the Roberto Clemente Building, which recently has been listed for sale. There's Ike Morphy, ace clarinet player and former member of an R&B group called the Funkshuns, who returns from his mother's funeral in Chicago to find that the apartment he's been renting for a song for 20 years is about to be sold out from under him. He'd had a handshake deal but no lease with the building's owner, who recently died; the owner's son, a twice-divorced club freak turned synagogue Man of the Year named Mark Masler, dreams of selling off his father's assets in order to build his not-altogether-plausible dream business, a combination car wash and restaurant. Mark's in love with Allie Scheinblum, whose nice-Jewish-girl facade hides the heart of a hooker. But he's worried about Allie's teenage brother Caleb, a "trenchcoat mafia" wannabe who spends too much time alone in his dark Riverdale bedroom, doing suspicious things on the computer.

The apartment's prospective buyers are a magazine editor named Rebecca Sugarman and her husband, Darrell, a shiftless Columbia grad student. Their broker, Josh Dybnick, came to New York to pursue acting but has found more success running open houses for the Overman Group, whose founder, Brad Overman, just happens to be getting a divorce from Rebecca's boss at the magazine, Chloe Linton, and who was also the previous owner of Ike Morphy's dog, a black Lab mix named Herbie Mann.

Of these characters, the most fully formed is Ike, whose dedication to music and to his dog during a period of hard luck is believable and poignant. But because Langer has imagined the novel as a jazzy symphony rather than a solo work (his punning subtitle is "A Novel in A-Flat"), he never lingers long on Ike's story. Instead, he strives to give equal time to all his characters and to map the intricate ways in which they're connected. It's a scrupulously democratic but also a distractingly impersonal choice: Where should the reader's loyalties lie?

The same difficulty arises with the book's other credible male figures, Darrell, Mark and Caleb. Langer takes mostly successful pains to humanize these wayward schmucks, but he never encourages the reader to endorse them.

No one receives more cursory treatment here than Langer's women, though. It's been a while since I've seen a sorrier gaggle of female caricatures, and I'm not just saying this because one of them, an absurd chimera named Liz Fogelson, is a book critic, though she's the worst of the lot. Langer's failure is especially surprising considering the remarkably nuanced female characters of his earlier books; their complex personalities were among those novels' most admirable features. Not so in "Ellington Boulevard," in which Chloe is a tired Tina Brown knockoff, Rebecca is far too vague to be at all convincing as an editor or a wife, Allie is a cut-rate princess and the young woman Darrell falls in love with, a budding writer named Jane Earhart, is flat-out incredible (and not in a good way).

What Langer does manage to get right are mostly big-picture successes: the dissonant music of the city; the time-lapse rise and fall of neighborhood fortunes; the eternal Manhattan polarities of aspiration and failure, wealth and poverty. What he doesn't seem quite ready for are the close-ups, which are not vivid or distinct enough to sustain a reader's attention.