What are you feeling so anxious about? I'm the guy who has to go out
there and lose.' 'That's what I don't like. That's what you don't
realise. It's harder on the rest of us.' 'I'm sure it must be, ' he
said. Tolstoy claimed: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way'. But what if the happy families are
actually the most unusual of all? Paul Essinger is a mid-ranking tennis
professional on the ATP tour. His girlfriend Dana is an ex-model and
photographer, and the mother of their two-year-old son, Cal. Together
they form a tableau of the contented upper-middle-class New York family.
But summer storms are blowing through Manhattan, and Paul's parents have
come to stay in the build-up to the US Open. Over the course of the
weekend, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling
point . . . What does it mean to be a family? To be an individual? And
how do we deal with the responsibilities these roles impose upon us? A
Weekend In New York intertwines the politics of the household and the
state to forge a luminous national portrait on a deceptively local
scale. Recalling some of America's most celebrated novelists - this is
John Updike's Rabbit for a new generation - Benjamin Markovits' writing
reminds us of the heights that social realism can reach.
