Cooperative Lives, a captivating work of literary fiction by Patrick Finegan, underscores the old adage that no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors – especially behind those of your neighbors.
Seventh Avenue and Central Park South is the prestigious address of the venerable co-op that is home to many illustrious residents, such as widowed romance author, Mildred Whiting, who’s under pressure to produce the next great romantic title yet seems to be suffering from writer’s block.
The co-op also has other less illustrious residents like George “Wally” Wallace, CTO of NYL Health Systems and his Kurdish wife, Hanni, an events coordinator, who are parents to a young daughter, Alya. Wallace’s job isn’t going as well as he thought it would and with all the problems at work, the last thing he expects to hear is that his beloved daughter, Alya, has leukemia.
Their friends, John “Jack” and Susan Roberts, along with their young daughter, Melissa, are also in the same building, and Sheldon Vogel, another resident, becomes more than just a nameless face when he instinctively pushes Susan, still in a wheelchair from a terrible skiing accident months before, out of the way of an oncoming bus.
Ex-attorney Jack has retired in disgrace after a career with three prestigious investment banking and securities firms resulted in three dissolutions. His seventeen-years-younger wife, Susan, is pressuring him about his life insurance and with his investments slowly depleting, this certainly isn’t the retirement Jack had envisioned for himself, while widower Sheldon has done the unthinkable: accidently selling 24,000 shares of stock instead of 240.
With these stories as the engine driving this charming and engrossing novel, Finegan writes with authority and grace. Though set in New York City – and on the one hand this is a very New York story – Finegan is telling a broader story of the country since 9-11, and how the world is at once more populous, and people more distant.
Finegan avoids clichéd stereotypes for his fascinating cast of characters, with each exhibiting strengths and weaknesses as they navigate the ins and outs of their daily lives – their layers of armor stripped away until there’s nothing left but raw emotion fed by love, hate, and the subtleties in between. The characters are mired by vulnerabilities resulting from bad choices, unfortunate circumstances, and from loving too much or not at all. While their motivations aren’t always clear, complex characters like Hanni are a study of contradictions as we become moved by her hate, her pain, and her loss.
At times, Finegan is quick to show his expansive base of knowledge, and deviates into what can be described as “informational detours” in order to inform his readers about certain aspects of aviation, medicine, and the like. While fascinating and impressive, these moments tend to make the story more convoluted than intellectually rich.
That is a small criticism for what is a masterfully written work of literary fiction. Cooperative Lives gives readers an incisive look at ordinary people being blindsided by the uglier side of life, and does so with beautifully evocative prose.
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