Endless petty squabbles

I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer — he has a deserved reputation for excellence. But because this study of a privileged American family reaches for a significance it doesn’t achieve, and leaves a self-consciously literary novel with a surfeit of detail.

There are admirable qualities. Markovits’s prose is elegant; his portrait of New York is vivid; his characters feel authentic. Paul Essinger is a mid-ranked tennis player facing retirement. Over a long weekend, his donnish siblings reunite in New York for his final match. Nathan is a Harvard professor; Jean a producer involved with her married boss; Susie has declined tenure for more children; their parents, Bill and Liesel, are academics enjoying the fruits of boomer stability. Markovits’s close focus on four days in their lives explores family fault lines, and how their history defines them individually and collectively.