Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make it immediately out of date. Especially one about parking. There’s certainly a parking novel to be written in the age of global terror and suicide attackers, but it will have a more security-conscious bent than the amusing small novel Calvin Trillin achieved that dreadful autumn, about a diffident late-middle-aged New Yorker looking for a spot to park from which, as the title suggests, Tepper Isn’t Going Out.
Bollards and concrete impediments, armed assault teams, helicopters overhead and a discarded parking ticket or Syrian passport in the glove compartment: those are the sorts of details the novel for the new age will bear. The real story might be why a publishing house in Bath — which has even worked ‘Tepper’ into its name! — has chosen to reprint the novel for a British readership in 2015; and in her foreword, the publisher tries to explain why, settling for ‘the perfect balance of odd and sincere in the topics it tackles’, which seems mostly right.
Murray Tepper, whose face ‘didn’t seem designed to hold an expression long’, is a Manhattanite in the pre-internet marketing business, working on mailing lists that solicit customers for strange, useless products.
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