Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
This zeitgeisty novel, which follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan, is a brilliantly humorous and astutely observed debut about family, love, and class.
Sasha, a middle-class New England girl who married into the Brooklyn Heights family, finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; Darley, the eldest daughter of the well-connected old-money Stockton family, followed her heart and sacrificed too much in the process; Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t have and must decide what kind of person she wants to be.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
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Pineapple Street is a witty, hedonistic book that is rife with the luxurious delights of living among New York’s one-percenters. It is about the unusual unknowability of someone else’s family, the distance between the haves and have-nots, and the madness of first love, all wrapped up in a novel that is a pure thrill. It is full of recognizable, loveable—if fallible—characters.
“Pineapple Street” is a very, very good comedy about class that gently prickles egos and sensibilities rather than making audiences laugh out loud. Jenny Jackson, the author, is a skilled book editor. In Brooklyn Heights, streets like Pineapple Street and others with fruity names are actually real, and the story’s focus on the wealthy Stockton family feels accurate. They hold themed parties, play tennis (of course in white), and don’t want much to alter, especially not their one per cent money or the trinkets that have accumulated in their Pineapple Street house, where their son Cord and his wife Sasha, who are already middle-class regulars, now reside.
The novel’s genius is in the way its characters fail to recognize the bias and prejudice that underlie their interactions. The Stockton kids believe Sacha, or “the DG,” is a gold digger, and Sacha holds similar views of the Stocktons. The combination produces dazzling impoliteness, arrogance, fake propriety, and social blindness.
The narrative centres on Sacha, who strives to fit in with her new, wealthy family, and Georgeanna, the Eldest daughter, who feels ashamed of her money and her charitable intentions. The enormous wealth imbalance in American culture is one of the largest social issues of our time, and there are obvious questions about it embedded throughout the fun.
The lives of the Stocktons are unaffected by racial inequality, poverty, or other societal evils because they live in a bubble. They aren’t awful people; they just don’t pay attention to their surroundings and have no idea how most people live. Tilda, the matriarch, once questioned Sasha, a member of the middle class, about what it was like to grow up in poverty. The inquiry is so tone-deaf that it comes off as thick but realistic and, in the moment, as incredibly humorous.
Jenny Jackson claims in her acknowledgements that she wrote the first half of the book in an apartment on Pineapple Street. Readers could ponder whether neighbours served as the Stockton family’s role models.
