Another Marvelous Thing

On "Vintage Contemporaries," Laurie Colwin, and small happiness, and also just a crumb on "The Cloisters"

I was a couple hours into reading Dan Kois’s new novel Vintage Contemporaries (hours, because I was listening to it on a cross-country flight, wedged between two strangers) before I realized it was kind of a book about Laurie Colwin. Dan had talked about this before I read the book, but look the Internet is full of stuff I’m supposed to be reading and sometimes I just miss stuff and anyhow January was a deranged month, okay?

Whew. Right. So what I realized — smiling in my seat, nodding a bit — was that he’d written an ode not just to a version of New York that’s faded away (the one where the East Village was full of squats and cheap food) but to a writer I personally love, the great Laurie Colwin.

Sharp-eyed readers of my book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women are now saying, Hey, I remember her! Yes, you do. Colwin is the second chapter in my book, in which I bop back and forth between her deceptively simple novels (particularly Family Happiness and A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which gets a sly nod in Vintage Contemporaries) and her cookbooks Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, both as much personal essay and memoir as recipe delivery vehicle. My discovery, as I read Colwin, was that she really gives us permission to be fallible humans, to mess up and burn the roast and say something we regret to our father-in-law and just let our hair down. Her characters have conflicts of the very ordinary kind — annoyance with a friend, a tiresome lecherous boss (also a nod in Vintage Contemporaries to A Big Storm), an internal pressure to always make elaborate food for one’s grateful but insufficiently appreciative family.

Which is to say that Colwin’s characters are privileged and well off but also relatable, and also, in the end, pretty happy. The word “happy” shows up a lot in her books, including several times in her novel titles.

Kois does a lovely job of threading Colwin throughout his book. There’s a character who is clearly an avatar for Colwin: a single mother living in an atmosphere that seems rarefied to our young heroine Em — she has lots of books and loves to cook good food and introduces her to martinis. (She also writes cookbook-memoirs.) Also, she introduces Em to a society that’s recognizable to me, as a naive and out-of-place rube when she moved to New York in her 20s too. There’s something magical about having friends just a little older than you in New York, because if they’ve stuck around that long they almost certainly have interesting friends, and if you get invited to a party you get a little starstruck. Someone has always written a play or produced a mildly successful movie or recently had a book reading. Now that I’m the (slightly?) older friend, I recognize it, too.

But Vintage Contemporaries is itself, in form and content, a tribute to Colwin (and the Colwin-within-the-book too). Her books deal with people who strive to be happy in the midst of pretty ordinary circumstances, and Em (eventually Emily) is aiming to do the same. It’s a book about friendship’s ebb and flow, about how we evolve over time and how we adopt and drop personas based on our phase of life and the odd little rocks that have inserted themselves into our life’s stream. But mostly it’s about trying to be happy.

I’m glad he did it. Colwin deserves a broader reading — she’s so easy to read, and so rich when you realize what she is really doing, which is probing what it actually means to be “happy” when your basic life circumstances would seem to naturally lead to comfort and happiness. But his take is also both light and meaningful, mixing in the activism and the ethical quandaries that come with living over the turn of the 21st century, and he does it by slyly slipping in references to all kinds of things, not all of them Colwin’s. I told a friend that I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that’s so clearly written by someone imbibing much of the same cultural water as me.

I wrote my chapter on Colwin on a lucky jaunt to Beacon, New York, in November 2020, which as you may recall was not the most enjoyable time to be alive, though there have been many worse ones. I had some AirBnb credit to burn because of unhappily cancelled trips, and I needed to write another chapter in my book. (I’d been upstate the previous month, to a little workshop in the back of a gorgeous house, both designed and formerly owned by Jasper Johns, to write the chapter on Hannah Arendt, but that’s another story for another day.)

So I thought about places I could get to on public transit cheaply and also enjoy myself a little, and landed on Beacon, which is a wonderful place. I rented a studio apartment for two or three nights, I can’t remember, on the lower level of a house that directly faced the bridge over the stream that led into town. It was beautiful, a perfect time to be there. I strapped on a mask and hopped on the Metro-North Hudson Line for 60 miles. I unloaded my things and turned up the heat in my AirBnb, and then walked up and down Main Street, looking for dinner.

What I remember that first night is finding a pizza joint with outdoor seating — plenty of indoor eating was happening at the time in a small town, but I stayed outside anyhow — and texting my friend Isaac (who, now that I think about it, co-wrote a book with Kois) about his book in progress, and reading a bit of Home Cooking. Later that night I found a restaurant with an outdoor bar — like a real bar, the kind you can sit at — and ordered a martini and texted my friend Vikram, the one person I knew would truly appreciate my happiness, in glee about it. Never have I been so happy to just perch on a bar stool.

Over the weekend I slept in a little, I wrote, I finished the chapter unexpectedly a half day early and had some time on my hands. I ran along the creek in the bright sunshine. I went to the local used bookstore and bought a Patricia Highsmith novella I’d never heard of and devoured it. I stopped by a local brewery and picked up a tall can of something weird and slowly slipped it as the sun set.

On my last day in town, I stopped by the little stores along the main street. In one, found the softest, creamy heathered wrap sweater, not a fancy one, nothing cashmere, just one that was warm and cozy. I checked the price tag and did a double take at how inexpensive it was despite being made of natural fibers, and I bought it.

The sweater is now, according to Tom, my “writing sweater.” He’s right. It’s been two and a half years since that trip, and I haven’t been back to Beacon since, though I’ve thought about going. Once everyone started traveling again I couldn’t easily afford it, but that’s fine, it’s there whenever I want it, day-trip-able. I published the book, and secretly the Laurie Colwin chapter is probably my favorite, starting with a story of friends coming over and me serving them the only true bomb among my dinner party stories, and it doesn’t matter, we’re still friends. I wear the sweater almost every morning, this winter, because it’s warm and soft and when I go to a yoga class in the dark wee hours it’s all I want against my skin. I think about my trip and about good friends and about simple, simple happiness.

What to watch
Well, I was going to recommend Return to Seoul, which I wrote about yesterday, but it turns out it’s not out till the 17th. Whoops!

So in its place I’ll say that when I finished Vintage Contemporaries I started listening to Katy Hays’s novel The Cloisters, which is one of those The Secret History-adjacent books that can be of varying quality. But this one is about a college graduate who finds herself unexpectedly working at the Cloisters — my favorite place in the whole world — among curators who might be a little too into studying the divination and tarot of the Renaissance courts?

Delicious, so far.

Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.