Living on Air Book

A girl caught between tract-house suburbia, bohemia, and elite society in the late sixties.

The New Yorker

Growing up in nineteen-sixties Levittown, a precocious fourteen-year-old shrinks from the “urchins of plumbers” who share her prefab suburb, disdain her weekly trips to the library, and call her Volkswagen-driving parents “Communists.” Preternaturally sensitive to class differences, she secretly applies to the preppie Bay Farm School, where she lurks on the fringes of “bright, cosseted teenagers” whose pedigreed fathers “didn’t bother having jobs.” There’s a fairy-tale quality to this story of a poor girl, nose pressed to the windowpane, obsessively cataloguing the habits of that mysterious tribe the rich—their carelessly worn Pucci nightgowns, their clambakes in Maine. Shapiro, in her third novel, is finely attuned to the self-consciousness and vulnerability of adolescence, and the slippery elision of money and sophistication.