Shelter in Place by David Leavitt

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on October 13, 2020

Shelter in Place is a novel of first world problems. The kind of problems shared by prosperous New Yorkers who have a weekend home in Connecticut. Sex in the City problems. In fact, when Sandra Brook, Min Marable, and Rachel Weisenstein get together, their dialog would fit nicely into a Sex in the City episode. Mostly they gossip about people who aren’t present, including Matt Pierce, who has been crashing on couches since he broke up with his boyfriend after resisting pressure to participate in three-ways.

Matt used to cook for Eva Lindquist until he made the mistake of asking her for advice about his relationship problems. Eva’s friends wonder where she finds so many handsome gay men who get paid to cook and to “keep her company, lose at cards, and agree with everything she says.”

Eva is in the process of buying an apartment in Italy, a project that annoys her husband Bruce, who works as a wealth manager. Bruce is annoyed in part because of the legal snafus Eva keeps encountering and the bribes that are required to untangle them. Eva wants to live in Italy as a response to Trump’s election. She also wants her friend Jake Lovett, a well-known interior designer, to decorate the apartment. Jake is on the fence about that request, one of many sources of tension that permeate the lives of the characters. Jake’s business partner adds some additional tension, or at least snark, concerning Jake’s career path.

Min is a magazine editor who worked at Self before moving to Entfilade, a magazine that focuses on shelter. She’s encouraging Jake to decorate Eva’s Italian apartment by promising him a magazine cover. Whether she will be able to keep that promise is an open question for much of the novel.

The plot is largely the stuff of soap opera. Bruce is secretly funding his secretary’s battle against cancer. Rachel mistakenly suspects her husband of having an affair with Sandra, who recently left her husband and is busy sorting herself out by having an affair with Bruce. Jake’s reluctance to travel to Venice relates to his memories of a tragic relationship. It is to David Leavitt’s credit that none of this becomes melodramatic. Still, all of the characters make their own problems, a common affliction of financially comfortable first world inhabitants. It’s difficult to generate sympathy for any of them, although sympathy might not be expected or intended.

Shelter in Place is grounded in shallow people making witty conversation. The characters spend a good bit of time discussing literature although it’s not clear that they spend much time reading. One of them attacks Barbara Kingsolver as “the embodiment of liberal piety as its most middlebrow and tendentious” without having read much of her work (he claims to have “dipped in”). The characters either love or hate (mostly hate) Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Safran Foer, perhaps because those authors all write more deeply than the characters are capable of feeling.

The novel lampoons political correctness as practiced by people who care more about how they are perceived than about political or social issues. Rachel stops wearing her pussyhat, for example, when another character tells her that the hat is racist because it’s pink and “not every woman’s . . . you know . . . is pink.” Characters make a point of letting their friends know that they oppose Trump but never engage in the slightest degree of liberal activism. A conservative character argues that liberals pretend to like things they actually detest (like sorrel soup) because they’re expected to like them. I’m a liberal but I think there’s some truth in that observation. On the other hand, the conservative character delights in expressing abrasive opinions, presumably because modern conservatives relish being offensive.

Bloomsbury explains that Shelter in Place is a “slyly comic look at the shelter industry.” Apart from featuring two interior designers and a magazine editor who are apparently part of the “shelter industry,” the novel has little to say about housing, apart from the difficulty of acquiring clear title in Venice. The comedy is too sly to be noticeable, although the erudite wit in the characters’ conversations is probably meant to deliver low-key amusement. In that regard, the novel at least partially succeeds.

Not surprisingly in a “sly” story about empty characters, the story itself feels a bit empty. The reader follows the characters as they interact with each other for a few days, determinedly showing off their intellect and political sensibilities, but to what end? I suppose there is value in showcasing empty lives that purport to be good lives and perhaps that is the story’s purpose. In the end, the narrative trails off, leaving every conflict, such as they are, unresolved.

Notwithstanding the negative tone of this review, I thought the dialog actually does reflect a certain degree of wit. I enjoyed the precision of David Leavitt's prose. While I would have enjoyed the book more if the characters had all jumped off a bridge in Venice (we learn about but never meet someone who did that), I can guardedly recommend it to readers who don’t mind plotless novels about disagreeable characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS