Young, gifted and spoiled rotten

“THE youth of Morningside Heights took no drugs,” Cheryl Mendelson writes in her new novel, “Anything for Jane.” Coddled by private schooling, organic food and steadfast devotion, these children were little thoroughbreds. “After earning high SAT scores, they attended desirable colleges,” entered professions, settled down and had children of their own. Did any of them act out? Perhaps, but their parents were probably to blame. “Anything for Jane” is about the narcissistic child-worship of upper-middle-class parents. This is the final installment in Mendelson’s quaint trilogy about the whims and desires of well-meaning yuppies in Morningside Heights, the gentrifying home of Columbia University. According to her, urbane New Yorkers yearn to breed. The neighborhood is full of neurotic, fruitful parents and the childless couples who envy them. Childlessness is nothing short of tragic.

There is some satire here, but frankly not enough. Mendelson is too fond of her characters -- and often too proud of their noble convictions -- to put them in a bad light. She does condemn “people whose selfish devotion to their children meant unfeeling indifference to anyone else’s” -- particularly the kids of poor people, an indictment that vibrates with delicious severity. But unfortunately we don’t get to meet those people. Instead we have a troupe of mostly warm, intelligent, progressive folk who are mindful of life’s inequities. With her dizzyingly omniscient narration, Mendelson lets us bounce around inside nearly everyone’s thoughtful, sympathetic head. I experienced some vertigo from her habit of shifting perspective abruptly in order to make plain just how insightful or observant one or another of her characters is at any given time.

At the center of this ensemble are Anne and Charles Braithwaite, a likable couple introduced two books ago, in “Morningside Heights.” These middle-age, contentedly second-tier musicians -- he’s an operatic baritone, she’s a stay-at-home mom who teaches piano -- enjoy a domestic idyll with their brood of four children. Though the economics of the neighborhood have seen “rich invaders” squeeze out the artists and academics, you wouldn’t know it upon entering their endearingly shabby, overstuffed apartment, which is full of worn rugs, expensive musical instruments and the detritus of privileged children. “It looks like ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ in here,” says one dinner guest.

A modern version of a Jane Austen clan, the Braithwaites are sensible and popular. Their kids are talented; their home reeks of “bobo” entitlement. Being a good mother comes naturally to Anne, who has no interest in “the show-off kind of luxuries” -- fancy clothes or jewelry. But she happily spends their limited cash on private schools, music lessons and expensive groceries for her children. For dessert, the family eats “berries from South America with cream.”

But all is not perfect. The eldest child, 18-year-old Jane, is a brat. Beautiful and musically gifted, she is also selfish, maddening and impetuous. “[H]er misery threatened the peace of the others both because they loved her and because she wanted to make them suffer.” Anne and Charles constantly ask each other how their devoted parenting could have created such a moody monster. Others allege (“in the firm, didactic tones they used to condemn obvious parenting errors -- but only when the parents were not around to benefit from the lesson”) that the Braithwaites are simply too invested in Jane’s musical talents to keep her in line.

Complicating matters, Anne allows Gabriela, their Dominican cleaning woman, to stay with them. Mysteriously ill and evicted from her apartment, Gabriela has nowhere else to go. Her nephew Andrés, a smart, melancholic and otherwise homeless high school senior, sometimes sleeps over too (to Jane’s developing delight). Though the situation is awkward, Anne’s sense of liberal guilt is too profound to refuse something so basic. “[S]he had to admit,” Mendelson writes, “that the world was a strange place when she and Charles could spend many tens of thousands each year just on tuition and camps, while Gabriela, so hardworking and honest, had to beg for a bed.”

Such clunky bits of moralizing pervade the book. Mendelson, a lawyer who has also taught philosophy at Columbia, can get a bit didactic in her writing. She has some interesting ideas about class and justice, but they rarely emerge from the story organically. Instead she tends to use her intellectual dinner-party characters -- such as Greg, a young Episcopalian priest, and Carla, a poverty activist (the two have a romance, in a side plot) -- as sock puppets verbally jousting over ethics and libertarianism. Mendelson seems especially fond of Michael, a sagacious doctor in a corrosively childless marriage. More than once she mentions his experience as a “great debater” at Oxford, presumably so he can toss off such one-liners as “If poverty creates virtue, then why work to rid the world of it?”

The soapbox gets a lot of use in the last third of the novel, which is spent lambasting New York’s drug laws. “Yeah, tens of thousands of the people in prison in this country are serving barbaric sentences for small offenses,” harrumphs Carla. “Everyone’s forced into plea bargains because sentences are so extreme they can’t risk a trial.” Fair enough -- the laws are a problem. But few readers will enjoy being bludgeoned by a novel’s self-righteous characters.

Still, Mendelson’s story moves along swiftly, with a blend of romance and drama. And fans of her other books can rely on her to tie everything up with a neat and pretty bow, like a thoughtful hostess gift.

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Emily Bobrow is an editor for the Economist online and a writer based in New York.