Nick finds such generational salvos “invigorating,” but his real passion project is lyrics for a musical about Didion’s move from California to the East Coast, tentatively titled “Hello to All That!” (Not as far-fetched as it may seem: News that Vanessa Redgrave would be appearing in a Broadway version of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in 2007, prompted a former colleague of mine to draft a few prospective numbers, including one about Didion’s fear of the L.A. freeway that began “Beep beep! Toot toot!”)
Nick’s little sister, Greta, is causing more trouble: A Yalie who once aspired to a law career, she’s been working at an Apple Store in Brooklyn and has fallen for a handsome YouTube nationalist named Xavier, who has a creepy cabinet of endearments for her: “my little flea,” “my little shrimp,” “my little duck,” “my little American cabbage,” etc. He’s lured her to Paris and incited her to throw a champagne bottle through the window of the posh restaurant Fouquet’s during a demonstration on the Champs-Élysées, an act of luxury radicalism that threatens to derail Nancy’s campaign.
This is a caper populated by urban elites. I can’t think of anyone in recent years who has lampooned that cohort between covers so freshly and efficiently as Ginder. Greta and Xavier meet, for example, building a simulacrum of a Blockbuster store on a video game in the sandbox genre, Nostalgeum. She and Nick pay 52 dollars for a boutique fitness class of “trampin’, liftin’, whippin’” at a studio in Chelsea where the instructor is pleased to be given a bloody nose and a black eye. A restaurant selling noodles by the pound is named Me, Myself and Thai, with anthropomorphic, cannibalistic noodles painted on its walls; the students lining up there, faces buried in phones and “backpacks dangling from single, drooped shoulders,” are somewhat noodle-like themselves. There’s an accusatory grandmother, Eugenia, with an Upper East Side townhouse, an open checkbook for Greta’s schemes, and a penchant for Earl Grey and Degas. And when a dead body needs to be wrapped up and disposed of in a Central Park West co-op building’s state-of-the-art compacting system, one character thinks parenthetically about the high-end sheets used for the task: “Frette — it’s a real shame.”
In a world increasingly starved for good dialogue, Ginder’s is bountiful and crackling, like the screwball comedies of yore. And sometimes even sincere. “It’s got to be disappointing, being called all those things,” Nancy’s campaign manager muses when their opponent, the one supported by the investment banker, calls Nancy a “communist” and a “hypocrite.”