Quiet Street

The opulence of New York City is famous. Count­less streaming programs, articles, novels, films, and social media feeds are dedicated to the markers of American oligarchy. Shows and films like Succession, The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolf of Wall Street; TikTok videos like what your rich mom coffee shop says about you: If you get your coffee at Via, you re a seventeen-year-old who is probably richer than me ; novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Breakfast at Tiffany s. Some examples of the genre, like The Great Gatsby, are staples of public education. The wealth is not a secret; neither is the inevitable violent decadence. I remem­ber a schoolmate who bragged about defecating in bed so the maid would have to clean it up. Such behavior extended to the highest reaches of power, as was clear in President Trump s casual sexism and violence. One of his children and one of his grandchildren attended the same school as I and the aforementioned defecator.
 
Still, I have affection for this school, which was called Buckley. It had a reputation for rigor, conservatism, old wealth, and athletic dominance over the dozen or so top tier private schools in the city. All sat in a highly developed hierarchy. Chapin girls marry doctors, Brearley girls become doctors, Spence girls have affairs with doctors, went one well-known say­ing about those particular girls schools. Still, all the schools had more in common than not, and if a child attended any one of them, he d be well prepared to achieve, maintain, and perhaps surpass his parents position in society. This preparation was accomplished as much by what was not taught as what was.
 
For example. At Buckley, we had Quiet Street. It began with a turn we d make on the charter buses not yellow school buses that we rode out to our playing fields most weekdays of the fall and spring. A right turn onto 124th Street in East Harlem. As we turned, one of the coaches sport-sirs, we called them would announce quiet

NICK McDONELL is the author of the novels Twelve, The Third Brother, An Expensive Education, and The Council of Animals, as well as a work of political theory, The Civilization of Perpetual Movement, and four books of reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including The Bodies in Person. He has contributed reporting and essays to Harper s Magazine, London Review of Books, Libération, The Paris Review, newyorker.com, and TIME, among other publications. His work has been published in twenty-three countries and appeared on best-seller lists around the world.

"An elegant confessional of the excesses of the ruling classes told in a kind of travelogue through sybaritic circles of hell....the lessons are as familiar as Croesus and Gatsby."
Washington Post

"Rich (pun half-intended) with anecdotal details from a life spent between the Upper East Side, the Hamptons, and all the other playgrounds of the wealthy, McDonell has done what for many in his orbit would have found unthinkable: He says the quiet part loud."
New York Magazine

"Meticulous...[in] McDonell s somewhat ironically titled book...it quickly becomes apparent that there s nothing quiet about the one percent s deceptively cordial appearance."
Chicago Review of Books
 
"Unsparing...Honest...I'm meant to be titillated, and I am."
Bookforum

"In delicate, persuasive, and beautiful prose, McDonell blows the notion of meritocracy sky-high"
Airmail

"Quiet Street is an exquisitely rendered horror story about American inequity, and how it mindlessly, immorally, reproduces itself. Unlike most such stories, however, this one left me believing in the possibility (and necessity) of drastic change. Nick McDonell writes with a scalpel in one hand, and in the other, a bushel of grace."
Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom

When Nick McDonell published his first novel at seventeen three years after I d published mine at forty-four I was impressed by the book as well as the WTF precocity. Now, he s almost as old as I was then, and he s put out about as many books as I have. This one is a bracingly frank, clear-eyed chronicle of his ultra-privileged golden youth in The Bubble, as he calls it, and his ongoing search for how he ought to use or forego some of that privilege now. If everyone this fortunate examined their lives this thoughtfully, the world would be better off.
Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses

"An earnest and piercing examination of