Confession: I troll the internet for youngish writers that I’ve never heard of. My Google Reader is chalk full of contemporary fiction blogs. One of my favorites is the NYTimes Papercuts Blog, and I particularly like their semi-weekly segment Living With Music. Here they give a writer the chance to list his or her top ten songs, usually stuff that’s had some affect on their writing. Most of the writers are young novelists from NYC.

This is how I came to Amy Koppelman.

Koppelman–look at that photo–looks like the quintessential NYC hipster writer: a Columbia MFA pedigree, a retro-tshirt, and a damn good playlist.

Koppelman has published two novels: I Smile Back (2008) and A Mouthful of Air (2003). I read ‘em both, in reverse chronological order.

The two novels bleed together like blood brothers. In I Smile Back, Laney is a middle-aged mother living in the suburbs of NYC and teetering on the brink of the mental abyss. In A Mouthful of Air, Julie is a younger version of Laney, a twenty-something mother living in NYC and trying to overcome her own ennui, a world weariness that, at the opening of the novel, has just manifest itself in a suicide attempt.

Both Julie and Laney are acutely aware of the absence in their lives of their fathers, an absence that Koppelman frequently evokes with narrative flashbacks. Both also struggle with the very notion of happiness: what does it mean to be happy? Both delve into the world of psychoanalytic recovery. Neither recovers.

Laney has two children, a beautiful car, loving husband. Julie has 1.5 children but is otherwise a match. Neither work. Both have domestics to do that which their angst finds unbearable, viz. take care of their children, their home, their lives.

Both have husbands who are practically non-Characters: always supportive, always ready to stand by their lady even after rehab or a suicide attempt. Both are committed to the idea of “family” and domestic bliss: “Let’s be happy, baby. Please, let’s just be happy.”

Halfway through I Smile Back I thought: “Now it’s the women’s turn.” American Literature is littered with stories of angst-ridden white male urbanites. Babbit, Rabbit, Portnoy, Herzog, all of them bemoaning the domestication of the White Man and his almost purposeless existence. Do I dare to eat a peach?

I thought Koppelman might have a refreshing perspective.

Kate Chopin, anyone? I remember sitting in a Denny’s in Fort Worth, TX after finishing the Awakening, chain smoking Camel Filters, and trying not weep in front Armando, the manager who was sweet on me.

But Koppelman’s characters are more caricature than flesh. There seems to be no affection between writer and character, and, quite the opposite, one senses a bit of judgement, as if Koppelman, fresh from a high school reunion, went straight home to write about the washed up homecoming queen she saw there.

Possibly, I’m being uncharitable. Maybe Koppelman herself is that homecoming queen. I know nothing of her biography that I didn’t read on a book jacket; nevertheless, wealthy, depressed urbanite is not the image she projects.

I read for those moments when a story takes me out of myself (as with the Awakening). I want words on a page to lead me into lives not my own. I want some mythos. I am not typically judgmental about what kind of world a writer leads me to. I like fucked up lives and unhappy endings as much as normal, happy ones. The trip there is the pleasure. I am as addicted to this feeling of leaving the body as I am to tobacco.

Reading Amy Koppelman was like smoking a candy cigarette: a puff of white powder and a useless gum, the image of smoking without the guilty pleasure.