The people in the new Brooklyn novels may have low checking balances, but they are not poor like the other people of Brooklyn, the people who, in “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” patronize National Wines & Liquors, Inc., where both alcohol and cashier are behind bulletproof glass, instead of the “much newer Tangled Vine, which specialized in organic and local wines and exhibited the work of area artists at its Thursday-evening tastings.”  Even the truly affluent Brooklynites like Nicole, one of the mothers in “Cutting Teeth” — the kind who have a “pristine Danish teak dining table” and “sixty-five-dollar organic candles” — are worried about money: “She felt disappointed in her parents, who … couldn’t ‘gift’ them money for a down payment like so many of her friends’ parents had, because wasn’t that the only way one could afford a home these days, even on a decent salary like [her husband] earned.”

These characters worry, and measure themselves against their peers; they all feel there is some spiritual channel through which they might live better lives.  After quitting her job, Gould’s character Amy pauses in front of a Buddhist temple but stops herself before ringing the bell. “What had she even been thinking — that she would throw herself on the mercy of some wise old bodhisattva and learn to lead a life of mindful solitude?”  In Fierro’s novel, the Buddhist element surfaces as an orientalist and ill-advised character named Tenzin, a Tibetan refugee and nanny who is wiser than everyone else and whose own inner monologue is unjustly composed in the exotic rhythm of her spoken English (“Poor Mommy Susanna, Tenzin thought as she stared at the banana. So much throwing up of food”). Offill’s narrator tells a joke: “Why couldn’t the Buddhist vacuum in corners? Because she had no attachments.”  (There’s something else these novels have in common, something critical: They all feature one or more writers.  For me, this was to some extent “Nathaniel P.’s” salient characteristic — Is this what it takes to make it? I thought to myself. “Mild sociopathy and Mama Celeste?”)

Reading these novels in conjunction with one another, you see the potential barriers to art when a place and its attendant mode of being loom so large, like the weather in books about Florida.  These novels are dense with atmosphere, filled with details so pointed that they seem like they should be satirical, but are not exactly satirical.  You also wonder if they are the last gasp of a decadent, doomed society. “Cutting Teeth,” Fierro’s Boschian tableau of parents so uniformly pitiable or unlikable, or both, is such that I almost hoped the anxieties of one character, a woman who is obsessed with a coming apocalypse, will be vindicated with a cleansing meteor strike.  The characterizations feel like sendups, but there is such a narrow margin of authorial distance between the sender and the sendee that it can be difficult to tell whether they are biting social critiques or anxious self-portraits. I suppose they are both.

Like characters in a somewhat less swashbuckling Jack London novel, these are all characters, and writers, who are grappling with their environments. Waldman’s novel seems less anxious on this front, because she has written the protagonist himself as a kind of Brooklyn landmark, like the Green-Wood Cemetery.  His dress, his attitudes, his haunts are assembled, Baedeker-like, as a feature of a Brooklyn where “everyone turned up everywhere. Though the parts of Brooklyn congenial to people in their demographic had expanded dramatically in a widening web of faux-dives and mysteriously hip restaurants, to Nate the place seemed never to have been smaller, so dense was it with people he knew.”

* * *

I recently read a quote from Teju Cole’s latest book, wherein, invoking Updike, he expressed “a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.”  Around the same time, the Scottish novelist J.M. Ledgard argued for a broader approach to fiction (an approach he takes in his own work): “If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it’s really finished as a force for grappling with the world.”

I do feel, reading these novels, the cramp of white sameness that once characterized the suburbs and their novels, full of a mass of people who differed only incrementally in income and occupation. Brooklyn, despite its huge size, has carved out a narrow, half-revered, half-reviled space in contemporary literature, like the suburbs did in previous generations, and the parallel is somewhat borne out by Atlantic articles and Times style pieces on demographic trends and the reverse suburban-to-urban exodus.  (Moreover, the foods of Brooklyn and the aesthetics of Brooklyn have a way of creeping, like big box stores used to creep, until one imagines that one day the whole country will be shrouded in organic burlap and twine.)  When people talk about literary sameness of the 2000s, it won’t be Olinger or Westchester or Gibbsville — perhaps it will be Park Slope and Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

While I don’t want to pick on Cole or Ledgard for things they didn’t quite say, reading both statements, I involuntarily bristled. On the one hand, the classifications seem either to track so narrowly — Updike, Cheever, Yates, O’Hara — or so broadly as to envelop the entirety of modern fiction. (“Madame Bovary,” for example, involved washing up, suburbs and middle-class angst.)  But mostly, the remarks bugged me because they disregard the population for whom washing dishes and experiencing family angst was the most likely form of enterprise, and which was simultaneously woefully underrepresented in the literary class: women.  The raising of children, the cultivation of family, the upkeep of the home — these have been the province of women, and yet men have evidently managed to wear them out as literary fodder.   (On a related note, if Adelle Waldman convincingly inhabits a man with Nathaniel P., I have to believe that it’s partially thanks to the past 70 years of American fiction — the Bellows, Irvings, Roths who painstakingly catalogued the ways that men regard women).  This batch of Brooklyn novels isn’t exactly about women douching themselves to death on tree-lined blocks.  But I thought of Cole when I read Offill’s narrator here: “All right then, this thing clogging the sink.  I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain.  When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.”

I was interested in Gould’s characters because, like Bev, I have bad shirts from H&M and want to be a writer.  But, also like Bev, and more significantly these days, I’m pregnant.  I worry about how to be a person and a mother.  I’d like to know how to avoid becoming as neurotic as Fierro’s characters, or at least how to recognize the warning signs.  I wonder, like Offill’s narrator, how to have a child and write a book and keep a man, to have both artistic fulfillment and domestic bliss: “I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air conditioner and the soft sound of their breathing.  Amazing.  Out of dark waters, this.”  I was weaned on Irvings and Bellows and Roths; sometimes I’m hungry for books that look probingly at the contemporary places that produced them, that talk about women and motherhood and writing in a world I can mostly recognize. While the unrelenting atmosphere of Brooklyn novels, the arugula pizzas and gravlax toasts and privileged-person financial anxieties can oppress and eventually madden, I found things I wanted, at varying levels of elegance, in these novels.

I know that, though these are books by women, they are all white women, all of a plugged-in writerly class.  I suspect that the more books like this there are, the fewer books are promoted from other horizons. It shouldn’t be that way. But I also think that there is value, even excellence, even transcendence, to be had in familiar territory.