Book Review: Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

By Simon Demetriou

From The Real Housewives of Orange County to Yellowstone, the lives of the immensely rich seem to have a hold over the popular imagination that allows almost any cultural production dealing with mega-wealthy people to be successful. Jenny Jackson throws her hat into this ring with her debut novel, in which she urges her readers to both laugh at and empathise with the members of an old-money New York family during a period of – for them – unusual personal strife.

The Stocktons are New York royalty, presiding over the fruit streets of Brooklyn Heights, who made/continue to make their money in New York real estate. Heading the family are Chip, who despite being the current Stockton patriarch contributes basically nothing to the story, and Tilda, who delivers some of the best lines in the novel, from ‘You can’t date a vegan. The footwear is ghastly’ to ‘A can is fine on the beach, but bubbles deserve stemware!’, but whose character doesn’t extend beyond the parodic one-liner.

Our real focus is on the children, Chip, Darley and Georgiana, and their relationships: Chip is recently married to Sasha, an interior designer who hails from modest Rhode Island stock and is consequently distrusted by the other Stockton scions; Darley renounced her trust fund to wed Malcolm, a second generation Korean American and aviation finance genius, but now has to deal with having no hereditary wealth, a cruelly unemployed husband, and two children; Georgiana is spoiled, selfish, insecure and facing up to the personal questions posed by first loving a married co-worker and then repeatedly encountering the obnoxiously righteous and preposterously good-looking armaments heir Curtis McCoy.

Pineapple Street moves between the perspectives of Sasha, Georgiana, and Darley with chapters assigned to each woman respectively throughout the novel. While the first and last chapters are given to Sasha, who performs the function of the ‘normal’ observer thrust into the deranged reality of the New York one percenters, and while – for me – the most interesting Stockton is Darley, Georgiana is the real plot driver since, as anyone who’s read anything knows, unwed women are always more useful to writers than married women. And while Jackson has been compared to Edith Wharton for her focus on wealthy New York society, given her ear for the gently acerbic, her depiction of the learning curve of a young, beautiful, self-involved but sympathetic heiress, and the obvious but still compelling way in which Georgiana’s story moves towards its foregone conclusion, a more accurate – and more flattering – comparison would be to Jane Austen.

Jenny Jackson’s not Austen, and she probably never will be (who is?), but that Pineapple Street made me connect the two is a pretty strong recommendation nonetheless.