William Sanderson is very rich, but you can always be richer. He's up for a huge promotion at investment giant Bedrock Capital, but there's one crucial hurdle he must clear first—assuming he can keep the HR department at bay. He's also looking for any string to pull to get his maddeningly indifferent daughter Ginny into Yale. Ellie, his wife, is a newcomer to New York who only wants to fit in, while Daughter #2, the shy Zoey, is happy just to make a new friend, even in the form of the unusual new girl who calls herself a goblin. Things turn upside down when the girls' exclusive school admits its first trans student, only to have her mysteriously disappear. As a frenzied search begins, the entire city frets about her fate. Somehow caught in the crosshairs are the Sandersons, a family desperately trying to navigate all the new cultural rules—and failing miserably.
Cutting satire depends on humor and irony, but also empathy. When the political commentary lacks that final ingredient, as in Scott Johnston’s The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, we’re left with unrelatable, unmoving characters who exist in a world detached from reality ... Johnston’s novel reads like a manifesto written by an aggrieved boomer scrolling Facebook memes created by Fox News anchors attacking everything from rent regulation to racial identity ... There’s clearly an agenda in this novel. Progressive politics are a threat to these characters—and to Johnston—but whether rightly or wrongly, the bigger problem here is the stilted writing. Dialogue is treated as an opportunity to dump information on readers who are presumed too stupid to understand big words. A better editor might have trimmed the worst of the awkward conversations, but instead, we have moments like William visiting the HR department to find out whether the board member Cy fits any part of the LGBTQ category required in the request for a proposal. Besides the heavy handed product placement for Levain cookies, the banter between William and Tanya, the HR rep, is the first time I’ve wondered if part of a novel was written by an LLM. There’s no sense of humanity here. It reads like William is entering prompts into Google, and Tanya’s answers offered to create a sense of plot and define the imaginary crisis created by DEI initiatives ... So many of the scenes are meetings that could have been an email. For instance, William takes Cy out for drinks in an attempt to suss out whether he falls into the magical LGBTQ check box for their proposal. This scene isn’t funny or witty or entertaining or heartfelt. It reads like filler in an attempt to imitate the idea of people ... The novel finally picks up about a third of the way through when the focus shifts to Ginny, Zoey, and Clover. It’s not as cutting as Mean Girls or Gossip Girl, but it tries, and Johnston is surprisingly at his best when writing teenage girls. There are absolutely moments in this middle portion of the book that build page-turning tension, and there’s quite a good unraveling of the plot as the three girls finally confront Easter Riddle, even if the plot feels borrowed from Season 1 of Search Party ... The trouble with all this is that the plot and page-turning is derailed by the perpetual victim syndrome rotting each of these characters to the core. It’s a fantasy further from reality than the wizarding world of Harry Potter, where DEI hobgoblins lurk around every corner. The girls are bad people, doing bad things. Johnston has failed to create characters to empathize with, and that’s an essential component of satire ... There are moments when The Sandersons Fail Manhattan does have some excitement, but these are few and far between labored diatribes. There is certainly an audience–buyers–for this novel, but whether they can read more than 160 characters or not is not the point. Finally, though, if we’re meant to take away from this novel that society has allowed progressive politics to displace the once great meritocracy, it’s a self-defeating argument. The publication of The Sandersons Fail Manhattan is proof-positive that white male privilege still exists.
Johnston offers a fictionalized amplification of exasperated public complaints he has made about New York’s prestigious Dalton School. Like-minded readers may enjoy his snarky lambasting of 'woke' culture, but those seeking fully realized characters, or a nuanced critique of contemporary liberalism, may do better elsewhere.
Clever ... Johnston holds no cows sacred in this entertaining take on the roles privilege and virtue signaling play in the pursuit of ambition. Admirers of The Bonfire of the Vanities ought to take a look.
