Picture “Real Housewives,” add in pop-science, and you have Wednesday Martin’s book, “Primates of Park Avenue,” a memoir focused on the anxious and hard-charging moms of New York City’s Upper East Side.
Simon & Schuster ($26).
After the birth of her first child, and in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, Ms. Martin and her family move from downtown Manhattan to their new locale, known for its snooty private schools, big-name department stores, and lavish apartment buildings.
Exploring the terrain of New York’s wealthiest and best-connected residents, she becomes fascinated with the area’s female inhabitants, and resolves to study them. At first given the cold shoulder, Ms. Martin soon finds a place in a circle of Upper East Side, stay-at-home moms and slowly learns its folkways.
She’s not a complete stranger to the world she enters — though from a small town in the Midwest, she’s married to an investment manager and has lived in Manhattan for two decades. But she does have two things that set her apart: a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Yale and the desire to apply some of anthropology’s lessons to her environment.
Ms. Martin announces her research interest to whoever will listen, and to make sense of what she observes, draws analogies to far-flung primate troops and aboriginal tribes. Like individuals in these groups, the moms exhibit fundamental drives and emotions inherited from our common ancestors that permit such comparisons.
Her descriptions lend themselves to laughs and eye-rolls. Kids compete for seats in selective pre-schools and consult with play-date specialists. Mothers experiment with faddish diets and turn the city inside-out in pursuit of the “it” hand-bag.
The book has serious passages, too. Ms. Martin points out the resource disparity between Upper East Side men and women and considers its implications. Giving up careers to raise children, the women depend on their husbands for financial support — some of it doled out in annual, performance-based “wife-bonuses.” This leaves them with less influence in their relationships and belies their myth of empowerment.
Whatever its merits, “Primates of Park Avenue” suffers from real weaknesses. Ms. Martin’s reliance on the anthropological approach yields mixed results. It allows us to feel a certain pathos for the Upper East Side women — fellow citizens of the planet, members of the species. But she fails to integrate social theory with personal narrative in a credible manner. She succumbs to determinism, attributing all the women’s trifles to evolutionary hard-wiring.
One example: After Ms. Martin flirts with one of the richest fathers at her son’s nursery school, she begins to receive play-date invitations on her child’s behalf. She understands this turn-about in terms of primate rules — because an “alpha male” finds her attractive, her status as a female within the group improves.
Ms. Martin also lapses into the solipsism for which she faults the women she profiles. Again and again, she uses the term “Manhattanites” as shorthand for her upper-crust clique, writing off vast swathes of the island’s population who do not shop for pumps at Bergdorf’s or prep their kindergartners for Harvard.
Worst of all, she reaches trite conclusions. Despite appearances, every community has its own set of norms and rituals. Mothers, with few exceptions, love their children. No matter our expectations, individuals can perform acts of great altruism.
Her prescription for wives eager to win equal status with their husbands proves hardly more original: In order to achieve parity with men, women must leave the home and find work elsewhere. That idea has been old news since Betty Friedan wrung her hands over the kitchen-sink, and the value of repeating it remains to be seen.
In a tradition that extends from Irving Berlin songs to cable reality-shows, outsiders have forever tried to peer behind the curtains of the Upper East Side power-elite. An insider of sorts, Ms. Martin could have provided us lower-rank primates with a more insightful, self-aware perspective.
Daniel Solomon is a Post-Gazette intern and a rising senior at Harvard: dsolomon@post-gazette.com
First Published: June 7, 2015, 4:00 a.m.