This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
A How Long Gone listener was nice enough to give me a subscription to her excellent newsletter, Ruby’s Recs, in which she, a voracious reader and alumni of the Manhattan bookstore Three Lives & Company, doles out book recommendations. The descriptions are concise and easy to parse, so when her “Best Reads of 2023” list hit my inbox, I bought a few titles that struck me. The first was My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, which I devoured. It is an excellent coming-of-age story with a few good twists and turns.
I also bought Quiet Street: On American Privilege by Nick McDonell, a graduate of the Buckley School, Harvard, and Oxford. McDonell was educated in rarefied air. Significant (and often old) money, secrecy, and legacy surrounded him. His mother, Joanie, is a writer, and his father, Terry McDonell, was a top editor at Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. His family was cultured and interesting, but unlike most of his classmates, his father didn’t run an international bank or hedge fund.
McDonell published his first novel, Twelve when he was 17. The book focuses on disaffection, despair, drug use, and violence among a group of wealthy Manhattan teenagers during winter break, material that McDonell was uniquely qualified to write. Hunter S. Thompson, a family friend, blurbed it. The book was a massive success and, in 2010, was adapted into a film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Chace Crawford. Since then, he has published novels, reports on several wars, and even an illustrated book about climate change.
Quiet Street is short (144 pages); I read it on a flight from New York City to Los Angeles last week. McDonell places a microscope on his privilege, exploring how the ruling class hoards wealth and power. He talks about taboo subjects directly. He interviews his Buckley classmates, reveals how much he was paid to write the book, and writes about volunteering at the morgue and taking a safari in Tanzania. Many of us are fascinated with the 1 percent, and McDonell is happy to tell the reader all about it. McDonell was home in Brooklyn, enjoying his time as a new father, when I called him from Los Angeles to discuss his motivations, the replication of the status quo, and the human condition.
Nick McDonell: It's not that far away.
Well, first, thanks for reading. I decided to write this book because... I talk about it a little bit in the beginning, but I had been working on conflicts abroad and in the summer of 2020—the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic—these things were in the conversation. I was in New York, thinking about the inequality that I grew up around, so the larger conversation was inspiring and returned me to these questions that I first addressed a long time ago but had yet to be as focused on for some time.
A little bit. There are no great revelations in the book. Partly, it was about using my life as material that I would report on to illuminate a world that is not so often discussed critically from the inside.
That was one of the most interesting parts of doing the book. And for anybody, if you'd like to give yourself something to think about for an afternoon, go talk to your ninth-grade classmates.
Of the 15 guys in my class, nine responded to my query. And of those nine, I think, six agreed to be recorded. I got a pretty good hit rate. Everybody was happy to talk about it, and were, in their different ways and to different degrees, thoughtful about it.
Yeah. And that's what's complicated about being in this world. People have affection for each other for so long after. The ties are so tight because [that school community] was so small. That can make it difficult to have critical conversations.
Yeah, that's true. And that goes back to the Medicis in Italy in some ways. From what I can tell, at these schools, because it has gotten so much more expensive in Manhattan… because the inequality is so much greater, magazine editors like my father was, tend not, I think, to send their kids to Buckley anymore simply because they can’t afford it. I think it has become more finance-oriented like all of Manhattan has over the last 35 years.
Are any parents cool? [But] I know exactly what you mean. They’re remarkable people.
Where are you from?
I'm back doing what I was doing beforehand. I spent a lot of the last year in Ukraine and am working on a project about that conflict right now.
The personal element of it is different, and I hadn't done that much of it, so it was a challenge in that sense. But Quiet Street and this [next] book are, I hope, part of the same larger project, which is about the uses of power and elite power and how that affects people or not. The previous book, Civilian Casualties, was in some ways about that, too. Even though they look at different geographies and groups, the concern behind many of the things I'm doing boils down to the same kind of problems. So, I hope it's all on the same beat. At least I tell myself that when I'm off doing these different things. I'm trying to stitch it together.
I think that the language around inclusivity and diversity has changed, but that the core of these schools is the replication of the status quo and the maintenance of power among a certain set of people in a certain economic class. And so both things are important to recognize. There can be change, but also essential stasis.
I do, I actually recently became a father. That’s why I was 25 minutes late.
A little over a month.
It feels good.
I am not going to send them to these schools.
I don’t know. That is far in advance. I’m considering the next diaper change. I try not to future trip, but in this case, there are ideas I have about how to try to participate in the community that, I think, will preclude me from sending these kids to a school like that. I don’t know what it will look like, and it will depend on the kids.
When I talk to people about this book, especially in New York, where the question of private education is so alive for a certain economic group, people really want to talk about it. I think people are trying to figure out if they feel okay about sending their kids there. That has been one of the reactions to this book. People of means want to talk to me, and I get the sense that sometimes they want me to say what they're doing is okay. It always depends on the situation, but I think that if people are feeling uncomfortable with those kinds of decisions, it's worth examining why they might be.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I think there could be. I'm having some really interesting conversations with people about it, and I don't know that I'll be writing about those things, but it all feels like interesting stuff.
This is the little tiny part of a much bigger conversation going on about inequality in the country. People do talk about it, and the question is being around people who do.
Yeah. And that’s where to generalize. As a country, I think we are encouraged not to talk about it. Not necessarily by people who get on a soapbox and say, ”Don't think about this,”" but there is so much other noise and entertainment around politics.
Did you see the movie Leave the World Behind? I saw that the other night, and I thought it was fun. Dystopian end of the world, with every man for himself.
It sounds to me like a human condition question.
