A Million Little Failures

I went to the launch party for James Frey’s Next to Heaven mostly to see Carole Radziwill. In the eight years that I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never seen any of our “Real Housewives” in person, despite being alert to the possibility — despite remaining hopeful that it will happen — whenever I’m on the Upper East Side for a doctor appointment, or at Balthazar for someone’s birthday dinner, or find myself walking by Zarin Fabrics. I’m sure if I spent more time in these kinds of well-heeled spaces, it would inevitably happen. But I can only tolerate them as a novelty, that side of the city being so alien and spiritually nauseating compared to my own (which lies mostly in what the political writer Michael Lange recently dubbed the “Commie Corridor”).