Middlebrow: The 2 Poles of Wednesday Martin's "Primates of Park Avenue"

The publicity for Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue got off to a sensational start, with an excellent op-ed in the New York Times that managed to be both salacious and feminist alongside a tonne of press about the book's more titillating details. But then, with the book's release, things went a bit off the rails. The Times ran a scathing "Reporter's Notebook" piece questioning both the book's facts and its politics, and the New York Post went further, poking several holes in the book's chronology and suggesting that entire scenes had been fabricated. When the Post's accusations proved to be largely correct, the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that subsequent editions of the book would contain a disclaimer explaining that liberties had been taken with certain facts.

Compared to the op-ed that preceded it, the book itself is largely disappointing. Much of the op-ed's feminist critique of wealthy Manhattanites is lost in a haze of self-justification and Martin's increasingly unlikely attempts to claim outsider status in the world of the super rich. Martin's hook is that she is a kind of amateur anthropologist studying the foreign world of the Upper East Side. This theoretical framework, however, is very thin and is more often condescending than insightful. Martin's anthropology, though, gives overt expression to an internal tension within the book: that between exoticism and universalism. In so doing, Martin provides a particularly clear example of a narrative structure key to middlebrow entertainment.

At one pole, Martin's anthropological conceit requires her to represent the Upper East Side in as exotic terms as possible. If she is really to be an anthropologist teaching us about a foreign tribe, then she needs to convince us these people are meaningfully different from both us and her. Thus, much of the book is given over to hyperbolic (and vague) descriptions of the dizzying cultural differences between lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side and, later, between the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. Those of us from other parts of the world may find it hard to believe that moving a few blocks within the same borough of the same city constitutes field work, but Martin continually insists on the dizzying culture shock she faces at every turn. The cars are different; the clothes are different; the way they pick up their kids from school is different; the way they exercise is different; etc. Never mind that the language, religion, geography, and food are the same--Martin suffers through months of culture shock. (This is a kind of provincialism perhaps unique to New Yorkers; only Woody Allen has been caused such psychological trauma by switching subway lines.) Tellingly, Martin does not spend much time analyzing the economic differences between Manhattan neighbourhoods. Doing so would likely reveal that the most meaningful difference between different New Yorkers, that of money, is largely irrelevant to her; she was super-rich all along, and thus is hardly a foreign observer of these other super-wealthy moms.

At the same time that her anthropological framework insists on exoticism, however, the way she deploys it erases all differences between not only people, but all primates. After describing each strange Upper East Side ritual she discovers, Martin turns to an analogous behaviour amongst some non-industrial culture or, more often, amongst some other species of primate. From there, Martin makes her most surprising move. She does not analyze the similarities and differences between the Upper East Side ritual and that of its anthropological analogue. Instead, she just asserts that they are identical and moves on. Thus anthropology is deployed to level all differences, not only between cultures but between species. The aggressive displays of female baboons are not an interesting point of comparison to the way women buy purses in New York; for Martin, they are the exact same thing, full stop.

The levelling of all difference reaches its climax in the book's final section, as Martin describes the loss of her third child during pregnancy. After conceding that there exist enormous differences in infant mortality rates between the global poor and the global rich, as well as between antiquity and today, Martin goes on to assert that all mothers' emotions (including those of non-human primates) are grounded in the same fear of a loss of a child. Thus individual and cultural differences are subsumed by something even broader than human nature--some kind of (gender-specific) primate nature. Martin may be exponentially better off than even an average American mother but, trust her, all mothers feel the same way.

These are the poles of Martin's anthropology: first she exoticizes a group of people; then she erases that exoticism so we might see that, deep down inside, we are all the same. This is the basic structure of really bad anthropology. But, more importantly, it is also the structure of a certain kind of middlebrow entertainment. The travelogue in which the narrator lives amongst an exotic tribe only to discover that we are all human; the sitcom which ends with the family reunited in the living room; the folksy Readers' Digest joke set on a distant army base: all three depend for their narrative logic on a quick trip into discomforting difference before a safe return to a generalized humanness. The specifics of Upper East Side life aside, Martin's main contribution to letters may have been to provide a strikingly frank example of this narrative progression.