Quiet Street

Praise

“An elegant confessional of the excesses of the ruling classes — told in a kind of travelogue through sybaritic circles of hell….the lessons are as familiar as Croesus and Gatsby.”
—Washington Post

“Rich (pun half-intended) with anecdotal details from a life spent between the Upper East Side, the Hamptons, and all the other playgrounds of the wealthy, McDonell has done what for many in his orbit would have found unthinkable: He says the quiet part loud.”
—New York Magazine

“Meticulous…[in] McDonell’s somewhat ironically titled book…it quickly becomes apparent that there’s nothing quiet about the one percent’s deceptively cordial appearance.”
—Chicago Review of Books
 
“Unsparing…Honest…I’m meant to be titillated, and I am.”
—Bookforum

“In delicate, persuasive, and beautiful prose, McDonell blows the notion of meritocracy sky-high”
—Airmail

“Quiet Street is an exquisitely rendered horror story about American inequity, and how it mindlessly, immorally, reproduces itself. Unlike most such stories, however, this one left me believing in the possibility (and necessity) of drastic change. Nick McDonell writes with a scalpel in one hand, and in the other, a bushel of grace.”
—Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom

“When Nick McDonell published his first novel at seventeen—three years after I’d published mine at forty-four—I was impressed by the book as well as the WTF precocity. Now, he’s almost as old as I was then, and he’s put out about as many books as I have. This one is a bracingly frank, clear-eyed chronicle of his ultra-privileged golden youth in The Bubble, as he calls it, and his ongoing search for how he ought to use or forego some of that privilege now. If everyone this fortunate examined their lives this thoughtfully, the world would be better off.”
—Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses

“An earnest and piercing examination of the mindset of the upper class”
—Publishers Weekly

“Friendships with Upper East Side elites, attendance at prestigious schools like Buckley, Harvard, and Oxford, and travel to exotic locations . . . as McDonell illuminates a rarified world of money, power, and connections, he also offers candidly sobering insight into the systemic cultural mechanisms designed to protect long-standing social inequalities. An eloquent and compelling study.”
—Kirkus Reviews