The New Yorkers

The New Yorkers (2007), set in a certain block of the Upper West Side of New York City during 2003, draws from author Cathleen Schine’s own experiences as a dog-owner in a similar neighborhood. Near to Central Park, the block attracts many dog-owners as well as a quirky cast of characters that represent the eclectic and diverse experience that is life in New York City.

The novel centers on Jody and her white pit bull, Beatrice. Jody leads a quiet life teaching music to kindergarten students. She lives in a garden studio apartment with Beatrice, a remarkably large and friendly dog Jody rescued from a shelter. As in many such stories, Jody finds that Beatrice has really rescued her. Over the course of a year, Schine traces the paths Jody and Beatrice walk and how those intersect and intertwine with others on the block. There are minor characters who add grace notes and elegance to the novel, but the focus is on Jody, Everett, Simon, Polly, George, and Doris.

Across the street from Jody lives Everett, who moved to the block after his divorce. He has one college-age daughter and works as a chemist. Everett is presented as cold and standoffish, but Jody falls in love the first time she sees him. Everett, however, falls in love with his neighbor, Polly, who is nearly his daughter’s age. Jody mourns their relationship from afar, even after falling into a relationship of her own with yet another resident of the block, Simon.



Simon is like Jody: shy and a bit introverted, living alone and set in his routines. He is a social worker, except for one month a year when he uses all his vacation time to go to Virginia for the fox-hunting season. Simon is besotted by Jody. They fall into a companionable relationship, which eventually becomes a love affair. Simon proposes; Jody hesitates. She cannot commit to him, possibly because they are not right together and possibly because she is still pining for Everett.

Polly is new to the neighborhood, having recently been dumped by her boyfriend and forced to find a place to live quickly. She is shown an apartment in Everett’s building and is appalled to learn that it is on the market because just two days before her showing, the man who lived there had hung himself in the living room. About to leave, Polly hears a noise and opens a closet door to find a six-week-old puppy the suicide had apparently adopted and then abandoned when he killed himself. Polly convinces herself the puppy is a sign; she takes the apartment and eventually persuades her brother George to move in, as well.

George is aimless, having recently been fired from his job waiting tables. He finds a job bartending at the Go Go Grill, a neighborhood restaurant run by the friendly and well-liked Jamie, who has a large and loving family as well as two terriers. Jamie allows his dogs and others in the restaurant, despite that being a violation of NYC health codes. George grows extremely attached to the puppy his sister found, whom she named Howdy, and George and Howdy become regular fixtures of the dog/social scene on the block.



George and Polly try to set each other up with romantic partners—as close as they are, each believes the other needs something more. When Polly enters a relationship with Everett, George disapproves, but he soon realizes that Polly isn’t completely serious about the older man. George, meanwhile, has a succession of short-term girlfriends who drift in and out of the apartment and his life. His most committed relationship is with Howdy, much to Polly’s chagrin, but it turns out George has a real talent for working with dogs, and he begins an informal side project with an ex-girlfriend’s dog, which quickly spirals into referrals across the city.

The comic villain of the novel is Doris, an older lady with a giant SUV and a spiteful disposition. Obsessed with the dogs in the neighborhood, she mounts a one-woman campaign to bring her city councilman to the block in an effort to have dog laws severely curtailed, including outlawing the presence of pit bulls like Beatrice. Doris’s long-suffering husband, Harvey, treats her with the gentle affection that signals she is a redeemable character, but until nearly the end of the novel, she is presented as vindictive, status-conscious, and having delusions of grandeur. In the end, Doris almost succeeds in shutting down the Go Go Grill by haranguing an inspector from the health department into visiting on a day when many of the neighborhood dogs are present.

Polly ends things with Everett who is devasted mostly because he has, against type, fallen fiercely in love with Howdy. Simon goes to Virginia for fox hunting season and decides not to come back, breaking off his relationship with Jody. Jody is sad that Simon has left her but is almost completely absorbed in caring for her beloved Beatrice, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Jody and Everett are accidentally reunited at a Thanksgiving dinner Jamie hosts at the Go Go Grill; Everett is sympathetic to Jody’s heartbreak over Beatrice’s illness because of the love he has developed for Howdy.



Schine’s writing is elegiac, a loving tribute to dogs and their owners and the streets and people of this certain block on the Upper West Side. In an epilogue, she gives all her characters neat and tidy endings: Everett and Jody eventually marry and adopt a dog; George falls in love with the boss that fired him from his previous job and becomes a dog trainer; Simon lives happily in Virginia; Polly gets a new roommate who also has a dog; Doris is gifted a dog by her sister and falls in love with her, transforming herself from the villain of the novel to just another sap in love with a bundle of fur.

In this story, dogs are redemptive creatures, teaching the people around them how to live life with kindness and joy. As the characters move through the year of their lives we observe, and as they come together and apart, the thread that binds them all together is the unconditional, selfless love of a dog.