Ground Up

May 18, 2009
From Idov, a staff writer for New York
magazine, comes a sagely wry novel loosely based on his experience running the short-lived Cafe Trotsky on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the fictionalized version, newlyweds Mark and Nina are living off her trust fund on the Upper West Side. Mark writes the occasional book review and Nina has given up her halfhearted career in entertainment law to pursue photography. After a guest (and, coincidently, Michelin reviewer) compliments their food at a dinner party they’re hosting, Nina confides that she has always dreamed of running a cafe, and soon the pair are preparing to open their own hip downtown Viennese paradise. Lacking in experience but full of enthusiasm, the couple battles with landlords, contractors, coffee distributors and temperamental pastry chefs, yet Cafe Kolschitzky bows badly: friends barely show up and a Starbucks knockoff sets up shop across the street. Meanwhile, their funding is cut, no profits have been turned and the naïve couple begins to unravel. Packed with insight and frequent hilarious asides, Idov’s debut mercilessly takes down “money is an illusion” bohoism.

Starred review from June 1, 2009
A fiercely funny yet frequently touching novel about the nightmare that the American dream can become.

The debut novel by Idov, a staff writer for New York magazine and editor of Russia!, a literary quarterly, strikes all the right chords—both cultural and emotional. Narrator Mark Scharf and his wife, Nina Liau, decide to open a hip coffeehouse on Manhattan's Lower East Side, based on their romantic memories of one they had visited in Vienna. The daughter of a wealthy Chinese-American woman from whom she is semi-estranged (yet whose wealth allows Mark and Nina to live well beyond their means), Nina is a talented photographer and a deeply dissatisfied lawyer. The son of Russian Jews who live in Indiana, Mark attempts to scrape together a living by reviewing books for this very publication (with book reviewing providing much of the novel's humor as well as a pivotal plot twist). Because Nina hates her job, and Mark doesn't have much of a job, he accedes to her desire to reinvent themselves through a project where they can work together."Nina wasn't worried about the low return," says Mark."She wanted to be paid in meaning." Mark knows all the right literary and musical references, all the right cosmopolitan cliches, but he's a rube when it comes to real-estate agents, avaricious landlords and the intricacies of public relations. As much as he and Nina appreciate coffee, they know nothing about selling it, though they receive a crucial lesson early on."The good news is that the margin on coffee is about a thousand percent…The bad news, my friends, is that Americans don't like to drink coffee…They hate the taste of it. What they like to drink is warm milk…Your job is to convince, in an original way, a guy drinking a glass of warm milk that he's a sophisticated adult." Everything that can go wrong will, in a manner both hilarious (the coffeehouse) and poignant (the marriage).

Though the protagonist's own book reviews are usually caustic, even he would give this debut a rave.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2009
Idovs first novel follows the fortunes of a couple who decide to open a Viennese coffeehouse on the Lower East Side in New York City. Mark, a book reviewer, and Nina, a lawyer largely supported by her wealthy mother, are taken with the idea of setting up a coffee shop like the one they found on their honeymoon in Vienna, an intellectual hub for hipsters and deep thinkers like themselves. They withdraw a large sum of money from their mutual fund, rent a space suitable for Caf' Kolschitzsky (named for the founder of coffee), and hold a grand opening. Mark and Nina manage to keep their heads above water until a Midwestern coffee franchise, Jumpy Joes Java, moves in right across the street, forcing them to go to extremes to keep their fledgling business afloat. A wry, witty look at what happens when idealism meets the real world, Idovs sharp debut will speak to a generation that has erroneously been taught to expect success from every venture they undertake.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)