Beachgoers who have finished their summer novels may want to take a trip back to the bookstore for “Closing Costs,” recently issued by St. Martin’s Press in paperback. In his fifth (and newest) novel, Seth Margolis takes a Tom Wolfe-like approach, skewering the obsessive nature of players in Manhattan’s frothy residential real estate market.
The fictional account follows several couples whose pursuit of their dream home is choreographed by cold-blooded real estate agent Lucinda Wells, the personification of the cutthroat nature of New York real estate.
“While I was writing the book, which took a couple of years, I had to keep going back and raising the prices I had put in the story, and I couldn’t keep up,” Margolis said in interviews when the book came out. “I thought the prices I put in were outrageous, but then reality kept beating them,” he said.
Margolis is no stranger to New York City, nor to the subject of real estate. He has lived in Manhattan for 30-plus years, and his wife is Carole Zelner, an agent at Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy.
A review in Publisher’s Weekly noted, “The well-drawn characters complement Margolis’ wry observations on Manhattan life and the ups and downs of marriage and career.” The review continued, “It will certainly resonate with New Yorkers.”
“Closing Costs” has reportedly generated some interest with filmmakers who are entertaining the idea of a movie adaptation. The author’s third book, “Losing Isaiah,” was made into a movie starring Halle Berry, Jessica Lange, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson.
Margolis’ other novels include “Perfect Angel,” “False Faces” and “Vanishing Act.”
The author received an MBA in marketing from the Stern School of Business at New York University and, when not writing fiction, serves as branding consultant for JP Morgan Chase and other companies in the financial services, technology and pharmaceutical industries.
Some excerpts:
Peggy wondered if Lucinda Wells had sold an apartment in every building in New York. She certainly had the energy for it, the metabolism of a nuclear reactor. Her eyes blinked continually like tiny cameras, recording everything. Click. Click. Click. Peggy half expected little flashes to go off.
“The crown moldings!” she cried. Click click click. “These old porcelain light switches, I haven’t seen these in years.” Click click click. “Oh my God, frosted sconces!” Click click click.
*
“Architectural Digest ran ten pages on this place,” Lucinda said. “I’ve never had a client bag that much real estate in AD. The article said it took eight coats of paint to get the walls like this — you paint it on, then sand it off, then paint it on again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” She tapped the wall with a pink fingernail as incandescent as the burgundy glaze. “I don’t know, it feels tr s nineties to me. Everyone I show it to agrees. They bring their decorator along on the second walk-through, even before the husband, and the decorator always says the same thing — these burgundy walls have to go, the white marble floor, yuck, we’ll have to install new moldings, and what if we moved the doorway to the dining room just a foot to the left to let more light into the foyer? Suddenly it’s a gut renovation, and for nine-point-five, that’s a turnoff in any market. You want to see the whole place, or just the kitchen?”
*
“She thought you could change everything just by moving across town and buying a big place, one apartment to a floor, the elevator opens and there you are, inside. But you can move across the country, and you’re still who you were in the beginning. She was wiser when she wrote this” — Peggy pointed a toe at the inscription — “than she’d ever been then. The room you were raised in, that’s forever. You can tear down the walls, put new ones up, but you can’t run from it.”
“I get so tired of real estate,” Rosemary said. “Half the city is either buying or selling their apartments, and the other half are real estate agents helping them do it.” People changing their skins, as Esme Hollender put it. “Maybe everyone should put an inscription in the rooms they live in, and there should be a law that you can’t remove it.”
*
You are what you eat, it was said — well, that might have been true at one time, when only the rich could afford leg of mutton or suckling pig or lobster thermidor or whatever it was the rich used to eat. But nowadays, anyone could pop into Zabar’s and pony up a few shekels for Scotch salmon or foie gras. Clothes make the man? Not when knockoffs, perfectly good knockoffs at that, were hawked on half the street corners in Midtown. No, today you are where you live. Shelter makes the man. With the right outfit, genuine or not, you could look like a million bucks anywhere in public, and you could eat like a millionaire at least once in a while with a decent credit line on your gold card. But you couldn’t fake it in your home. A home was your skin, your true face to the outside world.