Description: Years after the death of her husband, the renegade scion of a wealthy family who became a civil rights activist, Katy is embroiled in a lawsuit to win for her son his rightful share of his father's estate. In Smart Hearts in the City Solomon returns to the New York of her acclaimed novel, The Beat of Life. Her narrative focuses on Manhattan of the late eighties, convulsed by material gains and moral losses. An integral part of the novel is Solomon's rendering of Katy's profoundly erotic love affair with the restless sea-loving millionaire Mike Braden. Enmeshed by Braden but consumed by the needs of her own ongoing dilemma, Katy Becker reveals the complex psychology of female sensuality as it plays itself out in one very contemporary woman. The novel transports us back to Katy's adolescent involvement with Brad Culver, a black boy who grew up with her. Through the lens of this quirky couple, we get a glimpse of Manhattan at the end of the Second World War: the lost history of Carnegie Hill and Harlem, and the lost alliance between Jews and blacks. In a memorable, almost mythic adventure in the novel, Kary and Brad voyage together down the Croton Aqueduct, recast as an intrepid pair of Huck Finns. Solomon's insider look at the workings of an irresistible city over the past four decades of change and transformation is dazzling, robustly comic, and brilliantly knowing about the ways of people and society.

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