Tuesday Nights in 1980 review – sharp rendering of a city in transition

Molly Prentiss’s debut sets up shop as New York is about to clean up its act in the 80s but can her characters cash in or will they be left behind?

Molly Prentiss’s spirited debut, Tuesday Nights in 1980, opens with a woman who is risking the small comforts of her life to attend clandestine political meetings in a basement in Buenos Aires. The woman, Franca, and her friends are documenting the names of the people who have “disappeared” in the year’s after the military junta came to power. Franca is familiar with disappearance in other forms: her parents are dead, her brother has cashed in on an American passport and fled to New York. Her good-for-nothing husband has left her to care for their young son alone. During the day, she works in a bakery, while at night she records the missing and prays that her secret activities won’t bring harm to her little boy.

Predictably, these activities end in grief: Franca disappears from the scene, and the narrative telescopes to Manhattan, where an art critic named James Bennett attends a swanky party on New Year’s Eve 1979. Bennett, we learn in a brisk recap of his life to date, has synesthesia. This means the things he sees and feels are translated to colors and smells. His wife Marge exudes variations of the color red; having sex with her is like “eating a wild strawberry”; pregnant, she makes him think of a pomegranate full of seeds.

Continue reading...