Adult Situations

Adult Situations is a Covid-era literary/domestic novel about admiration, power, adultery, surrogate families, artistic prestige, and the damage adults do while insisting they are merely being complicated. Its central triangle is not only sexual but generational: Teddy Low wants Ilya Kravitsky as a father and mentor; Ilya wants admiration, forgiveness, and control; Ada, Ilya’s daughter, wants her father back from the wreckage he has made of their family.

The novel begins in summer 2020, when Ilya Kravitsky hires Teddy as his latest live-in helper. Ilya is a celebrated novelist, Columbia professor, Brooklyn literary patriarch, and the kind of charismatic older writer who turns his own life into a small court. For years, he has hired former MFA students as nannies for his children. The grad students call the job the “Third-Year Fellowship,” since it gives young writers room, board, proximity to greatness, and, often, humiliation. Usually the fellows are pretty young women. Teddy is unusual: male, gentile, earnest, and desperately eager to be loved by Ilya.

Teddy arrives at Ilya and Mahin Veisi’s red row house on Dean Street in Brooklyn and is already too intimidated to open the little gate. Mahin finds him outside and tells him the doorbell exists. The family is intimidating from the start: Ilya, the famous novelist; Mahin, his sharp Iranian-born novelist wife; their theatrical, difficult teenage daughter Ada; and their obscene, funny, hyperactive younger son Asher. Teddy has come from a privileged but emotionally starved Midwestern background. His father Henry once called him “the biggest fuckup” after a teenage DUI, and Teddy has spent years trying to redeem himself through literature, competence, and other people’s approval. He first read Ilya’s novel The Excess in wilderness therapy and treated it almost like scripture.