Book Review: Primates of Park Avenue
Despite my quips, far from a hate read
The Primates of Park Avenue is, on its face, a study of motherhood in the Upper East Side of New York City. The book is written by Wednesday Martin, who studied anthropology at the University of Michigan before obtaining her PhD in comparative literature and cultural studies, with a focus on anthropology, the history of anthropology and the history of psychoanalysis from Yale.
After living downtown, teaching, and working in finance and advertising, Martin married a rich finance husband and decided that, in the post-9/11 world, to secure the best public school district (and therefore life) for her newborn son, the family should move to the Upper East Side.
Using her academic background, she styles her move from downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side as if she were traveling to a remote Pacific atoll to study the culture of the indigenous islanders. Children act as the ultimate social currency for the women, who judge each other and assert their positions in a dominance hierarchy by which schools their kids get into and how well they perform. Throughout the book, Martin details how she finds herself “going native” to fit in and secure the requisite status and resources for her kid.
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The process of securing housing is the first of many hyper-gendered activities she engages in, describing Upper East Side gender politics as “even more markedly agriculturalist Bantu than freewheeling, downtown-ish, hunter-gather !Kung San.” Struggling to communicate with apartment brokers who wouldn’t give her the time of day, she hires a “buyer’s broker” of her own, a woman who could serve as her “native informant” of the new world she sought to enter.
After countless unsuccessful tours, Martin finally finds a “condop” (condo that acts like a coop) she thinks is the one. She undergoes “one of the most humiliating hazing rites imaginable”—the purchase application process, where her would-be neighbors collect info on “everything from our credit-card numbers and college GPAs to every school we, our parents, and our children had ever attended.” I have to say, she must not have been involved in Greek Life when she was at the University of Michigan if those are the worst rites she can imagine. Either way, Martin and her husband soon find themselves the newest residents of 900 Park Avenue.
The book continues in a similar fashion, covering the battles to set up playdates for children, the demands of postpartum fitness expectations, summering in the Hamptons, and the substance abuse (especially of alcohol and anti-anxiety medications) to cope with it all.
Some of the most unlikely prose of the book occurs in the chapter “Going Native: Mommy Wants a Birkin.” I did not know what a Birkin bag was when I opened this book. After twenty-six pages of overflowing description, I do. Martin describes in impressive, implausible detail the “powerful talismanic object with nearly magical and certainly mesmerizing powers—an Hermès Birkin bag.”
The entire chapter, I couldn’t get the Moby-Dick chapter The Whiteness of the Whale, a chapter wholly dedicated to exploring the color white, out of my mind. Martin’s “Birkinquest” (her name, not mine…) rivals the hunt for the Great White Whale in scope (her husband has to call binders of contacts around New York and go to shops in Hong Kong and Beijing before finally acquiring a bag in Tokyo) if not moral cost (see the crocodile-skin diamond encrusted handbag that sold for $185k in 2014—remember that buying status is as close to bad as a good neutral act can be).
If I may misquote Melville:
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this Birkin bag, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Her dedication to obtaining this bag, that is both as large as and as expensive as a car, might have dwarfed the effort she put into finding an apartment or getting her son into the most selective pre-school in the City. In fact, it’s my pet hypothesis that the writing of this book itself may be a retroactive justification to her husband of the request for the bag.
After her quest is accomplished and she finally has the Birkin, she is racked with anxiety over if the bag is real or not, or if by getting the bag through the Tokyo store she might have angered her New York contacts. Her friend must assure her over the phone, in words that might have been directed at Ahab himself had he been successful in his hunt: “You just can’t accept that the search is over. You’re afraid you’ll feel empty now that you have what you wanted! And you feel like maybe you’re a fraud. Maybe you don’t deserve it. You do!”
There exists an undercurrent of nastiness that can’t help but rear its head even through Martin’s own retelling of events, which presumably she retold in a way that she deemed was an acceptable way to present herself. Martin is open about the fact that she “went native.” But what she seems to either miss, not care about, or not see a problem with is how she adopts some of the antisocial1 behavior of the native Upper East Siders even as she claims to be a victim of their meanness.
In the close to her epic Birkin Bag chapter, she ends with a story of buying sweaters shortly after the Birkin acquisition. The saleswoman initially joked with her about wanting her bag, and after Martin played down its significance, the saleswoman one-upped her by mentioning someone who had recently been in the store with an even nicer Birkin, making it hard to get as excited about Martin’s bag.
A good thing too, I thought to myself, because you’d have to sell a LOT of cashmere sweaters to pay for one, even one like mine. If you could get anyone at Hermès to sell you one. Which I doubt. But I didn’t say any such thing. I only considered it as I paid for the clothes that I could afford and she couldn’t, and contemplated how, on the Upper East Side, there are many, many ways to run a woman off the sidewalk.
Sure. She didn’t say such a thing. But she ends her own chapter in her own book by writing such a thought for all of us to read, forever.
Another of the sharpest instances of the embodied nastiness is the close of the book, where she shares the anecdote of when her great rival, “the Queen of the Queen Bees, the meanest of the Mean Girl Moms,” finally acknowledged her in a social setting. At a party at “an immense, immaculate home in the Hamptons” the Queen approaches her and makes some backhanded comments about Martin’s book deal. Martin’s son, who is standing by her side, sick and asking to go home, goes to introduce himself with a snot-covered hand. Rather than stopping the viral transmission, Martin sociopathically lets it happen and leaves. The closing two paragraphs of the book are as follows:
And I noted with a satisfied smile, as I turned around for one last look at the party, that the Queen, who was also leaving, was wiping her eyes and her nose with the very hand she had used to accept my feverishly sick son’s greeting.
My son would be find with some ibuprofen and a little rest, I knew. The sun was sinking lower in the bright blue sky, and I felt a strong, slow swell of happiness come over me as our family drove home with the windows rolled down, taking in the beautiful afternoon.
Once again: her book, her words, her choice to represent herself this way. Astounding.
I am glad I read this book. Despite my quips above, it was far from a hate read. It was genuine interest that motived my reading, an assessment which should hold extra weight coming from someone outside the intended audience of this book: a 27 year-old straight man who lives in the mountains and can only handle one to two weekends in New York per year.
I would underscore as highlights her observations about the sex segregation of the UES social life, the analysis of the rigid hierarchies and social ranking of these elite women existing in a “niche of superabundance,” and the pharmacology of managing the stresses involved in this lifestyle. Her ultimate realization, brought on by the tragedy of her miscarriage detailed toward the end of the book, that beneath the ruthless exteriors of her rivals existed a nuanced compassion encourages the reader that there is humanity in the Upper East Side after all. “I have a sense,” she writes of a superficially mean woman, “born of experience, that under dire circumstance I would likely see a better, deeper part of her, and she would see the same in me.”
With that said, underneath the cute anecdotes, interspersed with the charming yet not overdone anthropological “Field Note” sections, there exists an unspoken motive. The book, and the very act of writing it, is itself a kind of elitist, status-conscious hypercompetition by the author. Through its own existence, the book attempts to protect the author from the unsavory downsides of association with its subject while she reaps the benefits. For this reason I am also glad I read this book.
In a Rish comment section, I recently exchanged thoughts with David Sasaki about how most of our behavior is about signaling. Is this book itself not serving a massive social signal for Martin?
She reaps the benefits of being a rich resident of the Upper East Side: she gets to own a handbag that cost tens of thousands of dollars, she lives in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the world, and kibitzes in the Hamptons and penthouses. Then she publishes this book, which constantly winks at the reader through shared conversations, with Martin exclaiming “Can you believe it?” to her husband after describing an absurd aspect of her house hunt, or when a salesman at a shoe store described women getting numbing injections in their feet so they could wear heels all night. “I raised my eyebrows, in disbelief, figuring the salesman was having me on. ‘For realsies,’ he said. He smiled as I surrendered my Amex, making the universal sign for ‘crazy’ with his finger next to his ear.”2
Are these winks real, though? Was she really in such disbelief, or does her behavior in adopting the culture and customs of the UES belie a different interpretation?
By the time the book was published, she moved out of the Upper East Side and she ‘retired’ her Birkin bag (due to arm numbness caused by the weight of the bag, per the diagnosis of a Parisian doctor). But, like her raising her eyebrows at the shoe salesman, I raise my eyebrows at Wednesday Martin. This book itself implies she “went native” more than she seems to know.
Hello readers and welcome to 2025. I’ve got a lot of goals in the mountains on my plate this winter and spring and I reckon I’ll have less time to dedicate to writing. Expect a little less from me this year as compared to last year. Maybe about a post a month.
As always, thanks for reading!
I realize this implies objective morality. I will bite that bullet for this observation, or at least claim that it is antisocial from the perspective of broader American culture.
Note the use of “Amex” here, which is not accidental. She doesn’t have a credit card. She has an Amex! She’s signaling that she’s rich!
"I did not know what a Birkin bag was when I opened this book. After twenty-six pages of overflowing description, I do." LOL
Also, "Amex" is totally a signal of elitism. I can't stand when people talk about what cards they have.
When I read your comment, “maybe it’s status games all the way down,” I nodded. It made me think about all the various signal games I inhabit and how they differ: academia, cycling, nonprofits, music festivals. Boulder has a different status game than Park Avenue, but they both have their rules and signals.
It makes me wonder: does the status game shape the player? Or does each player find the status game that fits best?