When you read a book that is as much about a place as it is about those who inhabit that place at a particular time, you want the place to be as much of a character as any of the humans who live in it. In TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980, Molly Prentiss makes a credible leap at describing 1980s New York City (I first moved to Manhattan myself in 1984 and managed to breathe the dregs of this time in my own way). She tries her best to convey its crummy but delectable dirtiness and rundowness in the days before Disney brought its bulldozer to town and took down all the raunch from midtown. This started a trend that has lasted through today, a gentrification that has altered the world from this novel in ways that most of us still mourn on a daily basis.

TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 tries to find the right words to describe the downtown art scene, the lives of the struggling artists, and those who lived off them and around them in these years before everyone had to move to the other boroughs to find a decent place to live.

"TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 is a stirring novel about people caught up in a world they thought they wanted to live in, but finding something far more meaningful and artful instead."

We follow the lives of three SoHo denizens: James Bennett, an art critic for the New York Times, whose exultant synesthesia (where your senses bring you color and taste sensations when you look at certain things) makes him a glutton for the new art being created downtown, to the detriment of his marriage to his Columbia sweetheart; Raul Engales, an Argentinian painter who is running from the political and personal past he left behind on his home shores and suffers a tragic loss in America that makes his American dream harder than ever imagined; and Lucy Olliason, a nice girl from the Midwest who takes the chance to come live in New York to find her great purpose in the larger world.

When these men suffer great mishaps that change their relationship to art and their lives in horrific ways, Lucy brings them together. A young orphan boy from Buenos Aires is loose in New York, and the search to find him brings a balm to each of the characters in some very stirring ways.

Prentiss knows her characters much better than she knows the city. Mentions of famous artists from the ’80s and Paradise Garage don’t do much to conjure up the world of Keith Haring, Madonna, and the summit of the mountain that was the original rap movement (for a better look at that, see HBO’s “Vinyl”), but she does infuse her version of New York City from that time with personalities whose very broad problems capture our imaginations in all their Day-Glo horror. 

A number of nameless Patrick Bateman-types later, Prentiss is able to help us see the key struggles in the working and casual lives of each of the main characters. I found James Bennett, with his lively way of looking at the world and the very personal loss he suffers, to be the most engaging. It is through his courtship with his wife, Maggie, that the heart and soul of the story is brought to life. Raul’s struggle is a political one, and the personal eventually becomes the political later on in the book, though it felt like a story ripped from another author’s satellite path. When he makes the leap into Lucy’s world, however, the whole book comes alive as the three characters face reality together and alone, the missing boy the conduit to the major climax.

If you were part of the early ’80s art scene, you will recognize elements here --- most specifically the joy of collecting fantastic works of art at basement prices and catching the collector flu, desiring more and more beautiful pieces as they become overflowingly available downtown.

It is to Prentiss’ benefit that she did not bother to try to include any of the real artists of the time in the story, except as markers, as her characters are bold and bright enough to stand alone and absorb all our attentions. TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 is a stirring novel about people caught up in a world they thought they wanted to live in, but finding something far more meaningful and artful instead.