In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.
Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.
By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.
“Cally Fiedorek’s Atta Boy is a Bonfire of the Vanities for the twenty-first century—a propulsive, unforgettable journey through a deeply stratified New York. From brawling barrooms to the glittering co-ops of Park Avenue, this is a fearless chronicle of the way we live and where we are headed. Fiedorek is an urgent writer for these times, with an unstinting eye for the class divisions that define who we are. I couldn’t put Atta Boy down.”—Ross Barkan, author, The Night Burns Bright
“In a lukewarm literary landscape, Cally Fiedorek’s Atta Boy blazes like a burning copy of the New York Post chucked from an open window of the 1 train. Fiedorek is a writer to watch—and watch out for.”—Andrew Ridker, author, Hope
“Atta Boy is a New York novel like I’ve never read before. Lively, madcap, and frequently hilarious, but not without sensitivity and insight too. Via its cast of all-too-human characters, Cally Fiedorek whisks us from dim barrooms to gleaming penthouses to examine the complexities and compromises of being alive today.”—Rachel Khong, author, Real Americans
“An insightful portrait of clashing socioeconomic worlds.”—Nathalie Atkinson, author, Zed Book Club
