‘Let’s Not Do That Again,’ a Crackling Satire Set Against a Senate Run

Nick finds such generational salvos “invigorating,” however his actual ardour venture is lyrics for a musical about Didion’s transfer from California to the East Coast, tentatively titled “Hi there to All That!” (Not as far-fetched as it could appear: Information that Vanessa Redgrave could be showing in a Broadway model of “The 12 months of Magical Pondering,” in 2007, prompted a former colleague of mine to draft a number of potential numbers, together with one about Didion’s concern of the L.A. freeway that started “Beep beep! Toot toot!”)

Nick’s little sister, Greta, is inflicting extra hassle: A Yalie who as soon as aspired to a legislation profession, she’s been working at an Apple Retailer in Brooklyn and has fallen for a good-looking YouTube nationalist named Xavier, who has a creepy cupboard of endearments for her: “my little flea,” “my little shrimp,” “my little duck,” “my little American cabbage,” and so on. He’s lured her to Paris and incited her to throw a champagne bottle via the window of the luxurious restaurant Fouquet’s throughout an illustration on the Champs-Élysées, an act of luxurious radicalism that threatens to derail Nancy’s marketing campaign.

This can be a caper populated by city elites. I can’t consider anybody lately who has lampooned that cohort between covers so freshly and effectively as Ginder. Greta and Xavier meet, for instance, constructing a simulacrum of a Blockbuster retailer on a online game within the sandbox style, Nostalgeum. She and Nick pay 52 {dollars} for a boutique health class of “trampin’, liftin’, whippin’” at a studio in Chelsea the place the teacher is happy to be given a bloody nostril and a black eye. A restaurant promoting noodles by the pound is known as Me, Myself and Thai, with anthropomorphic, cannibalistic noodles painted on its partitions; the scholars lining up there, faces buried in telephones and “backpacks dangling from single, drooped shoulders,” are considerably noodle-like themselves. There’s an accusatory grandmother, Eugenia, with an Higher East Aspect townhouse, an open checkbook for Greta’s schemes, and a penchant for Earl Gray and Degas. And when a useless physique must be wrapped up and disposed of in a Central Park West co-op constructing’s state-of-the-art compacting system, one character thinks parenthetically concerning the high-end sheets used for the duty: “Frette — it’s an actual disgrace.”

In a world more and more starved for good dialogue, Ginder’s is bountiful and crackling, just like the screwball comedies of yore. And generally even honest. “It’s acquired to be disappointing, being referred to as all these issues,” Nancy’s marketing campaign supervisor muses when their opponent, the one supported by the funding banker, calls Nancy a “communist” and a “hypocrite.”