We Could Be So Good

We Could Be So Good (2023) Cat Sebastian (Midcentury NYC #1)

Set in NYC in 1958

Nick is a reporter at the New York Chronicle, I job he worked hard to get, and loves doing. So he finds himself annoyed to be working with the boss’s kid, Andy Fleming, who is now on the city desk because his dad made him.

That annoyance lasts about a week.

“Is this part of your grizzled old reporter routine?” Andy asks, narrowly avoiding a puddle only because Nick grabs him by the sleeve and hauls him out of the way. “The one where you act like an ink-stained wretch, made of nothing but newsprint and subway tokens and paper cups of coffee?”

Andy is the heir apparent to the Chronicle, but he doesn’t want to be.

Andy doesn’t know if his father simply never bothered to get to know him and therefore can’t see how bad an idea this is, or if he’s so desperate to pass his life’s work on to his only son that he’s refusing to see reason. Either way it’s a depressing thought.

Andy is a bit of a hot mess, not able to stick with anything, not sure what he wants to do with himself, and not able to feel himself competent is anything he does.

In May, Andy gets stuck in the elevator at the criminal courts building for three hours, then turns up at the Chronicle looking mildly traumatized but bearing a box of doughnuts to apologize for cutting it so close to the filing deadline. In June, he’s nearly run down by a cab on Canal Street, only stopped by Nick’s hand darting out to grab his coat. In a single week in July, Andy bangs his head into the ladder of a fire truck while he and Nick are covering a warehouse fire, gets food poisoning from a chicken salad sandwich that Nick tells him looks bad, and is almost bitten by a guard dog at the scene of a robbery in the Bronx.

To me, Andy reads as having ADHD, but that’s reading into things for a diagnosis that didn’t even exist at the time. What’s important is that he sees these things as failings, which makes him insecure and anxious, which makes things worse.

He doesn’t want to take over the paper because he doesn’t see how he can save it and he doesn’t want it to fail on his watch. But he’s a good reporter, and loves the news.

I too used to love the news, but find myself now more in Linda’s corner.

“But listen, Andy, what good is a newspaper ever going to do me? If a bomb is coming, I’d rather not know. And so much of the rest of it makes me miserable. There isn’t much I can do right now about schoolkids in Alabama or pogroms in Russia. I want to know what’s happening, but not every single day.”

Not that Nick has things easy. Being raised Italian and Catholic makes it hard to come to terms with being attracted to other men; not hating himself is something he had to work at. And he desperately fears he’ll be found out and lose his family.

But throughout everything the two of them talk, which is the best thing you can do.

Characters: Nick Russo, Andy Fleming, Emily Warburton, Jeanne Warburton, Ruth Fisher, Lilian Corcoran, Maureen, Linda Ackerman, Michael Russo, Chrissy Russo, Danielle Russo, Sal Russo, Bev Russo, Lou Epstein, Bob Diamond, Stanley Jorgensen, Dave Hollenbeck, Ed Meyer, Jimmy Walsh, Gerald Williams

Cover by Alan Dingman

Publisher: Avon

Rating: 8/10

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