KINGS COUNTY
By David Goodwillie

Can a person with a tattoo have a soul? To judge from a broad swath of contemporary fiction, the answer would seem to be no — at least if the tattooed person in question is young, lives in a place like Los Angeles or Austin or Brooklyn and works in the arts. In that case, the character is clearly a member of the species “hipster,” almost always written about ironically, portrayed as too vain and ridiculous to be taken seriously.

It’s refreshing, then, that David Goodwillie’s very good new novel, “Kings County,” depicts such people with genuine, unmitigated sympathy and good-fellowship, as if, in spite of their fashionable lifestyles, they are as fully human as anyone else.

His characters either live or lived in the Kings County of the book’s title, a place commonly known as Brooklyn. Specifically, they live (or lived) in Williamsburg, in the early 2000s and up through the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011. But remarkably enough they are more concerned about being kind to one another than following the latest culinary or sartorial trends. (They’re mostly too broke for artisanal anything.) And like the characters at the center of Goodwillie’s smart debut novel, “American Subversive” — about a disillusioned Manhattan writer who gets wrapped up with a group of radical environmentalists — the youngish people who populate “Kings County” are thoughtful and appealing.

At the center of the new book is Audrey, a 32-year-old “artist liaison” for an indie record company. Audrey arrived in New York via bus from a Florida trailer park. In her early 20s at the time, she came ostensibly to find work as an actress but really to see the world. Once in Williamsburg, armed with the first of many waitressing gigs, she turned out to be less committed to acting than she was to drinking, smoking, hanging out with her best friend, a fellow waitress named Sarah, and sleeping around. But Audrey had good taste in music, and she became well known and well liked enough around the Brooklyn music scene to land the job — the “rock and roll prom queen of the North Side,” one character calls her.

Her crowd is made up largely of people like her. As a blue-blooded banker named Chris puts it: “What was often said of the indie crowd — they had hidden trust funds; they were faux-contrarians — could not be said of Audrey and Sarah’s circle, most of whom balanced multiple jobs and artistic pursuits with a deft sleight of hand. (And anyway, so what if someone came from money but wore white bucks or striped jumpsuits or bangs down past her eyes? Why did limo liberals get such a bad rap when the alternative was the tedious redundancy of limo conservatism?)”

By the time we meet her, Audrey has sowed her wild oats. She lives with her boyfriend, Theo, a book editor who was laid off from his publishing job in the wake of the Great Recession. Like Audrey, Theo does not come from the moneyed classes. He fled a depressed industrial town in Massachusetts where his father and brother worked for a long time at the last remaining vestige of industry, an AT&T/Lucent plant, until it too shut down. In high school and then college — which Theo attended on a football scholarship — he fell hard for literature. But his tastes were not sufficiently commercial for the world of publishing; hence his failure to thrive and ultimate layoff.

It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered a character like Theo in contemporary fiction. His bookishness and uncompromising, unabashedly serious taste make life harder on a practical level, but these qualities are also treated as something to be respected, even admired, rather than mocked as snobby or elitist. In his sincerity, Theo is a character more in the mold of Thomas Wolfe than Tom Wolfe. This is part of what attracts Audrey. But it’s not just her. Everyone agrees: On first meeting,, Theo may seem“quiet, oafish, socially inept,” but he is a good guy, a person of “substance and deliberation,” as Chris puts it.

Theo and Audrey live in Bushwick — “the Edison labs of emerging style” — in a loft building where the stairs have been made impassable by “a large, heavily stained couch wedged between the second- and third-floor landings.” But they’re in love and they’re happy, mostly. Theo’s new job, as a literary scout for a film company, makes him anxious. He has yet to find even one novel fit for adaptation; he worries about being fired and what that will do to the couple’s already precarious finances, as well as to his self-esteem.

This is the state of things when Audrey learns that an old friend, a strange but charismatic drug dealer named Fender, may have killed himself. Theo doesn’t know that Audrey and Fender and a few others share a secret, from the time before she met Theo. The revelation of this hidden chapter of Audrey’s past — and its present-day consequences, as Audrey comes to suspect that Fender didn’t commit suicide — becomes the engine of the novel’s plot. It makes for a suspenseful read. After the first chapter or two, the pages of “Kings County” begin to turn quickly.

But suspense plots have certain requirements, some of which conflict with or simply crowd out the quieter imperatives of character-driven fiction. In a mystery novel, for example, the characters’ relationships generally evolve in tandem with the plot, becoming strained as the mystery ratchets up in intensity and then resolving on cue. “Kings County” hews pretty closely to this formula, wrapping everything up a little too neatly.

On the other hand, Goodwillie’s characters are so likable — so sincere in their affections and so decent in their moral decision-making, in spite of their decadent lifestyles — that it’s hard to begrudge them their pat resolutions. Even Chris, the banker — that is, a type of person less likely to be granted full humanity than a hipster — turns out to be somewhat appealing. “Exasperatingly superficial and surprisingly genuine,” as Audrey describes him. When he watches the Occupy Wall Street protests from his office window, he thinks endearingly — without ire — that no one likes to be reminded of his own worst qualities. But Chris also proves to be a good friend, even when it means taking real risks.

Goodwillie is also a stylish writer, smart and witty without being a show-off. He’s great at minor moments, like this one: As Audrey “tied her hair up in a knot, her principal tattoo, a western scene rendered in black ink, became visible on her left shoulder blade.” I love the phrase “principal tattoo” as well as what it conveys about Audrey.

The tattoo is an image of two cowboys riding into the distance. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in size, covering the entire top half of Audrey’s left arm. “Commitment-wise, it was hard to criticize a half sleeve,” Goodwillie observes. The same might be said of Audrey and Theo generally. It’s not their originality or their coolness that makes them appealing — it’s something else, a willingness to go all-in that transcends where they live or how they dress.