Scott Johnston’s recently published second novel, The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, is one of the funniest and most compelling conservative fiction books to have come out in the last few years. The book is a tale of what can go wrong when an old New York WASP family comes up against the forces of cultural Marxism—specifically the woke trend for all things trans.
William Sanderson is a third-generation Yale graduate, a native of the Upper East Side, and a member of all the right clubs. He’s got a house in the Hamptons. His career in finance has taken off at his firm, Bedrock Capital. But the company is very keen on ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing. Its head only votes Democrat and has made the firm very liberal on all the racial and sexual matters du jour.
William has just joined the board of his daughters’ school after pledging half a million dollars in donations. The problem is, “Despite being possessed of, he fancied, an open mind, William sometimes had trouble keeping up with what he was supposed to believe.” William is married to Ellie Sanderson, who does not come from his background. A mixed-race military brat, she was raised at bases around the country and went to Louisiana Tech. She’s new to New York and is tenuously navigating the intricate web of status markers and institutions—namely, clubs—that the other stay-at-home moms at her daughters’ private school are involved with. Ellie’s traditional, but by no means reactionary, sense of justice often has her bristling at the new woke rules.
Ginny and Zoey are the Sandersons’ daughters. While Zoey is a shy and introspective sophomore, Ginny is busy applying for college as a senior at the Lenox Hill School for Girls and seems destined to be a fourth-generation Sanderson at Yale. But these days Yale is not so interested in legacies. It isn’t even interested in old-line private schools like Lenox Hill, which have sent students to Yale since the university started accepting women.
At the head of Lenox Hill is Padma Minali. Recruited from Seattle, she is a radical on issues of race and gender and intends to remake the school. She keeps her radicalism secret because the school’s board moves in baby steps. She announces, in the first board meeting that William attends, that the school is thrilled to have, as a transfer student, a girl named Clover Hunt (until recently called Amy), who identifies as “goblincore” and “ecosexual.” Clover will be excused from wearing the school uniform—tartan skirts—so that she can dress in “goblincore” earth tones. As other board members cheer, William’s silent thought is: “What the actual fuck?”
Padma keeps to herself the even more exciting transfer student she is working on recruiting. That ends up being Easter Riddle, formerly known as Richard. Easter, who is deeply ambivalent about his new identity, becomes the centerpiece of the story, as various Sandersons say innocent but politically incorrect things about the trans community.
The most intriguing misstep is based on a real occurrence in the precious world of New York private girls’ schools. In the novel, Zoey, Ginny, and Clover sit around making up lists of costumes that would be problematic to wear on Halloween. A friend on the other end of the conversation thinks the prospective costumes are funny and posts them to social media. The list, which contains references to the transgender community, goes viral. This is perceived as such a slight to Easter that Zoey and Ginny—but not Clover because she is in a protected category herself—are suspended from the school, and an assembly is called to discuss the matter.
Easter’s parents show up with the sleazy lawyer they have engaged—or rather who they have been engaged by—based on the real-life feminist-ambulance chaser Gloria Allred. She runs a very aggressive shakedown campaign against both the school and William Sanderson’s firm after Sanderson calls a transgender person who throws blood on him outside of his Park Avenue building a “freak.” That word hits the tabloids and goes viral on social media, too. It’s enough to get him fired.
In this all-too-true-to-life satire, it is remarkable how adeptly the author portrays different constituencies, none of whom wishes to do Easter or anyone else any harm, but who are not as careful with their words as they need to be in this newly unfree social milieu. Easter, meanwhile, panics when asked to speak about the situation and runs out of the school. He disappears for a few days.
At one point after the girls are suspended, a certain Bob, who was kicked off Lenox Hill’s board for questioning how the locker room will work with a trans student, and whose daughter was therefore “counseled out” of the school, runs into Ellie at a Starbucks. Bob’s family has moved to New Jersey and put their daughter into a traditional Catholic school.
Ellie, at that moment, does not know that her husband has been fired or kicked off the board at Lenox Hill. She thinks everything will be okay as soon as Easter is found. Bob tells Ellie that our society is going through mass psychosis:
Evil doesn’t just happen. It is allowed to happen, often by the seemingly well-intentioned people who might otherwise be in a position to stop it. There are only, ever, three different groups at play: the true believers, the cowards, and the sleepwalkers.
The true believers are revolutionaries wholly committed to the cause. “They’re especially effective at exerting control over institutions, something that gives them maximum cultural leverage,” he explains. The sleepwalkers are those too caught up in their daily lives to question the radical takeover. The cowards are people with money and power, who see what is going on but are profiting from the status quo and therefore do not object. It dawns on Ellie that Bob is suggesting that American society is in the middle of a revolution.
In the end, Ellie ends up a hero. Her daughters are not pushed out of Lenox Hill. Instead, she pulls them out to be homeschooled. This well-written, fast-paced book may be the best account in fiction of the radical race and gender revolution we’ve lived through since the pandemic.
