The book progresses from one get together to the next with the broad setting changing from New York, both small towns and city, to Florida and then France and Italy. At each gathering more people are added to the entourage. It seems Ashberry and Schuyler could have gone on ad infinitum with this group of characters continuously adding more people to the mix. The action of the story, if one can even call it that, is getting to and from large meals or gatherings for drinks. In his forward, Ashberry mentions that the reality of the characters existing largely as a leisure class might have much to do, in retrospect, with “The fact that the apartment,” the authors were sharing in New York when much of the novel was written “was a sixth-floor walk-up whose rent was $57 a month.”

   Due to the social settings and scenes, this is a novel based much on external personas where we know the characters largely through what they say and how they say it. And this is what intrigues me in Marshall’s “I hope you won’t confide,” as in, “We’re neighbors, okay, but let’s not over do it.” And Fabia’s response is equally idiosyncratic in seeming to mind his rather off-putting remark not at all. Combined, this back-and-forth represents varied elements in the relationship between these two, and it hangs in the atmospheric air of Marshall’s kitchen on a stormy night.

   The novel is peppered with young love between errant, but never fully wayward upper-middle-class Americans. With them as focal point, and as the “ninnies,” in the title suggests, the conversations are enjoyable to read, but might not be so to listen to if one were actually in a room with these people.