Setting

A Thousand Clowns is set in New York City, specifically in the borough of Manhattan, the cultural and economic center of the city. Gardner and his characters know the city well and use references to its boroughs and neighborhoods as a kind of shorthand. Murray and Nick, for example, live above an abandoned Chinese restaurant in a brownstone on the lower West Side, an area that in the 1960s was home to struggling artists, writers, and other nonconformists who were attracted to its interesting nineteenth-century architecture and its low rents. Neighborhoods offered a blend of residential space and small businesses including shops and delicatessens, often combined in one building. Brownstones, deep and narrow apartment buildings made of brown sandstone, provided small and inexpensive living space.

Sandra has grown up in the Bronx, another of New York's five boroughs. Murray and Nick suspect from her accent she is from...