ANT008 - New York, New York
Following on from ANT006, where I focused on novels set in London, today's issue looks at the city that never sleeps, New York.
I must confess that I have never visited New York, but that doesn’t stop me feeling like I know it well. A mecca for many of my interests, the birth-place of some of them, it’s a city that has played a role in who I am as a person. Who many of us are, I suspect.
The Jazz capital of the world, New York embraced the bubbling genre that had formed in New Orleans and took it on as it’s own as artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie found a home there (although in many ways they succeeded in spite of the city). Miles Davis: The Autobiography is a slightly addled, rambling read that is fascinating all the same, going deep into the music but not shying away from the heroin addictions, dramas, racism and violence that surrounded it.
It makes sense that it later became the birth-place of Hip Hop, a genre that owes so much to jazz, when DJ Kool Herc began looping breaks on Sedgwick Avenue and Grandmaster Flash’s infamous block parties took the Bronx by storm. Check out Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and the film Style Wars for more on that. It has since birthed many of the genres seminal artists such as Biggie, Mob Deep, Nas, Wu-Tang, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Joey Bada$$, Master Ace, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Big Daddy Kane and Jay Z, the city’s hardship and ambition running through all of their sounds.
It was also amidst the burnt out buildings and rubble of 1970s New York (see photos) that graffiti really sprung to life, with the likes of Taki 183 and Tracy 168 tagging the city and subway system. Their names, appended with the number of the street they lived on, show a lawless city amidst which they must have felt retribution was unlikely. Fuzz One’s excellent book A Bronx Childhood tells jaw-dropping stories of an unsupervised childhood painting trains from the age of eleven, dodging the switch-blades of older writers and raiding cannabis farms in city parks. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring later took a similar energy to gallery walls while photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfont’s book Subway Art remains a bible of graffiti to this day.
A city with an intense grittiness that lends itself to striking photography, it is also the home of many greats, with the likes of Gary Winogrand playing a role in forming street photography as we know it today, Weegee sleeping clothed next to a radio to be first at crime scenes and Boogie capturing the city’s rougher edges in modern times.
Of course, it is through literature that I feel I know this city I have never stepped foot in most intimately. It goes without saying that New York has birthed and inspired an immense number of writers, from Herman Melville and Walt Whitman through J.D. Salinger, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison to Paula Fox, Patti Smith and Colson Whitehead. Depictions of New York in the white blanket of winter and fire escape stairs casting bold geometric shadows in summer sun bring to life a city where everything seems dialled up to the nines and the sense of excitement is palpable. Having no memories of my own to lean on, my experience of reading about New York are very different to the books on London I covered in ANT006 - I am entirely at the mercy of the writer’s descriptions and view in a way that can be liberating.
There are many lists covering the more infamous books of the city (this New York Times piece is a very good one), but this issue is about the titles that have stuck with me in particular. I’ll be returning to them as soon as I get the chance to visit.
“Curtains forcing their will against the wind, children sleep, exchanging dreams with seraphim. The city drags itself awake on subway straps; and I, an alarm, awake as a rumor of war, lie stretching into dawn, unasked and unheeded.”
Maya Angelou - Awaking in New York
Despite galloping around the world and encapsulating the entire latter half of 20th Century America in its 800 pages, Don Delillo’s Underworld is soaked in the writer’s place of birth, The Bronx. It begins in 1951 with Bobby Thompson hitting a home run to drive the New York Giants to league victory, going on to follow New Yorker Nick Shay in a reverse chronological account of his life and his efforts to trace the history of that exact baseball. A novel that reads like a feat of memory and a tomb of historical significance, it’s Delillo’s masterfully tuned sentences that make that history crackle like never before.
It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time’s own aesthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.
Don Delillo - Underworld
It is a quote from Underworld that sits as the epigraph of Megan Bradbury’s Everyone is Watching to set the tone for the ambition, tension and desire that runs through the New Yorkers of her debut. “Longing on a large scale is what makes history”, it reads. Following four visionaries of the city - Walt Whitman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Moses and Edmund White - in a fictional re-imaging that leans on real events, it is a portrait of the place and a study of how cities gain their character. Bradbury’s style of sharp, tiny vignettes seems uniquely formed for this distracted age, but comes together to form a complex and rich whole.
The beauty of New York is that when you turn around there is always something worse to see.
Megan Bradbury - Everyone is Watching
Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind is a novel more about the absence of New York than New York itself, but that doesn’t stop the city looming over it. When a family retreat to Long Island for a quiet holiday, they are disturbed by an old couple who claim that they own the home they are staying in and have fled the city after an unexplained and unprecedented power outage. With no TV, phone or internet, the facts are unknowable and the two parties must learn to trust each other amidst strange circumstances. Alam’s characters, and their quandaries, are intensely believable and the writing is perfectly paced to create a story that’s unnervingly tense and full of jittery conflict, fitting so much into a confined stage.
Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos. There was only a collective faith in order.
Rumaan Alam - Leave the World Behind
Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air is a book that’s hard to pin down - on the one side character driven in a ‘literary’ way but on the other full of cliche’s that Connolly seems to intentionally lean into until you can’t tell what is used with tongue in cheek and what isn’t. That makes it intensely readable, like literary fiction for those who might normally balk at the idea. It also doesn’t stop the characters sticking with you, their relationships being touching, the transformative power of art shining out. It certainly doesn’t stop New York buzzing through all that it is.
New York City. It was a prospect like no other. These people around him now would scatter across the city, into buses, taxis, cars, into the arms of people or the grip of solitude, into a city of a billion fragments that made perfect sense for some but remained shards of confusion for others, standing at angles that did not piece together and among which Finn would hope to define the shape of his brother, Jack.
Tom Connolly - Men Like Air
A poetic, audacious novel, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is as tightly poised as the infamous act it is set around - the true events of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s illegal tight-tope walk between the twin towers in 1974 (more literally documented in the film Man on Wire).
He was pureness moving. . . . He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air.
Balanced in the exact centre of the book is a description of Petit’s preparation for his unbelievable feat, seeming to hold everything together as the tale spools out from it in either direction. This un-nerving sense of careful balance runs so strikingly through the novel - in Petit’s act, in the characters lives, in the city around them, in the book’s structure - that it’s a breathtaking read. Yet Petit’s act is used as proxy for something else that connects the characters and informs how they look at what they are witnessing, their desire to see him fall, fly or step back to safety - grief. In its examination of the psyche of the city and the repercussions of dramatic events, it achieves a masterful feat of being a book about 9/11 set decades before 9/11 even happened.
She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
The many faces of New York are bought to life through McCann’s nuanced characters and the levels of society they span. Corrigan, an Irish immigrant in the Bronx, a faithful Christian who tests his resolve by looking after down-and-out prostitutes and petty criminals in Bronx housing projects. His brother Ciaran who follows him reluctantly, never able to understand how Corrigan puts up with the beatings and mistreatments he’s subject to for his troubles. Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, heroin addicted prostitutes inexplicably tied to Corrigan’s fate. The wealthy Claire and the mothers of the group she belongs to for those who have lost sons in the Vietnam war. Sam, an eighteen year old computer hacker contracted by the Pentagon. The ‘man on wire’ Philip Petite himself. They are as diverse as the city and yet none of them are out of McCann’s reach.
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.
It is a tale at times heart-breaking but undoubtedly redemptive and full of bold, engrossing, messy life. The kind of lives that could only be lived in a city such as New York. McCann’s prose consistently gleans and delivers lovely nuggets of thought wrapped up in a story that is intensely metaphorical and full of underlying meaning while also flying through an unforgettable plot.
“She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it’s yours.”
Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin
As mentioned in the intro, this NY Times long-read - The 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years - brings four writers and a bookseller together to talk about New York books. A good read for its reflection as much as recommendations.
I was looking for something that either reflected an aspect of the city that I recognized or showed me a city I didn’t recognize — but that I learned through reading was part of its DNA and maybe spoke to the origin story of the modern city.
Nilanjana Roy on The Bliss of Reading Slowly.
I promise that if you commit to a classic or a story cycle of your choice — all of Terry Pratchett, for instance, or a spring of Shirley Jackson, or a few daily lines by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish from the 30-plus books of poetry he left us — your relationship with reading itself will change, quieten and deepen.
Shalom Auslander’s piece, The Not-Sad Story About the Very Sad Thing, is a bittersweet reflection on every-day life that finds the beauty even in sadness.
Misery began to seem easy to me - lazy, dull, obvious, no matter how much the miseries patted themselves on the back for being so insightful and wise. I determined, instead, to laugh – a Vonnegutian laugh, a Beckettian laugh, a Kafkaian laugh – a laugh that doesn’t deny the abyss, it mocks it. The highest laugh, as Beckett put it, the risus puris, the laugh that laughs at that which isn’t funny.
An Annie Dillard quote on being alive.
Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this.
Nas’ Illmatic is cited by many as one of, if not the, greatest Hip Hop albums of all time. Debates like that seem a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t change the fact that it stands out as a one of a kind piece of storytelling genius. He was twenty years old when it was released, eighteen when much of it was recorded, surely younger still when some of the lyrics were penned, but he found a cutting wisdom that most never will. The kind of enigmatic creation that’s hard to believe, it’s impossible to separate from New York and the blocks of Nas’ native Queens (this Complex article is a good read on that). It’s full of unbelievable production from heavy-weights, but Pete Rock’s sample flip of Ahmad Jamal’s I Love Music for The World is Yours is sublime.
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Until next time,
MQ.