New York Stories

Firstly, many apologies for not updating this blog in a little while. I would use the excuse that I was in Uruguay for most of the time, but that would be disingenuous, since I had (a) laptop; (b) internet connection – albeit dialup and spotty; and (c) lots of spare time while I was down there. It's just that the drive to blog was missing.

So instead, I decided to use that spare time to catch up on some reading. The main course was The Fortress of Solitude, the hugely ambitious new novel from Jonathan Lethem; for dessert, I read The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Colson Whitehead. It's an unoriginal combination: not only are they both about New York City, but they even share a publisher. And browsers looking at the latter book on Amazon are encouraged to buy it in conjunction with the former for a combined price of just $29.57.

My advice is to save your pennies, or at least the $13.97 that Amazon wants for the Whitehead. It's a small and slender volume, with very little substance. If you want to get 90% of the benefit for free, wander into your local bookshop and simply read the first real chapter (after the introduction), called The Port Authority. It's eight short pages long, and turns acute observation into allusive, almost epigrammatic prose. Unfortunately, the book only goes downhill from there, and since there's no kind of narrative arc, there's really no reason to read on.

As the book continues, you're bound to have an emperor-has-no-clothes moment at some point. And once you've had it, there's no going back. Would-be profundities become silly at best, idiotic at worst, and reading any further loses all of its appeal. Whitehead loves switching points of view, from first person to second to third. But he also anthropomophises everything, from grains of sand to the entire island of Manhattan, with less than happy results. Take the Coney Island chapter, for instance:

Naturalized styrofoam bits recite pledges and names of presidents at the slightest provocation.
The number of house keys lost this day will fall within the daily average of lost house keys.
Their castles rise proudly from soggy plots of real estate, yet despite their enthusiasm a very small percentage of these children actually go on to careers in construction, it's very strange.
The unseen infrastructure of waves. Events a thousand miles away find their final meaning in these gentle little consequences begging at the shore.
Underneath the boardwalk is where they store failed mayoral candidates.

Never mind that you can't fall within a daily average. None of these sentences – and they're a pretty representative sample of what you'll find in the rest of the book – means anything at all. They're held together by nothing but grammar: our minds desperately scramble to find some kind of meaning in them, as though confronted by "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". But the real response is much more simple: no, styrofoam bits don't recite anything. No, it isn't strange that kids building sandcastles don't all grow up to become Donald Trump. No, underneath the boardwalk is not a store of failed mayoral candidates.

This book is Whitehead's first since he won a MacArthur genius award in 2002, and it seems that the praise might have gone to his – or his editor's – head. If he's a genius, he doesn't need to worry about whether he's making any sense, right? It's the same thing that happened to Jeanette Winterson after she got praised to the skies for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Bourgeois extravagances like plot and meaning got jettisoned, in favour of Art. Well, excuse me, but I'd rather have comprehensibility.

So there's no doubt that The Fortress of Solitude is much better suited for someone like me. While there are no shortage of digressions and passages of beautiful observational writing, there's still a plot, something to keep you turning the pages.

Once again, however, there are good reasons to stop turning at the end of the first chapter. In this case, I hasten to add, the first chapter, called Underberg, is 292 pages long, and makes for a wonderful and self-contained book in and of itself. It tells the story of a kid called Dylan Ebdus growing up in Gowanus/Boerum Hill in the 1970s, and is full to bursting with wonderful riffs on popular culture. From the games children would play on the slate sidewalks of Dean Street, through the birth of cultural phenomena from rap to graffiti to crack, Ebdus experiences it all.

Every so often, this comes across as slightly boastful. Ebdus, who is clearly modelled on Lethem himself, shows us his streed credentials at every opportunity: all of us who didn't grow up in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 70s have to concede that Lethem has one over on us. And because Lethem seems to feel that Ebdus has to personally witness just about every important cultural development of the time, the character sometimes loses versimilitude. Is it really possible that a kid whose father spends all his time holed up in the attic, whose pothead mother abandoned him at an early age, whose friends rarely turn up to school at all, whose teachers barely notice him, who displays no signs of academic ambition, whose only reading material seems to be comic books – is this kid really likely to make it into Stuyvesant High School by dint of sheer natural intelligence and/or whiteness?

It is at Stuyvesant, we assume, that Ebdus learns how to write, and once he graduates, the third-person first chapter ends and we move into the first-person second chapter. (There's also a brief intermission, where you can get up, stretch your legs, and go to the bathroom.) Ebdus moves on to a Camden College which is entirely familiar from Less Than Zero, where he becomes popular by wearing a Kangol cap "long enough before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar". He loses touch with his best friend from Brooklyn, a black kid called Mingus Rude to whom Lethem shows no mercy at all in terms of plot. No miraculous tickets out of the ghetto for Rude: instead, we see a textbook descent into drug addiction and worse.

Lethem's very good, actually, on the mechanisms which reinforce the class and race divide in America. While Rude never has a chance, Ebdus's friends from Camden almost have too many:

"How's Karen Rothenberg?" I asked, shifting to safer ground.
Euclid goggled. "She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis – rehab. Now she's got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks – you remember Dashiell?"
I lied and said I did.
"Dashiell got Karen's hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York magazine, so everything's hunky-dory."

There's a lot of such good observation where that comes from, although most of it's in the first half of the book. The second half spends too many pages tying up loose ends from the first, as well as helping to explain why we kept on running across a character called Robert Woolfolk rather more often than seemed plausible. Turns out Lethem has something in store for him: a baroque revenge fantasy involving a magic ring which gives its wearer comic-book superpowers.

In general, the first half shows and the second half tells. Confined mostly to one block in Brooklyn, the childhood portion of the book manages to raise the largest of themes (race, class, drugs) while keeping its feet on the ground. Once Ebdus moves to California in Part II, everything is viewed through a distorting veil of self-knowledge which the third-person narrration of Part I happily avoids.

Both parts, however, suffer from a surfeit of specificity. Most of the time, this book says a lot more about a very specific part of Brooklyn at a very specific point in time than it does about America or life more generally. People who aren't intimately familiar with Brooklyn's geometry are going to get hopelessly confused by the constant refrains about which streets divide which neighborhoods, while readers who don't particularly care about the evolution of popular music from the mid-70s to the early 80s will find their eyes glazing over at the endless musical references.

This novel was almost designed, you might say, to be read by an overeducated thirtysomething New York-based book reviewer – such a person has all the background knowledge and interests necessary to really appreciate it. Had it been set in Detroit instead, then I daresay the reviews would have been less numerous and less positive. The Fortress of Solitude doesn't so much transcend its setting to make larger points: rather, it relies on that setting to provide a foundation for the whole project.

Lethem's still a long way from the Great American Novel, then. But in this book's first 292 pages, he might well have written the Great Brooklyn Novel. And that is no mean feat.

Posted by Felix at 15:09 EST

Comments

The book rewards slow reading. For me it is much more poetic than any novel I have ever read.

This is a surprising leap in concept and style from Motherless Brooklyn.

"Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at PS 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing fot he fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twide and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else."

Posted by: Evan at 23:37 EST, March 19, 2004