This weekend marks the 11th anniversary of my daughter’s seduction by the Big Apple. What was meant to be a simple birthday trip became a life-changing event. As a Midwesterner whose personal idea of paradise is a small town in Montana, I was initially horrified. Now, after seven years of visiting the city, that first glimpse of Manhattan from the plane window brings instead a warm glow of anticipation.
New Yorkers, of course, believe that their city is the center of the universe, and the center of their city is Manhattan. It doesn’t really matter whether you agree or not, once you are there, there is only The City. Density and diversity are the hallmarks of Manhattan — there is nowhere else like it.
As a mother, I visited Manhattan; as a librarian, I started reading about it. I’ve confessed in previous columns to a preference for fiction when in search of truth. Oddly enough, some of my first choices were rather bleak.
One that particularly stands out in my memory is “Bringing Out the Dead” by Joe Connelly. This novel, which Martin Scorsese made into a movie, is the riveting story of Frank Pierce, an Emergency Medical Technician working in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. “Saving someone’s life,” Frank says, “is like falling in love, the best drug in the world.”
Not all calls are saves though, and as Frank careens through the teeming nighttime streets, the ghosts of past failures haunt him. A veteran paramedic himself, Connelly tells an authentic streetwise story of burn-out and personal desperation, one I would recommend to anyone other than a mother whose child is moving to New York.
Nowadays, the city is more likely to inspire me to read Edith Wharton. The New York society she portrayed in “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth” is gone. Money has trumped breeding. But the suffocating effect of a world governed by convention and appearance is not gone. “Sex and the City” by Candace Bushnell and “The Nanny Diaries” by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus tell essentially the same story, though with less humanity and skill than Wharton.
What I like best, though, as a visiting mother rather than a tourist, are the books that capture the unique and incredible energy of the city. I’ve never been to the Empire State Building or even to a Broadway show, but I’ve walked miles of city streets, and that is the Manhattan I’ve come to love.
Two recent novels spell The City for me. Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City” is a departure for him — most of his novels are set in Brooklyn. His prose is universally described as electrifying, stunning and exuberant.
Unfortunately, many people find him “over the top.” For those of us who enjoy that kind of trip, “Chronic City” is a knockout.
The setting is Manhattan; a dense relentless fog covers the financial district, an escaped tiger keeps snarling subway traffic, a doomed space station floats above, the New York Times offers a war-free edition and Lethem’s Everyman, Chase Insteadman, smokes pot and ponders reality and illusion with his friend, cultural critic and former Rolling Stone columnist Perkus Tooth. Migraines, hiccups, chasms and ghostwriters figure prominently, along with a pervasive smell of chocolate.
If you’re not quite ready to roll right over the top, you might prefer “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann. Winner of the 2009 National Book Award, this novel tells the converging stories of 10 characters inextricably linked by the amazing appearance on August 7, 1974, of a “wirewalker” on a cable strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center.
Philippe Petit did indeed walk a tightrope between the towers, but this novel is primarily about what McCann calls the “anonymous corners of human experience.” Irish monks, underpass prostitutes, Park Avenue mothers, crack-addicted artists, mothers in the South Bronx, mothers everywhere — the role of the author is to make these corners “right.”
McCann says his inspiration came not just from the walk, but also from a photograph of it: “A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one … The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.”
I’m always happy to leave New York, to take a deep breath and not smell food; to experience darkness and silence. But then, in the morning, I look out my window at empty sidewalks, and I feel a bit sad.
Photo by Marcin Wichary (from Creative Commons)
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