Reading Frenzy, and Thoughts: Why New Yorkers Love and Hate to Read About New York
I’m in a reading frenzy recently: two thick novels in the last ten days. I inhaled ‘Then We Came to the End,’ by Joshua Ferris, and then moved immediately into ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ by Claire Messud. Purely by coincidence, each novel features an unstable character whose catalytic effects on the plot are driven by an unhealthy relationship between that character and the thoughts and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I’ve never read Ralph Waldo Emerson, though someone recently told me that he believes I might be part Transcendentalist…so maybe I should.
‘Then We Came to the End’ is set in Chicago, while ‘The Emperor’s Children’ is set in New York. I enjoyed Ferris’s novel deeply, but became a little bit obsessed with Messud’s, probably because I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. The story concerns three friends in New York City, all Brown graduates, all 30 years old, all working in the culture industry (a documentary TV producer, a freelance writer and critic, and a celebrity journalist’s daughter/former Vogue intern who can’t finish writing the nonfiction book she got a contract for in her early 20s). There’s something old-fashioned, Jamesian, about the novel: it has a detached omniscient narrator, elevated diction, long sentences, and an action-packed plot about ambition, professional reputation, the rising and falling fortunes of individuals in a rarefied, fairly self-important little world — New York writing and publishing, at least as it’s portrayed here.
After finishing the book, I became obsessed in turn with the reviews of it that people had posted on Goodreads. There was a lot of negativity in the reviews, especially, it seemed to me, from people around the three central characters’ age who felt that Messud had tried but failed to capture something about their own lives.
I felt some of the same indignation as I was reading, though much of the time I was able to suspend my disbelief and just enjoy the funhouse-mirror feeling of being immersed in a world that is and isn’t mine, a New York that is and isn’t true to my own experience — possibly because it just isn’t the New York that I know, and possibly because the world of the novel is stretched, changed, abstracted from reality — because that New York is a fictional creation merely inspired by the original. ‘Based on a true city,’ the movie posters would read.
Reading the book, and then the Goodreads commentary, made me think a little bit about writings about New York. Many of the Goodreads reviewers who’d read ‘The Emperor’s Children’ seemed to share a similar orientation towards the book: annoyed, yet mesmerized. Picking at it like a scab. It made me wonder: with eight million people living in New York, most of them proud and ambitious, is writing about New York City, even with all that it’s been done before, just de facto good business? Because there are eight million people with that hunger to read about themselves, see themselves and their city mirrored back to them. Even getting it ‘wrong’ can be good business, as the Goodreads reviews seem to indicate: readers complain about the book but they’ve read it and fretted about it, like an unflattering photograph of yourself that you can’t stop peering at if only to comfirm that you don’t, can’t possibly, really look like that.
When I first moved to New York, one thing that struck me was how much time everyone, and quickly I, spent thinking and talking about New York itself. I’d always been place-aware, but this seemed to go beyond anything I’d experienced. Everyone I encountered seemed to have a relationship with the city, or their idea of the city, that was as intimate and drama-laden as any of the handful of most important human relationships that define a life. The need to read about the city and, for people creatively inclined, to write about the city, follows naturally from the way that people who live here relate to this place. New York City demands art. Just like any other powerful and multivalent experience.
What I want to know is, is New York different in this (becoming a major player in its citizens’ lives, etc.) than other big metropoles? Are people in London and Tokyo always dwelling on London-ness and Tokyo-ness, striving to represent it and needing to see it represented?
I don’t know how I’d find out, but I would like to know.
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