Is NYC your cup of tea?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays

When I read in the publisher's blurb that Colson Whitehead had "won critical acclaim for his literary novels" I counted it a big negative. The more "literary" a novel is, the less substance it typically has. However, this was a book of essays, and it was quite short, even in the Large Print edition.

Whitehead's The Colossus of New York: a City in Thirteen Parts does consist of essays, but they're my first exposure to "essays" in stream-of-consciousness mode. Took a little getting used to. Another word I don't like to see in a blurb is "evocative." In this case, however, the essays do evoke the New York City experience, quite well.

It isn't quite true that every sentence has a different person's viewpoint, but it is close. I suppose it is one way to get across that there are eight million New Yorkers, and as the author says, each has a personal NYC inside. This seems to be the theme of the book. Your NYC is not my NYC, even if "you" and "I" live on the same block, or next door.

A history teacher I once had said most of us live a "dumbbell life": there is a cluster of places near our home, a cluster of places near our job, and the road between them. We seldom get outside that dumbbell. Most of the time that is our world. Author Whitehead's NYC is bigger than that, because he expresses quite a tendency to get around the city. Perhaps a better simile for his inner map of NYC is a still shot of one of Calder's mobiles: a cluster of amorphous shapes with paths between.

I've visited Queens a lot, because of church connections. I've been to Manhattan twice, and I don't care for it, any of it. I am not an anthill kind of guy. I left Los Angeles (and I lived inside LA city limits for about a year) because it is an anthill. I like small cities and towns better. The nearest city to where I live now has 70,000 residents, and I hate to go downtown.

Thanks to Colson Whitehead, I get a taste of New York experience without having to go there.