Can art be a salve? In these days of collective mourning, I find myself reaching for the literature of New York. The poetry and stories and novels of a city that offers, above all else, possibility.
Read Walt Whitman’s “Mannahatta” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice,” a short wallop of a story about an immigrant Jewish girl’s role in her school’s Christmas play.
I pulled from the shelf Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything,” a rollicking novel of 1950’s career girls in New York. Tenderly, I opened my dog-eared copy of “Netherland,” Joseph O’Neill’s layered tale of friendship and cricket in New York. Even though it strained credulity, I’ve been thinking about Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close.” I had to skip chunks of the overwrought “Let the Great World Spin,” but certain characters and locations in Colum McCann’s sprawler will live with me forever. I grieve for the New York lovers haunted by the Holocaust in I.B. Singer’s “Enemies, a Love Story.”
When I hold Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” in my hands I am transported back to the Fifth Avenue mansions that housed my school and where I, fittingly, lost myself in Lily Bart’s inexorable decline. If you’ve never read Edmund Wilson’s “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” do: you’ll discover New York in the 1930s, and the reason this novella was banned for obscenity.
New York is the sole possibility in Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.” In Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park,” New York is the redeemer. Eerily, E.B.White’s “This is New York” (1948) predicts the ease with which this urban wonderland could be destroyed.
Reading New York is reading life: John Cheever’s stories still shock, Richard Price’s thick novels could, and should, go on and on. Forever I can be wooed by the New York poetry of Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes and Frank O’Hara: “…oh god it’s wonderful/to get out of bed/and drink too much coffee/and smoke too many cigarettes/and love you so much.”
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