1,001 Novels: A Library of America, NYC: the outer boroughs

1,001 Novels: A Library of America, NYC: 

the outer boroughs

    There is no denying the primacy of New York City in American Literature.  The constituent parts of the New York chapter have more titles than most of the other individual states.  

Published 5/9/24

Daughter (2003)

by Asha Bandele

New York: 62/105

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 1/28

    Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island is the last sub-chapter of the 105 books from New York- that's over 10% of the entire list for a single state, and something close to 70 percent of the books from New York state are from New York City.  I checked out the Audiobook from the library- when I say it was absolutely excruciating to listen to, that's neither a criticism nor a compliment, just a reflection of the heartbreaking AND extremely over-wrought narrative, about a mother who loses her college age daughter to a mistakenly fired police bullet.  

    The Publisher's Weekly review that is quoted on Daughter's Amazon product page calls it "maudlin" which was a thought I frequently had listening to this book.  I'm not exactly a stranger to the difficulties faced by African American people at the hands of the police, and I've had plenty of experience counseling people who have been through the kind of tragedies that this book covers.  Still, the actual details of this plot defy believe- both the daughter of the title and her father are shot mistakenly by the NYPD thirty years apart. 

  Also, the decisions made by the characters in this book are simply excruciating to hear.  Like every chapter is filled with either the Mother or the Daughter making a terrible decision and paying a terrible price for that poor decision.  I can't remember another book like it where the decision making by the characters was so cringe inducing.  It was definitely a function of my life in the criminal justice system- I just can't stand to read fiction/watch tv/movies about people making bad decisions. 

    

   Generally speaking Daughter is an extreme example of common narrative:  A family has a child who they treat in an over-protective fashion, seeking to shield them from their own mistakes or to overcome their underprivileged background.  This then causes the child to make the exact same mistakes the parents are trying to prevent, providing the ironic tension in the narrative.

   Here, Miriam, the mother of the dead daughter, is raced by a religious couple who welcome her as their late arriving, miracle baby.  She feels suffocated in this environment and, at 17, falls for the school janitor, a young guy just back from Vietnam.  When her parents catch her making out with her boyfriend on the street, they forbid her from seeing him, and she responds by moving in with her boyfriend and his grandmother.

   Of course, she gets pregnant immediately.  Of course, they don't get married.  Of course, it doesn't work out, which, you know, everyone can see except for the character herself.  Bandele makes a point that is similar to other African American authors, which is that African American families struggling to better themselves often restrict their emotions to survive, which can then have negative consequences for their children. 

Pioneering African American author and scholar Toni Cade Bombara

 Published 5/14/24

Gorilla, My Love (1972)

by Toni Cade Bombara

Bedford-Stuyvesant,  New York

New York: 64/105

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 2/28

   I had to Google Bedford-Stuyvesant to learn its proper Borough(Brooklyn). Bombara was a pioneer in the 1960's "Black Arts Movement" and Gorilla, My Love is her pioneering work of short-stories about working-class African American men, women and children living in Brooklyn.   The stories of Gorilla, My Love are interesting from a literary perspective because almost all of the narration is done in first person and some of the stories are done stream-of-consciousness style.  Bombara utilizes the dialect of the place and time and doesn't clean up grammar to some "standard" English criteria.  

  Unfortunately, combining first person narration with sixteen different narrators requires an intellectual investment beyond what you would expect from a shortish book stories (192 pages).  It's ok though, because Gorilla, My Love is a canon level title on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, worth reading solely on its literary merit and trailblazer status.  You could make an argument that Gorilla, My Love belongs on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, perhaps subbing for a Toni Morrison novel (there are several on the 1,001 Books list).   If I saw a copy in a used book store I would probably buy it so I could read the stories again. 

Published 5/20/24

Sunset Park (2010)

by Paul Auster

Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 3/28

New York: 68/105

  I don't like Paul Auster, something I was reminded of while reading his obituary the other day.  I'm sure it has something to do with his status as an apostle of Brooklyn hipster culture, which I don't love.  To me, he just feels so middlebrow, like the literary fiction equivalent of a beach read novel by Elin Hilderbrand.  I don't hate the author or his books, I just don't find much to like.  In any of them. Ever. It's like his fans are people who read American literary fiction in English but have never read a book translated from French or German that was written in the past fifty years.  Because if they had they would know there are writers- like Patrick Modriano- who basically do the same thing and have won the Nobel Prize and shit. Nobody read Patrick Modriano in English. 

  Sunset Park has no whimsical details or existentialist detectives.  Rather it is an ensemble piece about four proto-hipsters who inhabit a squat in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn.   The main dude is Miles Teller, son of a wealthy Publisher who abandons college after overhearing his Dad and Step Mom say something mean about him (not kidding).  When the book picks up he's working a wagie job in Florida when he meets his 17 year old girlfriend, a Cuban-American who is the underage manic pixie girl of Miles' dreams.  Auster is light on the sex stuff, that is, after he establishes that Pilar, his nymphet, will only let him fuck her in the ass to avoid pregnancy.  Thanks, Paul Auster, for that detail.

   Amazingly he's not the only character with underage sex issues- another of his housemates, a girl, is still recovering from the time she fucked a 15 year old who she was supposed to be Nannying- of course she got pregnant, had an abortion and thinks about it all the time.  It's a Paul Auster novel!  I listened to the Audiobook, read by the author, and at the end I was like, "That's the last Paul Auster novel for me ever!"

Published 5/21/24

Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)

by Edwidge Dannicat

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 4/28

New York: 69/105

   Breath, Eyes, Memory is another candidate for continued/increased canonical inclusion. Dannicat tells this powerful story of intergenerational trauma through the eyes of a young Haitian immigrant to Brooklyn. Dannicat covers an incredible swath of emotional territory in the course of telling the life of Sophie.  Sexual violence and the tradition of mothers testing their Haitian daughters for their purity by forcing their fingers into the private parts of their daughters is central to Breath, Eyes, Memory and if I'd thought it through a little I would not have listened to the Audiobook, which was rough.  So rough.  I won't soon forget Breath, Eyes, Memory. 

Published 5/22/24

Sparrow (2017)

by Sarah Moon

Pacific Street and Fourth Ave., Boerum Hill, Brooklyn NY.

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 5/28

New York: 70/105

     I briefly considered checking out the Audiobook of Sparrow, a 2017 YA Novel about an African-American girl with some kind of social anxiety disorder, but I was like, "I'd better read this one!"  Good choice, as it turned out.  I was reading this book while thinking about a recent New York Times article that highlighted recent studies that have questioned the positive impact of large-scale (i.e. school/government) intervention on the mental health of children. The article, Are School Too Focused on Mental Health? brings into play several evidence based observations that run along the lines of, "Maybe talking incessantly about have basically every child has mental health issues isn't the best way to diminish the negative effect of those issues/lessen the prevalence of those issues. "

  You needn't be a child to understand the path taken by schools/government- older Americans will remember the clumsy, government sanctioned school programs, of "DARE" and the "Just Say No" campaign, risible campaigns that only made drugs seem cool and familiar.  I don't have children, but I do have a great deal of professional and familial understanding of mental health issues, and I thought Sparrow was a pretty good example of all that is ridiculous in the treatment of mental health issues in progressive society- here represented by the upscale neighborhood of contemporary Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

  The whole plot is built around the fact that Sparrow, a 14 year old girl with no articulated trauma in her life beyond a busy, professional single mother (she works in IT for a finance company), is so painfully shy that she disassociates by pretending she is a bird flying away.  It's the second book in a row to use dissociating by adolescent African-American girls as a plot device.  In the Edwidge Dannicat book I just read, Breath, Eyes, Memory , the character disassociated because her mother was performing virginity checks on a weekly basis by inserting her fingers into the narrator's private parts.  Here, Sparrow is shy.   Impossible not to compare the two main characters.  Next to the Sophie of the Dannicat novel, Sparrow looks ridiculous.  

   It's also another work of contemporary American fiction dealing with mental health issues where no one exercises during the entire book.   Instead, Sparrow finds her release by going to a "Girls Who Rock" camp and learning to play bass.  That's cool, but again, I felt like some of the mental health issues in this book could have been handled by having someone run around a track a couple times a week.   If you go back and you look at the actual history of psychiatry- there was not a lot of exercise going on there.   The people who developed psychiatric care looked down on "physical culture" and they never really got over it. 

  

Published 5/27/24

Visitation Street (2013)

by Ivy Pochoda

Broad Street Pier/141 Beard St/Red Hook/Brooklyn New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 6/28

New York: 70/105

   Part of the reason the New York section of this 1,001 Novels list is dragging has to do with the nature of New York itself, specifically, New York City, which has its pro's and cons like any place, but the cons seemingly outweigh the pros for most of the working class/underclass population. Everyone struggles to survive in the concrete jungle, and the literature reflects that experience.  I think also the fact that I am just reading through one chapter after the next lessens the impact of each individual title. I'm considering starting two chapters at once after I finish New York/New Jersey to keep proceedings fresh.

   Which is all a preamble to say that Visitation Street was another miss for me, an ensemble cast novel about a group of neighbors in the still ungentrified neighborhood of Red Hook circa...the late 2000's I'm guessing from the publication date.  The New York Times reviewer called this book "powerfully beautiful" but also only gave it a capsule review in a a piece about books with "Watery Graves."  That does accurately describe the plot, about a white girl who goes missing in racially mixed Red Hook after she and her dumb friend take a kids raft out into the Harbor. 

  I picked up the Audiobook, which turned out to be a mistake, since I thought almost all the characters and subplots were dumb.  I'd never heard of author Ivy Pachoda before I read Visitation Street- I see that she grew up in Brooklyn, went to Harvard and was a Professional Squash Player(!) in her youth.  I do appreciate every ensemble cast/portrait-of-a-neighborhood type novel in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project since they give a break from the parade of YA fiction and POV bildungsroman's that otherwise dominate this project.

Published 5/31/24

Sag Harbor (2009)

by Colson Whitehead

Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 6/28

New York:  73/105

   Sag Harbor is the eastern most title in the New York/New Jersey chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  If any author was a candidate to get more than one book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, surely Colson Whitehead is at the top of the list.  Just for New York City you could plausibly use The Intuitionist- also his first novel, which is about elevator operators in an alternate New York City.  John Henry Days probably wouldn't be anyone's first pick but it is set in West Virginia, which I'm guessing is under represented as a literary locale. Zone One is IMO, a killer zombie book set in a very specific part of Manhattan and uses the geography of Manhattan throughout.  The Underground Railroad is a good pick for Charleston, South Carolina, Nickle Boys is set at a specific, historically based school in Florida and both Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto take place in the same area of Harlem.

  The fact that I've made it 20% through the project without an author being repeated makes me think that is the rule for this project.  Quite the opposite of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list, which had several authors with more than five titles in the first edition.  Maybe as many as 20 writers in that first edition with over five titles.  I can see why Susan Straight picked Sag Harbor- it is, first off, named after a specific place.  Second, it's a book by a canon level author- though god knows quality doesn't seem to be the first, second or third criterion for many of the books on this list.  Third it's about growing up and human relationships, and to my knowledge it's the only one of Whitehead's books that could remotely be thought to be autobiographical. 

    I think it is telling that Sag Harbor wasn't his first, second or third book.  Twenty years into this blog I hold it as a truth that authors who start with a first novel that closely resembles their own experience- a POV bildungsroman or multi-generational family drama with the main protagonist resembling the author- are the weakest authors, canonically speaking.  Yes, they might score a hit with that first book- particularly if they have an unusual background or lived experience, but the odds that they are either going to 1) mine that same subject for a second well received book or 2) move on to create a book that isn't taken directly from their own life is much lower than authors who start with a book that is about something other than their own, fictionalized growing up experience.

   The pleasures of Sag Harbor are many.  It's a low stakes enterprise without the drama that typically accompanies the bildungsroman as a genre.  The biographical details provided sent me scurrying to the internet to look up "Colson Whitehead's Dad" and other related subjects.  Whitehead is an amazing writer, and his era specific soliloquies about the Road Warrior movie, the Roxane/UFTO rap beef and applying Dungeons & Dragons alignments to everyday existence were equally delightful.

   Colson Whitehead is very close to the top of my list in terms of authors who are both commercially succesful AND critically acclaimed.   Whitehead has summitted the American literary establishment with his back-to-back Pulitzer wins but he hasn't quite won over the rest of the world (he sort of missed his Booker Prize window because his prize winners were published before they opened up the competition to American authors).  A Nobel Prize seems unlikely- Whitehead never shows up in the betting odds.  None of his books have landed as a hit on television or film- Amazon put a lot of money into The Underground Railroad adaptation but even a pretty die-hard fan like me couldn't finish the series.  

  Surely though this is a top 10 title for the New York/New Jersey chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.

Published 6/20/24

Desperate Characters (1970)

by Paula Fox

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 7/28
New York: 80/105

   Originally published in 1970, Desperate Characters was out of print by 1990 until it was rediscovered by Johnathan Franzen, who wrote a nice essay about it.  A publisher read his essay and the result was that Desperate Characters was re-published to a whole new audience in 1991.  When Paula Fox died in 2017, many of articles focused on this revival and helped elevate it into a quasi-canonical status, where it remains today (the 1991 edition was updated as recently as 2015).  It's a short, sharp novel about a childless white couple living in Brooklyn in the late 1960's.  I would fully agree that this novel was decades ahead of its time- it often seemed to be that, but for the absence of smart phones and the impact of computers, the characters could be in Brooklyn right now, behaving essentially the same way.

  The plot, or plot-lessness, feels very contemporary as well: Basically the wife of this couple- a stay at home type (the husband is a lawyer), gets bit by a cat.  She goes out to lunch a couple of times and talks to a couple friends, then they travel up to their vacation house and find it has been vandalized in their absence.  I'm serious, that's the whole book.  I can certainly understand why it was such a revelation to Franzen back in 1990- finding a novel about contemporary life that holds up for decades afterwards is a rare experience. 

  This is also the first book I can remember out of the 200 or so books from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list that I've read where the main characters were a childless, professional couple.  I've noticed that almost every book in the entire project revolves around the relationship between a parent and their child, typically from the perspective of the child, sometimes from that of the parent.  Usually adults who don't have children in the books on this list are either dramatically dysfunctional or the whole book is about the fact that someone lost a child.

Published 6/21/24

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

by Paule Marshall

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 8/28

New York: 81/105

  Brown Girl, Brownstones was a pioneering bildungsroman about the experience of growing up black and female in an immigrant family.  Like other pioneering books from the POV canon, Marshall takes her place on the basis of being the first, or one of the first, to express this particular point of view- I can only imagine what her conversations with publisher were like before someone agreed to publish her book.  Told from the point of view of a young woman in a Barbadian immigrant family. Brown Girl, Brownstones that would, in the future, come to embody the pov bildungsroman, but must have been very fresh indeed at the time of publication.  In her New York Times obituary they wrote that this book is, “the novel that most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writings.”

  That is pretty impressive, because contemporary African-American women writers exploded into the consciousness of the reading public about a decade later.   Selina Boyce, the protagonist, is 10 when the book starts, a witness to on-going disputes between her mom, a no-nonsense type, and her husband, a gauzy dreamer.  

 By the end of the book, Selina is a college student who is dreaming of an artistic, bohemian life while she carries on with a young veteran who lives in her Brooklyn neighborhood.  It's a memorable journey, and never seems dated in its prose or themes.

  I checked the census website and as of 2021 almost 17% of adult Americans did not have children. That would make them the most dramatically underrepresented demographic group in the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, I think.  I guess you could add in the books where the protagonists are young adults who just haven't had kids yet.

Published 7/5/24

Halsey Street (2018)

by Naima Coster

Halsey Street and Bedford Avenue, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 9/28

New York: 82/105

  Halsey Street is another POV novel about a woman who is the child of an African American father and Dominican mother, Penelope.  It's a little different than most of the other books that fit that description because this is not a bildungsroman- the protagonist is already an adult woman living in Pittsburgh and working (beneath her education) as a bartender, fucking random white guys she meets at said bars.  Reality comes home when she gets a call from a neighbor about her ex-record store owner Pop, who is having major health issues in the aftermath of the departure of his wife and Penelope's mother to the Dominican Republic, where she has decided to retire, alone after a working life of cleaning houses.

 Penelope returns home to confront her family demons and learn a little bit about herself in the process.

  Coster also gives us chapters told from the perspective of the escaped Mom, living in her dream home down in the Dominican Republic, and several chapters take place there.   In other words, Halsey Street is closer to the "adult woman returns home to confront family issues" story line that is more common in places like Vermont and New Hampshire.  Penelope stands out as a character via her singular lack of achievment in life- one year at RISD before dropping out to pursue her bartending passion because teachers said she was "drawing too much" at art school.

  Penelope is as sad as any white girl in the 1,001 Novels Project.  I would have like to know more about the father- his back story establishes that he was raised in an orphanage before going on to start his highly succesful record store as an adult, which seems like it would be borderline impossible based on the OTHER books from the 1,001 Novels project about the lives of other African American men in New York CIty.  I would have liked to have heard THAT story, not the book I got about his sad adult daughter who doesn't know what to do with her life.  Boo-hoo. 

Published 7/12/24

Golden Country (2006)

by Jennifer Gilmore

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 10/28

New York: 85/105

  Last twenty books for New York.. LFG!  Jennifer Gilmore's Golden Country is part of the very specific 1,001 Novels: A Library of America category of "Woman authors who wrote one or two decently well received novels about their own experience growing up or their family history in the past twenty years and the book didn't really sell and then they maybe wrote one more novel or maybe none at all and that was that."   This category maybe describes 10 to 15 percent of the close to 200 titles I've now read for this project, so it can't be ignored.

  Gilmore is squarely in this category with her novel about the intertwined lives of two Jewish-American families from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn.  Throughout this book I was reminded of the film Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, where the two characters decide to masquerade as the inventors of the Post It Note, which was actually designed by the large corporation 3M.  In the film, the characters get away with the ruse until they actually run into someone who knows the truth,  Similarly, if the reader is ignorant of the history of the Jewish mob in New York City or the story of the invention of the television, Golden Country is decently plausible, but those readers who are familiar with that history will find much of Golden Country risible. 

  Like many other titles on 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Golden Country is filled with characters who seemingly do little else in life but hang out with family members, many of whom they actively dislike and/or are actively dislikeable.  Pages and pages of people complaining about their family situation, while exciting events take place off-stage and with no adequate description.  I'm particularly susceptible to dislike characters who are well educated, well off housewives who feel like they missed out on life because they chose to marry and raise children, and do absolutely nothing about that circumstance except complaining about it their entire lives- and this book has several of these characters.  

Published 7/17/24

Leaving Brooklyn (2006)

by Lynne Schwartz

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 11/28

New York: 87/105

   Leaving Brooklyn is a novella about a nice girl from Brooklyn growing up in the middle of the 20th century who f**** her optometrist as a 15 year old.  For a story that, these days, would likely end up with the perpetrator in prison for a lengthy stretch, Leaving Brooklyn is a surprisingly low stakes affair. I gather from the reviews I read from when Leaving Brooklyn that this a work of bio-fic/thinly veiled memoir, i.e. that is something that happened to the author, and it seems dated in that sense, as much as the "Great White Man" fiction that it mirrors.  These days, a 15 year old simply can not f*** an adult man without being considered a victim by society, in the place and time this book is set, 15 year olds could and did get married. 

   It was, in other words, a real cringe fest as the kids say, with the "love scenes" by the naive 15 year old protagonist and the adult doctor being particularly rough to stomach.  At least Leaving Brooklyn is short and it very much left me wondering what the f*** I had just read.

Published 7/18/24

The Law of Enclosures (2006)

by Dale Peck

Long Island, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 12/28

New York: 88/105

    Dale Peck was/is a pretty significant literary critic- which is a type of author that very much interests me- the writers who are both critics and trying to make a serious go of it writing fiction.  The more I write about books, the more I align with the proper philosophy of the critic is to try to increase attention for the books they prefer, while simply turning a blind eye to the negative.  Saying you don't like a specific book is fine, you state your opinion and move on- jumping in to take issue with some kind of critical "conventional wisdom" in an attempt to draw attention to yourself (and your opinion) is, in my opinion, the saddest path to literary notoriety.  It is also extremely bad karma. Peck, for example, is known for calling Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, "The first literal waste of paper, in terms of the trees felled to create the book, that I have encountered."  I mean, ok, lots of people don't like David Foster Wallace but jeez.  

  But then, to be that type of critic- which Peck is, for which he was known for being at the height of his notoriety, and then to turn around an expect people to be nice to his own work.  Well, no.  So I have no problem saying that I found The Law of Enclosures insufferable.   I learned after finishing the book that Peck is a member of the LGBTQ community, and it is funny, because I often thought, before I knew that, that The Law of Enclosures was written by a gay man who has no insight into the dynamics of abusive/failed relationship between hetero suburbanites.   Basically, The Law of Enclosures is a standard take down of the emptiness of suburban existence genus long island, socio economic classification lower middle, ethnic racial classification, white non-ethnic. 

  There are some elements of the mechanics of Peck's storytelling that make The Law of Enclosures both more interesting than an average example of the above genre AND way more annoying- trying to piece everything together like a jigsaw puzzle a la high modernism and post-modernism.   When it comes to the trauma-narratives of mid 20th century American suburbs I'll take my sob stories straight, thank you very much.   I'm really not expecting much from Long Island in terms of literature, since it is already one of my least favorite places in real life. 

Published 7/23/24

Lily's Crossing (1997)

by Patricia Reilly Giff 

Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 13/28

New York: 89/105

  Lily's Crossing is a Newberry Medal Winner from 1998, about a young girl who befriends a Hungarian boy who was smuggled out from Nazi held Hungary and France to wait out the war in Rockaway Beach, Queens.  It's not the first book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America with that plot.  Beyond that, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash covers similar territory and goes on to do much more, since it is not a book for children.  But Children's Lit is what they hand out the Newberry Medal for being.  Who am I to take issue with their judgment.  Seems like Rockaway Beach deserves more than a kids book about World War II.

Published 7/25/24

A Stone of the Heart (1990)

by Tom Grimes 

Queens, New York City

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 14/28

New York: 90/105

  A theme that has emerged from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is the career's of the author's who have been selected.  I'm focusing on the lesser known folks, since I've read most of the canon-level or just under canon level picks that editor Susan Straight made, leaving me to actually read the lesser known books for each state and region.   One way I can identify the books at the bottom of the ladder is by publisher and the absence of either E-book or Audiobook or both versions when I go looking.  A Stone of the Heart is bottom of the barrel by those standards- published by an indie that I'm pretty sure is out of business and without an Ebook or Audiobook edition.

   And indeed I soon learned that author Tom Grimes most famous book is called Mentor, a memoir about how he flopped as a big time writer of literary fiction and mentee of Frank Conroy, who plucked Grimes from pre-fame obscurity into a role as the chosen one of the Iowa Writers Workshop, only to see his second novel, Season's End, get the most brutal review from Publishers Weekly I've ever seen in my life, reprinted in full below:

This schizophrenic second novel from Grimes ( A Stone of the Heart ) veers from sluggish philosophizing and ponderous verbosity to snappy repartee and crisp narrative. Mike Williams, a left fielder and singles hitter for an unnamed major league baseball team, chronicles the intermittently compelling stories of his marriage to his high school sweetheart and battles with his agent, manager and team owner in the seasons between 1975 and the players' strike of 1981. Proposing baseball as an anchor of sanity in the craziness of the business world around it, Grimes contrasts the sharp realities of life with ``the sweet illusions of the game.'' The first part of the novel, charting Williams's rise to stardom and its burdens, is smugly pretentious and nearly chokes the sly, sardonic humor that is its principal redeeming feature, although the rest of the book is better focused. Williams observes, ``We are ballplayers. We accept the ineffable and get on with the game.'' Grimes should have have followed suit from early on. (Apr.)

  

     I mean I can not believe Publishers Weekly did him like that.   A Stone of the Heart, meanwhile was his debut, a novella about an overweight, baseball loving teen who has an alcoholic father and out-of-touch-with-reality Mom, growing up in Queens.  Presumably it is the text which Frank Conroy plucked from the application pile and based his opinion upon.

    A Stone of the Heart is very on-brand for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, a short novella about a lower-middle class family which exists entirely in their own reality, where reality intruding from the outside world is represented by a Grandparent or parish priest.  No one goes anywhere, and the only thing that happens in the book is a trip to see the Yankees in the Bronx. Heart pounding stuff.  

Published 7/30/23

Final Payments (1978)

by Mary Gordon

Queens, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 15/26

New York: 91/105

  In 2017, a New York Times reviewer of Gordon's most recent novel called her, "the bard of the American Catholic experience" but then goes right on to say that perhaps she hasn't gotten due credit because most serious readers in this country think Catholicism is stupid and its avid followers are idiots.  I don't agree with the former sentiment- there is plenty interesting about Catholicism, as indeed, there is about every succesful world religion, but I do agree with the second sentiment: that practicing Catholics tend not to be very interesting people because of the requirements of the faith to not ask certain questions and to definitely follow certain arbitrary rules because "God says."   I'm also always thinking about the hundreds of years the Catholic church spent trying to prevent normal people from reading the Bible because it was "dangerous" and of course the Inquisition is a personal sore spot as someone who was raised Jewish.  Catholicism has been systematically eliminating people who think differently and take issue with authority for over a millennium. 

 For this reason I would Final Payments in the "boring protagonist" category of books on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   The thirty year old protagonist, Isabel Moore, is a woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her bed-ridden father, a once prodigious Catholic intellectual who has served as the guiding light of her part of Irish-Catholic Queens.  As a care-taking gig, the requirements of her dad seem particularly onerous- at one point she recalls how she only got one hour to herself outside the house and had to do that by skipping Church, which is the only reason she was allowed to leave the house.

  At the beginning of the book, her father dies leaving Isabel Moore adrift.  She has two friends in the world- one a divorced lady living in Manhattan and the other a married mother living unhappily with her local pal husband outside of Albany (I think?)  After the funeral, Isabel lands a gig surveying in home caretakers of indigent elderly people and almost immediately bangs her friends husband and commences an extra marital affair with the second man she meets, a friend of her married friends (whose husband she bangs almost immediately). 

  Of course, this renders her apoplectic with guilt, particularly after she is confronted by the wife of her married lover in public, and she ends up retreating to the home of her Father's caretaker, who she had maliciously fired after her father's stroke so that she wouldn't be around anymore. 

Her Dad sounds like an absolutely atrocious human being, his career highlight being a stint as a speech writer for pre-disgrace Joseph McCarthy.   It's not so much that Isabel is unlikable as much as she is simply not an interesting human being.  It is, however, a good book for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America for the solid depiction of a working-class Irish-American neighborhood in Queens- a valuable piece of the New York City jigsaw puzzle.

   

Published 8/9/24

Floyd Harbor (2019)

by Joel Mowdy 

321 Neighborhood Road, Mastic Beach, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 16/26

New York: 93/103

   This book of inter-connected short stories is set largely over the course of a couple of days in the community known as Mastic Beach- if you Google "Floyd Harbor" you will learn that it is a kind of alternative place name in the area- the area town of Shirley considered changing their name to Floyd Harbor in the 80's but the decision was voted down by the local community.  It's a book that genuinely sent me to the map, since I was unaware of this colony of economically depressed white people (you could call them "white trash") living a proverbial stones throw from the wealthier communities of northern Long Island.  I guess you could call it south-central Long Island.

   Mostly, it reminded me of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful, set a couple hundred miles north of Long Island, but with a similar case of wayward, damaged young people, doing their best to destroy their own future while avoiding responsibility in the present.   Recently, I've been homing in on the fact that I do not enjoy listening to most of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of America as Audiobooks and simply prefer checking a few out from the library at a time and running through them in a weekend.  I read Floyd Harbor on my Kindle- which is a good format/book fit- reading a series of interconnected short stories on the Kindle.  Short stories, generally speaking, go better with reading on a device, full length novels are better read as a book if possible.  Audiobooks are best for books the reader really enjoys and books that are so long that you will never read them. 

   In terms of understanding Long Island based on the books chosen for 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, the only time in my own life I've been to Long Island was to the northern part for Thanksgiving my freshman year in college because a high school relative had family who owned a home up there.  I remember smoking a joint and being freezing.  I've also been listening to the Power Broker, by Robert Caro about Robert Moses.  The first 15 hours of the 60 plus hour Audiobook is all about Long Island, since that was Moses' first major project- lots of talk about early twentieth century Long Island there.

      Mowdy only got a "new and notable" sentence in the New York Times which describes characters "struggling to overcome poverty and trauma."   At least they are somewhat interesting people and Mowdy does a good job describing the drug use- not always the case in trauma-lit.

   

Published 8/13/24

Big Man (1966)

by Jay Neugeboren

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 18/26

New York: 95/103

 

   Again, I was left wondering why Susan Straight left The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll off the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list when I was reading Big Man, about the aftermath of the 1950-1951 point shaving scandal that rocked organized basketball.  Mack Davis, the narrator, is working at a car-wash in Brooklyn five years after he was banned for life (but not imprisoned) for agreeing to shave points.  Big Man is the second book in the New York chapter written from the perspective of an African American but written by a white man. It's almost impossible to imagine a similar book being published today but it seems like it was accepted practice at least through the 1960's. 

   Mack Davis is recognizable as an alienated young person from the 1950's.  Perhaps because of the trans-racial authorship, Mack seems less concerned with the disabilities of race then just getting by- living with his Mom in Brooklyn, working at the carwash.  The extremely low-stakes plot involves Mack signing up as a ringer in a B'nai B'rith fundraising game where he is playing opposite another banned player who has embraced a life of organized crime whole-heartedly.  Meanwhile, a local journalist tries to enlist him in a scheme to sue the NBA for illegally banning him via the "blacklist."  Mack isn't exactly a dim-bulb narrator- his virtuosity on the basketball court elevates those portions beyond the hum drum of an impoverished Brooklyn existence circa the mid 1950's, but he isn't exactly a paragon of light and virtue.

  There's a love interest in the form of a single mom who is herself a surprisingly good player and a host of minor New Yorker stock-types, including the journalist, who I'm presuming represents the author, since he is a middle-aged Jewish guy. 

Published 8/12/24

Preparation for the Next Life (2014)

by Atticus Lish

Queens, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 17/26

New York: 94/103

   Preparation for the Next Life was published by Tyrant Press.  Tyrant Press was in the news in April of this year because its publisher, Giancarlo DiTrapano, died what can only be described as an untimely death at the age of 47.    His New York Times obituary described him as a "defiantly independent publisher," which I believe means he refused to sell his company for a comfortable sum and then later made bad financial decisions.  This book was one of his career highlights as a published because it won a PEN/Faulkner award.  Here is the relevant portion from the NYT April Obit:

The next year, Mr. DiTrapano published the first novel by Atticus Lish, “Preparation for the Next Life,” a love story about an Iraq war veteran and a Chinese Muslim immigrant set in Queens. Mr. Lish, a Harvard dropout who once taught English in China, had labored on the novel for years. After reading the manuscript, Mr. DiTrapano became convinced that he had discovered a bold new literary voice, so he ordered his largest print run yet: 3,500 paperback copies.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Dwight Garner proclaimed it “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade,” and it became the talk of the literary world. Mr. DiTrapano scrambled to print thousands more copies. Mr. Lish was recognized with a PEN/Faulkner Award.

     Anyway, the cause of death was not released.  Within the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America Preparation for the Next Life was an absolute joy.  It pulses with the energy of post-Iraq War I NYC- you can practically taste the garbage in your mouth.  There are moments of shocking action- any discussion would be spoiler-adjacent, but wow, it did get my attention.  The character of the Chinese Immigrant woman who forms a relationship with a damaged Iraq-war veteran is well drawn, Lish doesn't patronize her.   RIP Giancarlo DiTrapano. I'm sure he would have been amused to read his own obituary in the New York Times.  

Published 8/14/24

Half-Resurrection Blues (2015)

by Daniel Jose Older

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 19/26

New York: 96/103

  Half-Resurrection Blues is the first pick in Daniel Jose Older's fantasy-genre series, Bone Street Rumba.  I had to read it on the native Libby app because Older has some kind of exclusive deal with Amazon which seems to prevent one from checking out E-books from the library and reading them on your Kindle.  This book was another reminder of how much I prefer science fiction to fantasy.  What makes fantasy so uninteresting to me is that ANY fantasy scenario is just a stand in for human emotions and characters, so why not spare us the sad vampires and angry werewolves and write about human characters instead.  

  This book is about a half living/half dead Latino who is working as a kind of agent for a council of the dead that operates in New York City.  The entire book has heavy Brooklyn vibes, and from that perspective it is a good fit for the 1,001 Novels project.  Otherwise though, it was a forgettable work of death-obsessed fantasy for me.

Published 8/14/24

The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)

by Sister Souljah

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 20/26

New York: 97/103

 The official page for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America map has the wrong publication date (2005) for The Coldest Winter Ever, Sister Souljah's best selling and in many ways pioneering novel from the "street literature" genre or "Urban Fiction" as it is known to differentiate itself from the 18th and 19th century tradition of selling pamphlets on the streets of cities like London, Paris and Berlin. There are some continuities- the idea of a criminal biography is present across all times and places.  I certainly remember Sister Souljah from my childhood- I was an avid listener to Public Enemy when she joined after Professor Griff was "fired" for antisemitic remarks, and I remember Bill Clinton attacking her, which gave rise to the idea of a "Sister Souljah moment" i.e. repudiating a putative ally.

  After reading the book, I realized that Souljah is a long time friend of Puff Daddy and was actually responsible for running his home for minor children, Daddy's House Social Programs and if any representatives of the Southern District of New York are investigating Diddy for racketeering they should certainly be asking questions of Sister Souljah about what went on at Daddy's House.  Here's an excerpt from a paywalled 1999 LA Times article detailing Daddy's House trafficking:

    There is a Daddy’s House International Travel Group that takes 10 to 15 of the programs’ students each year on a trip. Last year it was to South Africa.

     Anyway, I mention that because this book is frequently and graphically about underage girls having sex with adult men.  Winter- the name of the narrator and protagonist is a 17 year old going on 40 child of the Brooklyn projects, the daughter of local crack kingpin Ricky Santiaga.  The novel picks up with everything going splendidly- Winter is Daddy's little princess, she has everything she could want, etc.  When Ricky proudly announces that the family is moving to a suburban mansion on Long Island, everyone but Winter knows that a downfall is coming.

   The downfall is swift and Federal- although her narrator is young and considers herself 'street smart,' readers of classic literature will recognize her as a "rake's progress" type of girlie making her downward descent into an underworld.  It's not hard to see why this book was a hit with it's audience- which is probably not an audience that spends much money on books- which makes Souljah's achievement impressive.  I was also impressed by Susan Straight's decision to put this book on her list of titles- it's the edgiest book on the entire list so far.  I was astonished that my paperback copy arrived via the YA section of the Los Angeles Public Library.  I'm a big supporter of libraries but holy cow, this book's narrator describes her 12 year old self having her "tunnel painfully widened" by a big n-word male genitalia in addition to the graphic descriptions of crack addiction and general urban ennui.  

  I mean I applaud the prose and the authenticity of her narrator but it's hard to imagine giving it to a 12 year old to read. 

Published 8/19/24
Sophie's Choice (1979)

by William Styron

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 21/26 

New York: 98/103

   I was really dreading Sophie's Choice, the 1980 National Book Award winner about a doomed romance between Sophie, a Polish-Catholic holocaust survivor and Nathan, a brilliant though erratic Jewish New York city scientist and their relationship with the narrator, a Thomas Wolfe admiring would-be writer from the upper south, who handles narrating duties.  After reading the book, I was proud to announce that I was wrong to dread reading it and in fact it may be my favorite book from the entire New York subchapter- certainly it's a top 10 pick.  Really, Sophie's Choice is two books in one (and at 600 pages that is not an exaggeration) .  

  The first book is Stingo's (the narrator) story.  He is southerner, seeking to become a writer in New York City in 1947.  He moves into a Brooklyn boarding house, attracted, like other southern intellectuals, to the idea of Jewishness.  There he meets sad Sophie and brilliant and erratic Nathan and becomes intertwined in their tumultuous relationship.  The second story is Sophie's recollections about her experiences during World War II, namely being sent off to Auschwitz from Krakow after being caught in possession of a contra-band ham. 

  Sophie's story is gradually revealed over the course of the book, in dribs and drabs, until she finally reveals her famous "choice" (to save one of her two children from the ovens) near the end of the book. Styron expertly intertwines the two tales for maximum dramatic effect- I was not surprised to learn after finishing the book that he won the National Book Award in 1980.  I was totally surprised by the amount of explicit sex, drugs and insanity that Styron portrays- and really enjoyed it.  Sophie's Choice is a no-doubt Holocaust lit classic for the ages and I'm glad the 1,001 Novels project finally forced me to read it!  Recommended!

Published 8/20/24

Netherland (2008)

by Joseph O'Neill

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 22/26 

New York: 99/103

  Netherland, Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel about the aftermath of 9/11 and, of all things, cricket, is the only book representing Staten Island on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.  That seems a trifle unfair, but it's hard to get upset considering I've never been to Staten Island and I doubt I'll ever go.  If one was looking to break down New York lit, I would propose the following time-based categories:

1.  Everything before the publication of the Great Gatsby in 1925.

2.  1925- through the end of the World War II.

3.  End of World War II to 9/11

4.   9/11 to the pandemic.

5. post-pandemic (ongoing)

 

    By this analysis, Netherland is a post-9/11 book, about a wealthy Dutch oil and gas analyst who sees his marriage to an English attorney (who is, quite, nonsensically, practicing as a US attorney after being educated in the UK- something which is, to my understanding, impossible.) fall apart after 9/11 forces the couple and their infant son to move into the Chelsea hotel while their way-downtown condo is repaired after 9/11.   Netherland also falls squarely into the category of rich people and their problems, a group I have little empathy for and no sympathy with.  I'm not, personally, a rich person, but I've been close enough to them to know that the wealthy tend to be way less interesting than one might expect and that wealth is often unearned or randomly bestowed on people who have no business being rich.  

   I did enjoy the cricket angle, and the parts about cricket, and the cricket-based community that this rich financial analyst falls into after his marriage falls apart kept my interest where his relationship with his wife did not.  If there is one character type in American fiction I can't stand it's the well to-do young mother who suddenly decides that she just can't make a go of it in her marriage, often for reasons that appear opaque and/or non-sensical to others.  I'm a feminist all the way down the line, and no huge fan of child-bearing, but personally, I feel that women in the upper echelons of the socio-economic pyramid should stick it out for the 18 or so years child rearing requires, in the absence of some actual incident of domestic abuse or abandonment.  Suck it up, lady, that is what I wanted to tell the wife in this novel.  Certainly, she doesn't do her child any favors by abandoning her husband in New York and moving back to London. 

Published 8/21/24

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

by Betty Smith

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 23/26 

New York: 100/103

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the 1943 hit by author Betty Smith, was a great find from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Like many of the popular novels from the earlier parts of the 20th century, I'd never heard of this book and certainly would not have if it were not for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I'm sure, if I lived in NYC, or grew up there, etc, I would have read it as a kid, since it's probably the first and definitive Brooklyn based bildungsroman written from a female POV.  According to the foreword of the anniversary e-book I read,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was originally written as an autobiography of Francine/Betty Smith before publishers asked for changes.  Smith seems like an interesting dame- certainly for her era, with the rags-to-riches backstory and three husbands.

  I went in skeptical/uninterested but the I was convinced by the end. It was nice, at long last, to get a book where the New York City based working-class protagonist actually escapes in the end instead of just continuing the cycle of never-ending misery.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was written before the YA category existed but there is no doubt its a YA title- and a good example of why an adult might want to read a YA title. 

Published 8/22/24

Motherless Brooklyn (1999)

by Jonathan Lethem

6138 

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 24/26 

New York: 101/103

  True confession: I get Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster confused, all the time.  Perpetually, as it were. Motherless Brooklyn was a popular and critical breakthrough for Lethem after several books of sci fi/fantasy/lit fic at a time when that wasn't really a thing. After Motherless Brooklyn broke out he's published regularly though none of his books have gone canonical post-Motherless Brooklyn.  Personally, I read his post-apocalypse/published during the pandemic book about Maine, The Arrest, which I enjoyed but didn't love.

 I've never had any inclination to go back and read the rest of his bibliography, as indeed I had not actually read Motherless Brooklyn. One aspect that stuck out to me is that this is one of the last canonically New York books to be published right before 9/11, and it is, simply put, a more innocent era, when an American author could spin together a genre detective story with literary fiction qualities and leave out the global war on terror, or the terrific/terrible impact 9/11 had on everyone in New York City.   I listened to the Audiobook- which was a good Audiobook, not great, but good. It was much appreciated after umpteen Audiobooks of bildungsroman's narrated by pre-teen girls born to immigrant parents, but like Paul Auster's meta-detective fiction I didn't find Motherless Brooklyn compelling.

Published 8/23/24

Re Jane (2015)

by Patricia Park

6138 Gates Ave, Flushing, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 25/26 

New York: 102/103

  Re Jane is an at times excruciating re-telling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a Korean-American orphan who was raised by her all Korean uncle in Queens, New York.   I...didn't actually get that it was a retelling of Jane Eyre until after I finished the book and looked it up online, which shows you how much of an impression Jane Eyre has made on me.  It does, however, explain why I found Re Jane to be so particularly difficult to read/listen to- I had to give up on the Audiobook version right around the time she fell for the adopted father of the girl of the family she was Nannying for in Brooklyn.   The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project puts this book on the location of the family grocery store in Queens, but it just as easily could have placed in Brooklyn, where her nanny-family lives, or for, that matter, Seoul, where Jane decamps after the aforementioned sexual encounter with the father of her charge.

Published 8/26/24

The Great Gatsby (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

West Egg, Long Island New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 26/26 

New York: 103/103

    Last book from New York state- certainly to be the biggest state, I'm guessing. I'm guessing the California won't have more than 80 books for the whole state. I can't actually remember when I read The Great Gatsby last, or first, for that matter, but I know I've read the book at least twice and seen two different versions of the movie- the 1974 Robert Redford one directed by Francis Ford Coppola and the Leonard DiCaprio 2013 version by Baz Luhrmann. 

 I don't think it's a stretch to call The Great Gatsby the first hit of the mass-media era- most people today don't even realize that it was a bit of a bomb when it was released and only achieved canonical status in 1926 when a theatrical version proved to be a huge hit and toured the country etc. My sense is that the idea of the novel as a piece of expandable intellectual property started with The Great Gatsby.  The Great Gatsby is also the UR example of the "Great American Novel" genre, the idea of a novel that purports to tell a deeper truth about American society beyond the lives of its characters.  Few of the books of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list have fit that category thus far- editor Susan Straight has shown a strong preference for the YA bildungsroman, strong and diverse representation among racial, ethnic and gender lines.   Straight has stuck to her one book per author rule- I think Colson Whitehead could have had at least three of his books in this chapter.  She has largely eschewed genre fiction outside of detective fiction, which has made it in both as genre titles and as genre/literary fiction cross-overs- where are all the future New Yorkers?   

 New Jersey to close out Chapter 2 next and then it's off to  Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina, (Chapter 3) before doubling back northward to do Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas (Chapter 4).