Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

The one book I finished this week was The City We Became by N.K Jemisin, which is a love letter to New York City and a middle finger to H.P. Lovecraft. (When not literally interdimensional tentacle monsters, the novel's Lovecraftian horror is embodied as racism and gentrification.) A friend of mine has been bugging me to read this book for ages, and my first week in NYC for a summer internship seemed like an appropriate time to do so.

In a world where particularly "alive" cities - São Paulo, Hong Kong, London, Lagos - are embodied by human avatars, New York splinters into six when its main avatar (and the city itself) is attacked by cosmic horrors, turning a handful of everyday New Yorkers into the avatars of the city's boroughs. Brooklyn is a rapper turned lawyer turned city councilwoman; the Bronx is an older Lenape woman, a veteran of the American Indian Movement and Stonewall; Queens is a young Indian immigrant in New York for grad school and an internship she hopes will turn into a H1B visa; Manhattan can't remember who he was before he arrived in the city but he's all slick smiles and sharp edges; Staten Island is the sheltered daughter of an abusive cop. They need to harness their newfound powers and work together (easier said than done) to save the primary avatar, and their city, from an interdimensional threat - the Enemy - that is both impossible to comprehend and far too easy to recognize.

This is a deeply unsubtle book - although, hey, some things are worth being blunt about - and sometimes the details feel piled-on for the sake of piling it on. (Like, not only did Staten Island/Aislyn's mother have to give up her dream of studying piano at Juilliard when she got pregnant and married Aislyn's abusive father, but it turns out she didn't actually miscarry the son that Aislyn's father had always wanted, she secretly got an abortion in the hope of still following her dream and then felt so guilty about it that she chose to give up anyway?? And none of this was particularly relevant to anything else??) I liked the city-magic more than the people-magic, both in the sense of the borough-avatars channeling their borough-specific-powers, and the Enemy weaponizing the cityscape (rather than individual people) against them; the monstrous Starbucks shops were probably my favorite. On the non-magical side, I really enjoyed the interactions between Bronca (the Bronx) and Brooklyn.

Of the metaphorical stack of books I have in progress, I'm almost done with This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel and pseudo-autobiography. I suspect I'm going to skim rather than read the last couple of chapters, because my patience for Amory Blaine (and Fitzgerald) is quickly running out. Was Eleanor Savage literature's first manic pixie dream girl?

Comments

[kore]

In his forties Fitzgerald annotated his own copy of the Eleanor section in TSOP with "This is so funny I can't even bear to read it."

[sabotabby]

I loved The City We Became and was relieved because I started and abandoned something similar, and I'm glad Jemisin wrote a better version of the story I wanted to write.

[chelseagirl]

The City We Became was the first book I bought, during lockdown, from an indie that's actually a block from me. It took over a month to arrive, having gotten stuck in transit somewhere states away. I wonder if that's significant? ;-) (After that, they opened for pickup, even though you couldn't go in, so I bought from them that way.) I enjoyed it but I think it may not have been the best time to read it, being in an actually dystopic NYC?