“I probably moved to New York because of the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker, EB White,” the author Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney told Interview magazine recently. Sweeney, now a resident of Los Angeles, spent 27 years in New York nursing her ambition to write fiction. This March, her debut novel, The Nest, entered the New York Times bestseller list at No 3, following a publishers’ bidding war that ended in a seven-figure deal with Ecco. Sweeney has not only made good on her lifelong aspirations, she has also given New York another telling of one its favourite myths: the literary success story.
There is probably no other city in which an author is more feted than New York, and authors repay its attentions with their own. New York is a city where your MFA class might be taught by Zadie Smith, or Jonathan Safran Foer, or where you might find Jonathan Franzen in your local wine shop browsing organic reds (this happened to me). Instilled with what Joan Didion described as the sense “that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month”, New York’s energy is self-conscious. All its streets are famous, they fizzle with performance.
But it is also a city with its own distinct problems, and, like those of a tabloid celebrity, they are available in print. Thanks to its population of writers, who have made the New York novel almost a genre in itself, the city has been examined again and again – in recent years through the trauma of terrorism, market crashes and extreme weather, as well as through changes in its traditional communities. Today, if you want to understand the complexities of New York life, it’s a good idea to read its fiction. The Nest, which follows a group of siblings across Manhattan and Brooklyn as they attempt to resolve the issue of their family trust fund, covers a fair few “New York problems”, and follows many other authors trying to portray this incredible, resilient city at the dawn of a new century.
The wealth divide
Vulture describes the siblings of The Nest as belonging to a “subclass of Brooklynite – the trust fund listless”. The Plumb family must come to terms with the potential loss of their promised inheritance, and the incongruence of a New York lifestyle and strained finances. This divide of experience between the very wealthy and the rest of the city is something that is handled with humour in books like Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013), or Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes (2004). In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), four friends transcend vast differences to support and love each other over decades – despite one of them growing up “insulated from everything that money could protect him from, including bigotry”.
But inherited wealth is also questioned: Lotto, the playwright protagonist of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (2015), is a charismatic but credulous child of privilege: “Why can’t I write about poor people if I was raised with money?” In Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star (2015), John’s family money enables his alcoholism and allows him to live a directionless lifestyle, which feeds his addiction.
Collective grief
“I wanted to tell the story of one ordinary New Yorker who is haunted, not just by 9/11, but the fact that New York City is not only a place of repeated trauma, but of the repeated suppression of trauma,” said Teju Cole of his novel Open City (2009). His lead character, Julius, takes us on ambling journeys across the city, reflecting on its past and present. At one point, he finds himself at Ground Zero: “The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself.”
Cole’s idea is that New York’s grief has been forced into hiding, and this is sensed in The Nest, in which an bereaved ex-fireman finds solace in an object only he knows the true value of. It is also apparent in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006), where a young boy undertakes a secret quest, in order to process memories of his father. Meanwhile, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) opens in New York on 9/11, with the city seen through the eyes of a survivor stunned with shock and fear.
Loneliness and new technology
As new technology grows, so does the anonymity of city life: Midtown resident Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013) namedrops social platforms including Gchat and Goodreads. Though he spends time with friends, and contacts them constantly via the internet, his writing contains a sort of night-vision numbness that speaks to the millennial experience. In Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), we see New York in a near future, where social media and e-commerce have taken a dystopian turn.
Changing communities
Though the urban landscape of New York can shift rapidly, displacing whole communities, observant writers watch for the traces they leave behind. Barrett, the fading boy genius in Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen (2014), notices a smell in his Williamsburg apartment “as if the ghost that is the building itself cannot and will not believe that its walls aren’t still bare, smoke-stained plaster, its rooms no longer inhabited by long-skirted women sweating over stoves as their factory worker husbands sit cursing at kitchen tables”. At Ground Zero, Open City’s Julius sees haunted ground: “Gone too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. The Syrians, the Lebanese … and, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?”
The pressures of art
Art is everywhere in the New York novel, in physical and spiritual form, and museums often provide symbolic backdrops for narrative; not least for Don DeLillo, who opens Point Omega (2010) in the Museum of Modern Art, and has the eponymous performance artist of Falling Man invited to fall from the upper reaches of the Guggenheim at “scheduled intervals”. The power of art also comes into play for Theo, of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), and Tommy O’Toole of The Nest, who both come across masterworks in the aftermath of disaster, and are lured into the same dangerous and life-altering act.
The characters of New York fiction are often grappling with a desire to be celebrated for their art. When The Nest’s Bea Plumb, a blocked writer once dubbed a “Gliterary Girl”, is shamed at a literary party, it reflects a belief inherent in books such as The Luckiest Girl Alive (2015) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – that success in writing offers a way into capital-S Society. In A Little Life, artist JB frets that his painting career is dwarfed by his friend’s glittering life as an actor. Meanwhile, in The Snow Queen and A Visit from the Goon Squad, two musicians find their voices late in life and experience the redemption of an audience.
