Last month, I took a video while walking down the Brooklyn street where I live. I’d intended only to capture the sounds (loud! more than merely loud… cacophonous!) of a newly established construction site as a response to a friend who had just sent me a video of her quiet Hudson Valley surroundings. But, in recording the din of my neighborhood, I also managed to include another bit of New York City scenery: a precariously stacked, six-foot-high mountain comprised entirely of bulging garbage bags. It was all just out in the open, this particular paradox — the deafening clatter of creation served as a soundtrack to a slumping tower of discarded possessions, newly devoid of all former worth. What a town!
It took a while for the gingko trees to turn gold this year. Once they did, their luminescence made it almost easy to forgive them for filling the air with the scent of overflowing diapers. It’s only just gotten cold. It’s been awhile since walking outside felt like stepping inside someone’s mouth.
For better or for worse, we’ve been spat out; things have come more sharply into focus. When the temperature drops, the geography of the city makes a different kind of sense. It’s easier to find true north (which, if you’re facing uptown, is actually a little to the left).
There’s something jarring about all this clarity. It’s hard to trust. New York, for all its straight lines and hard edges, its gridded streets and parallelogram parks, is home to countless surprising spaces — hidden alleys and secret, statue-filled gardens. It’s a covetous place, where having a home that you really love makes it feels like you’re getting away with something. And maybe you are.
It’s said a real New Yorker is someone who has lived here for 10 years, but I think that status is actually achieved when you have your first dream about finding a new room in your apartment. I’ve had many of these and it’s always disappointing when I wake up, my luck having disappeared the moment I open my eyes. It would be lucky, wouldn’t it? To find an extra room, to have some more space, to have the opportunity to reimagine your place in the world, to start all over again.
But then, I wonder how quickly it would take for that newness and for the feeling of gratitude that accompanies good fortune to fade and become a thrum of entitlement, a certainty that this unfamiliar space that I’d never seen nor stepped foot in before actually belongs to me. That I deserve it. That discovering something allows for the possession of it and that possession is permanent and that this space only began to exist once I’d found it.
In Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story (available here), space is at a premium for a young family, crowded into a tiny apartment that suddenly, surprisingly, expands one night when a woman named Stephanie comes over for a visit. She opens a closet door, revealing a secret terrace that immediately gets put to use by the square-footage-starved city-dwellers, who are devastated to realize that their haven disappears when Stephanie isn’t around. They keep inviting her back. Even as other aspects of their lives start developing not-unrelated fissures, the foundation of the fantastical terrace they’ve come to love feels more and more firm. Of course, love is inherently fleeting, and the only reliable thing in life is loss. And so the dream of the terrace becomes a nightmare.
Leichter has written a profound, provocative novel with Escher-like dimensions, it loops in and out of itself, divided in four discrete sections that double-back on each other in breathtaking ways. The themes within are of the capital T sort — loneliness! extinction! — but there is an intimacy to how she approaches it all, a reminder that our internal narration about everything going on around us makes those same myriad horrors and wonders just another part of our story, another thing to process and possess.
Is it okay that all we have are stories? Does it matter what story gets told? Or whose? Leichter’s characters have some difficulty accessing the truth; sometimes the stories they tell themselves contradict reality — especially when those stories come from a place of fear. They’re constantly spinning new fables about who they could have been, or who they already are in some different, parallel reality. They’re eager for the chance to begin again, to slow their inexorable slide toward their endings. And so they begin again and again.
Does it matter? The lie of a fresh start? Perhaps not. Perhaps it isn’t insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome. Perhaps that’s just hope. Perhaps the lie — the fantasy — is all that matters. As Leichter writes, “Then again — most beginnings, apocryphal. Almost always unobserved. Who can remember with any accuracy life’s initial drift toward its final shape?”
Even if the actual beginnings of things are slippery and changeable, the myths we create around them — the origin stories — are as revealing as any long-forgotten facts. All of which is to say, I’ve recently spent about 46 hours listening to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (available here) on audiobook, and so, you know, I still have 20 hour and six minutes left. 1
What is there to say about this tombstone of a book that hasn’t already been said? That reading it is as relentless and punishing a slog as traversing the BQE at rush hour? That I’ll be forever haunted by images of the Central Park Zoo in the 1930s, when rats had the run of the place and stole food from literal lions? That one of the most delicious burns a person can deploy about an unsightly architectural barrier is that it’s “a fence only a mother could love”? That when you hear a name that sounds funny to your 2023 ears (i.e. Rexford G. Tugwell) you should definitely look it up, because you just might learn something? Yes, yes, and yes!
At this point, about as many years have elapsed since The Power Broker came out than had passed between its initial publication and RM’s rise to prominence a century ago. The ways in which Moses shaped this city are innumerable, of course, but what’s maybe most interesting about his story is how clear it is that, no matter how much the city changed around and because of him, he was incapable of changing with it — he couldn’t adapt, he couldn’t accommodate, he couldn’t even drive. He launched this city on a new path, one that it’s still sputtering along on (only now with bike lanes!), but he himself couldn’t start over. And so despite the ongoing relevance of so much of what he did in his half century of power, in the ensuing 50 years, he’s become a relic, a joke — that rare New Yorker who didn’t get to write his own second act. Robert Caro did it for him.
In the vein of second acts, starting over, and monomaniacs for building things, might I whole-heartedly recommend Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn (available here)? Freiman’s debut novel, Inappropriation, came out in 2019, and was both a perfectly savage skewering of identity politics and a coming-of-age narrative, set at an elite private school in Australia. Meanwhile, The Book of Ayn’s protagonist, Anna, is well past her school days, and yet it could still be said she’s coming of age — or at least coming of a certain age. Anna is 39, childless, without a romantic relationship, and floundering in her career. She comes from some money, but also benefits from adjacency to real wealth. (Though she’s between homes, she’s able to stay in a posh pied-à-terre in Manhattan belonging to family friends.) Anna’s biggest pain point, though, is that her debut novel — a satire about the opioid epidemic — was panned in the New York Times, and she was effectively canceled as well as being dubbed a “narcissist.” Even worse, her friends think she’s that most eye-rolling of things: pointlessly contrarian.
Anna is, understandably, defensive against all the ways in which she’s being misread, and doesn’t see why people can’t grasp her particular brand of humor: “It wasn’t funny to say the wrong thing because you could, it was funny to say the true thing because it was wrong.” But the more firm she is in her convictions that she’s in the right, that she’s the only one who refuses to succumb to a self-imposed trauma narrative (despite the fact that she does have a traumatic origin story; her brother died as a young child, and she’s the one who survived for “no reason”), the more isolated she becomes.
Enter: Ayn Rand. Or rather, a walking tour devoted to Rand that Anna decides to join, setting herself up to be swept away by a writer not known for her humor (or… her writing), and to reinvent herself as someone new, someone with a coherent philosophy, even if it is an improbable one.
While her initial attempt at writing a novel about Rand is a non-starter (“Writing historical fiction was like trying to masturbate to Michelangelo’s David”), Anna is beckoned by the same siren song that has lured so many New York writers (including Rand): Hollywood. Of course, despite Anna’s initial relief to be in Los Angeles (“Unlike New York, it still seemed to be a place where magic happened to people who absolutely didn’t deserve it”), she soon discovers what everyone who moves across the country expecting a fresh start finds out: Wherever you are, there you are — and you’re still 39. The only thing to do, of course, is to kill the self, submit to ego death, and truly begin anew.
For Anna, this happens at a commune on the Greek isle of Lesvos, but it doesn’t happen in quite the way she thinks it will. (Although, yes, she does get to have her own dalliance with a much younger man, much as Rand was known to do.) Does her ego die? Does she finally rid herself of Rand? Instead of me answering those questions, I’ll just say that what Anna finds herself coming back to is stories — books, really, those crucibles for lofty ideas, for challenging theories, for paradox: “A book was better than a person. It thought better, was more courageous. A book could speak to you — whoever you were, whatever your bad thoughts and deeds; it could hold you in its arms, sit up with you all night. Be merciful.” It could even help you start over. Just as long as you’re not, you know, writing “Eat, Pray, Love narrated by Humbert Humbert.” Anna is aware — “no one wanted to read” that. Although, if anyone could write it, Freiman could.
But also…
“According to the couple clichés, a trip is a new memory you make together.” And what better place to make new memories than a Central European spa perhaps best known for its presence in a film that could most generously be called “willfully opaque” but would not be inaccurately called “boring,” the latter of which Lauren Oyler does in her decidedly unboring, beautifully discursive recounting of her recent getaway to Marienbad. Thanks to this, and her Harper’s piece on the Goop Cruise, Oyler is easily the most compelling travel writer working today. Read this and then pre-order her forthcoming book of essays, No Judgment. (Granta)
If you’re someone who doesn’t think that socks are the most fun thing to buy yourself, might I point you in the direction of these Uniqlo socks? Which are incredibly fun to buy for yourself because a) they come in more colors than a rainbow could hope to hold and b) they can be worn with loafers, boots, and sneakers and retain the perfect amount of slouch. Plus, they’re not $40 a pair like many other socks seem to be these days. Although! If you don’t mind having slightly fewer color options, these socks from Maggie’s Organics are the ones I probably reach for the most and are also reasonably priced. The natural color is my favorite, and a nice balance to the red, yellow, and green Uniqlo pairs filling my sock drawer. (Uniqlo and Maggie’s Organics)
Finally, buy someone you love (or even just like) dates. Just trust me. (Rancho Meladuco Date Farm)
If you do decide to read The Power Broker, listening to it on audiobook, as I’m doing, has its pros and cons, with the major con being that it is impossible to skim, as I would certainly be doing if I were reading a hard copy of the book. (I guess you could just zone out, but that’s always a fraught proposition for me, personally, with an audiobook, and I always end up rewinding, which I hate to do. What if I’ve missed something good? And essential? Etc.) What I’ve liked about it, though, is that it’s served as encouragement to concomitantly indulge in many short books that feel like necessary counterpoints to the ugliness of RM’s life. Here’s some of what else I’ve been consuming: Down Below, Leonora Carrington (wonderfully deranging, overlapping in time with some of the action in The Power Broker, a wholly different experience); Do What They Say or Else, Annie Ernaux (a bracing and unsentimental account of what it is to be a 15-year-old girl, wickedly funny!); and Daddy Was a Number Runner, Louise Meriwether (a re-read for me that felt important as a counterweight to all that Moses, it’s tough and tender and a fiercely wrought look at what it was to grow up in Harlem in the 1930s; Francie Coffin is one of my favorite characters in literature).