I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes.
I have not seen my family since before the pandemic; a year and a half will have passed by the time I’m wandering my childhood apartment again. But my family is waiting on the other side of that chasm, and when I get there, it will be as if I never left.
On first read this scene demonstrates the narrator’s quiet, observational mood, as she’s just left New York after her father’s death and “had begun looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what,” but on reflection it pierces several thematic layers, and sets expectations. In this interpersonal thriller, Dutch methods of urban trash removal are rendered in greater detail than our heroine’s nearly absent back story. Character motivation and development are less important here than the systems within which those characters live.
There is a moment in the middle of John Brandon’s fetching new novel, “Ivory Shoals,” that might be the best depiction of a grand theft horse gone wrong in all of literature. The earnest and plucky 12-year-old Gussie has survived deadly swamps and bounty hunters on his way to find his father, when he happens upon a wounded and wary Morgan. Gussie is a good kid. He intends to just borrow the horse until the next hamlet in this post-Civil War Florida landscape of insane heat and sundry dangers. But in four pages of gorgeous prose, Brandon delves into Gussie’s tactics, slowly building tension as the boy walks the animal down a trail and works up the courage to mount. For anyone who has attempted to climb onto a moving horse, the result will be disastrously familiar.
The narrator of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s To Walk Alone in the Crowd is a man with a 20th-century sensibility exiled in the excesses of the 21st. He’s recovering from a terrifying depressive episode, in a state alternating between “the twin poles” of nostalgia and anxiety. And because he is, above all, a passionate reader, the project that keeps him grounded is gathering the words thrown up by the cities he wanders – mostly Madrid and New York, with brief interludes in Paris and Lisbon – and archiving, collaging, and repurposing them. His quest is to understand what the words in all the restaurant menus, billboards, erotic massage flyers, subway signs add up to. What do they say underneath, and who, exactly, are they saying it to?
While many books have sprung up over the past year attempting to make sense of the pandemic, “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine” is uncanny in its prescience. It also serves as a good reminder for all of us to refrain from feelings of complacency because as this fascinating book shows again and again, it’s foolish to think this will be our last pandemic.
Now Susan Sontag was famous
among certain people—you know
who I mean—urban informed culturally