On last Wednesday, June 1st, I celebrated the one year anniversary of my arrival in New York City. Over the course of my 365 days in the Big Apple, I’ve found a job, moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and spent more money than in all of my previous years combined. There are things I now have less of (time, space), and things I now have more of (debt, concert wristbands.) I no longer hang out at the Gowanus Yacht Club and Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern; instead, I’ve opted to down pints and shoot the shit at the much-closer-to-home Rudy’s, 7B, and Jimmy’s. Even though I consider the past year to be a definite success, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about how happy I really am living in New York City, and have often considered leaving for more livable environs once my lease expires. I won’t list all of my problems with this city because they’re pretty self-evident, but I will say that I deliberated the situation so exhaustively that at one point a few of my friends refused to discuss it with me any further. Eventually, I decided that I would stay in the city for at least another year. Of course, very soon after this – and on the exact day marking the passing of my first year in NYC, no less – I was offered a chance to return to Pittsburgh, my hometown, with a well-paying job that came bundled with a company car, laptop, and other ancillary perks. Worse yet, I had only twenty-four hours to decide whether or not I wanted to pursue the position. I was fucked.
* * *
A recent issue of
Time Out New York, a weekly mag that serves as a guide to NYC entertainment and plays a major role in determining the city’s zeitgeist, contained a grid that compared a group of men referred to as “The Literary Jonathans:” writers Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jonathan Lethem. The grid contained several categories, the last of which was, “Known For.” This seemed to be the place for the editors at Time Out to take a jab at each of the uniformly-named scribes; under Franzen’s name, they printed something about his
blow-up with Oprah Winfrey, Safran Foer was noted for his precious precociousness, and, to be honest, I forget what they said about Jonathan Ames. Under the name of Jonathan Lethem, however, it read only, “his writing.”
Lethem has written a few books, including
Motherless Brooklyn,
The Disappointment Artist, and most notably
The Fortress of Solitude, a big, fat novel about a white kid growing up in Boerum Hill, a small Brooklyn neighborhood, in the 1970s. I’d seen the book prominently displayed in bookstores whenever I’d wander into one back when I was unemployed. I couldn’t buy it because I was living off of my savings at the time and there wasn’t much room in my budget for books, especially when I was already engrossed in a
way-too-long memoir written by a South Bronx detective who’d been educated at Harvard. But spotting the book became such a habit for me that whenever I walked into a bookstore and didn’t see it, I’d scour the store’s shelves until I found it. Whenever I’m in a bookstore, I have a strange tendency to seek out books I’ve already read. I eventually move on to the tables displaying the newer titles, but I always find myself coming back to those tiny paperbound landmarks.
I did, finally, pick up a copy of
The Fortress of Solitude about a month ago, and finished it on the very day I was offered the position in Pittsburgh. You can read a review of it
here or
here. As far as criticism goes, I’ll say only that
The Fortress of Solitude is an amazing book, though not a great one, if that makes any sense. It is an intense, long, and ragged affair that demands a lot of your patience and imagination. It is incredibly uneven, but I guess you don’t read a book like
The Fortress of Solitude hoping for seamless entertainment. You read it in the hope that, at some point or another, you come across a phrase, character description, or digression that’s so beautiful and pointed and funny that you don’t even know what to do with yourself.
I kept staring at the book, kept fingering the jagged grain of the edge of its pages, as I tried to come to a decision about New York. I even read the
quotes on the back, a practice I normally avoid. One of the blurbs was written by Michael Chabon, my favorite writer and author of
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, my favorite book. It reads: “[Lethem] has…re-created a world, a moment in history that I would have thought lost and irrecoverable. He has created, in young Dylan, a genuine literary hero. He has reinvented and reinvigorated the myths of the superhero, of black-white relations, of New York City itself. But most of all, from my point of view, he captures precisely – as only a great novelist can – how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass.”
And that’s it. There it is. New York City: the beat-down that you can never get enough of. Every time I send off the rent check for my shoebox apartment, pay $7 for a Coors Light, go six weeks without seeing a blade of grass, or lug groceries from ten blocks away, it’s just another yoking, another shove to the pavement. But, in a strange way, it’s impossible not to be thrilled by it, even when the people you laugh and commiserate with – the ones who really know what it’s like – start to disappear one by one.
As tough as it was, I turned down the chance to return to Pittsburgh. The time just isn’t right for that yet; there’s more to prove and more to learn. I’m still addicted to all of its possibilities that this city holds, still obsessed with the idea that I might see or do something so great that I won’t even know what to do with myself. Except, perhaps, work up the courage to leave.
