Tag: New York

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is more than the book I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be an examination of city streets and public spaces and how they welcome or exclude women, of a similar ilk to Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. It turned out to be more like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Which is fortunate, because I loved Laing’s book and hated Kern’s. Elkin blends personal memoir with the stories of other women who have worked things out through walking and sought anonymity in city streets across the world. It gave me a lot to think about. This one’s going to be a long one – make yourself a brew.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

Deliverywoman

Deliverywoman is the debut collection of short stories by New Zealand writer Eva Wyles. It is a robust collection that explores, across thirteen stories, the nature of connection: how do we relate to one another; where do we find and give meaning; what does it mean to be empty and how is that emptiness filled. There’s a quietness to Wyles’s writing that made me focus on what was going on, looking beneath the surface of the words to find the unspoken. Although it’s quiet, it’s not gentle. There is plenty of grit to abrade the reader’s thoughts.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

The Visitors

Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ novel The Visitors follows a former textile artist turned art supply seller, known only as C, as she navigates keeping her business afloat, repaying her medical debt, crushing on her childhood friend, and hallucinating a garden gnome in a business suit. It’s a novel about the precariousness of life on a planet being killed by humans where our reliance on technology makes us vulnerable to hackers who want to disrupt the status quo. It’s also about self-interest and the different forms that takes. It’s about friendship, capitalism and insanity.

The right frame of mind can make or break a book, I find. I picked this one up during a tough few days. Consequently, I didn’t have the patience for its beginning. I almost put it down.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 9

Swanna in Love

It is 1982 and Swanna Swain is 14 years old. Her parents, both academics in their forties, both having a midlife crisis, have separated. They send Swanna and her younger brother Madding to summer camp because her father is moving in with his new girlfriend and her mother has decamped from New York to an artist colony in Vermont for the summer. Camp is over when we meet Swanna, sitting next to her friend Jacquie Beller on the bus back to New York, looking forward to reading the personal ads in the back of the Weekly Wag on the way. But Swanna’s mother has other plans, and Swanna has to leave the bus. What follows is a perfectly observed comedy of teenage incredulity, parental irresponsibility and the complications of desire.

Jennifer Belle establishes her heroine quickly as a smart character, a teenager who makes people laugh unintentionally and a near-adult seeking to leave childhood behind. She’s sure of herself in some ways, uncertain of who she is in others, and still expecting the adults around her to keep her safe while she stretches her independence. I liked her a lot.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 1

His Illegal Self

His Illegal Self opens with a personal history of the main character. In summer 1965, a boy is born to an idealistic young woman. The boy’s father disappeared six months previously; the mother leaves him behind after two years. He is raised by his grandma in upstate New York, surrounded by photographs of his mother as a child and young woman. His grandma refuses to call him in public by the name his mother gave him, instead smudging the sound into the more acceptable Jay.

In 1972, on an unusual trip into New York City, the boy hears a young woman he believes to be his returned mother use his real name, Che. This woman appears unannounced at the apartment and, after a bizarre shopping trip to Bloomingdale’s, instead of heading home with him and his grandma, she runs down into the subway with him. They jump the barriers to ride to Grand Central Station, where they board a bus to a place called Philly. He wants the woman to be his mother, but she asks him to call her Dial.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Flame Alphabet

The Flame Alphabet is the second novel by Ben Marcus. Published in 2012, it depicts the impact of an epidemic that turns first children’s and then everyone’s speech toxic. At the start of the novel, Sam is packing to leave his home somewhere in New York state with his ailing wife Claire while their teenage daughter Esther is at school. Esther’s words cause a pain that Sam describes as crushing – “an intolerable squeezing in the chest and the hips”. From this beginning, Sam describes how he came to be in such a situation, unpacking the shape of a pandemic that feels unknowable.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is an epic tome that spans three continents, across 55 chapters in seven parts. I read the 10th anniversary reissue, which has an interesting introduction by the author reflecting on what America means to her and how living there made her aware that it is possible to be judged above all else for the colour of your skin.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 11

The Corrections

In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, we meet the Lamberts, an American Midwestern family with a whole raft of issues. Or not, if you take the view that to be flawed is to be human, and if you’re in the habit of questioning who makes the rules anyway. Set in the second half of the 1990s, heading towards a new century, Franzen riffs on the economic turbulence of the time. The novel’s title refers to the economic corrections attempted by governments to stave off a global recession, applying the principle to the lives of the book’s characters.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street

Bartleby the Scrivener is a classic short story by Herman Melville concerning an unnamed lawyer and his team of scriveners, or clerks, plus an office boy. His two existing clerks, Turkey and Nippers, are chalk and cheese, switching temperaments halfway through the day so that there is always one irascible man in the office, while the office boy, Ginger Nut, is the son of a man who wants a better life for his boy. When the narrator advertises for a third scrivener to help with an increase in work, he brings into this setup the inscrutable Bartleby.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2