I've always loved coming-to-New York stories and, judging from the acclaim that's greeted the new Bob Dylan movie, America does too. Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, arrives in the Greenwich Village of 1961; in no time, this "complete unknown" is embraced by the burgeoning folk scene of Greenwich Village, thanks, in part, to the city's gift of proximity.
But I wonder about the longevity of the "coming-to-New-York" genre. These stories of arrival and promise fulfilled are almost always nostalgic, pre-dating the New York of obscenely high rents. And, does a dreamer even need to come to New York — or any city for that matter — in the age of the internet?
In a New York minute, Kay Sohini vanquished my doubts. Her debut book — a graphic memoir called This Beautiful, Ridiculous City — affirms the enduring power of New York and the power of literature to give people the courage to cross all manner of borders.
Sohini is a South Asian graphic artist who grew up in the suburbs of Calcutta, living, as she says, in: "a sprawling ancestral house, with four generations and far too many territorial people." From a young age, she was a loner and a reader — a reader peculiarly drawn to New York stories.
"Everybody writes about New York with so much tenderness, even when they are sick of it," Sohini says. And, so, from afar, she began to read her way into New York. Years later, Sohini broke away from a long abusive relationship with a man who she says, "made a room smaller just by walking into it." Staking her escape on little more than her years of reading and a modest fellowship to grad school, the wounded Sohini flew to New York.
Through understated language and jolting comics-style images, Sohini tells a vivid, multidimensional New York story of her own: There's her odyssey, a capsule history of modern India, and, always, references to books, books, books. This Beautiful, Ridiculous City engages with a good slice of the essential New York City literary canon: from Ann Petry to Fran Lebowitz; E.B. White to Dylan Thomas; Colson Whitehead, Nora Ephron, and fellow graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel.
Like all these chroniclers of the city, Sohini sometimes questions her illogical attachment to such a difficult place, wondering if: "I am forever doomed to love things and people whose reciprocation is fraught with contradictions." But New York — in image and reality — saved her and her love for the city remains hardy.
One New York City writer Sohini doesn't mention is Gay Talese, who's hailed — along with Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe — as a pioneer of New Journalism. Talese, now in his early 90s, has written a lot of great pieces about New York, many of which are gathered together in a new book called A Town Without Time.
The very first piece Talese published in Esquire in 1960 leads off this collection. It's called "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed." Among the thousands of things Talese notices are the night workers — "truck drivers, ... cops, hacks, cleaning ladies, ..." who line up for movies in Times Square at 8:00 a.m. Other essays here ruminate on the oft-overlooked Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and mobster Joe Bonanno.
Worth the price of this collection alone is Talese's masterpiece: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." This 1966 profile of Old Blue Eyes packs the sparkle, fizz and complexity of genuine New York seltzer. Talese read from the opening of that profile on This American Life:
Just as Sohini assures us that New York still draws in dreamers, Talese reminds us that New York is already riddled with ghosts, many of them tough-talking and hard-drinking. Eight million stories and counting about the city, but still room for more.
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