The author’s perfectionism determined everything – in the rigor of the novel’s conception, the confidence of its structural devices, and above all, in the exuberance of its rhetorical displays. A summary of the book doesn’t really give a sense of his constant alertness, his persistent attention to the smallest detail in a scene. Plus, Ellison manages to get the reader to wear the Invisible Man’s mask, to see through the eye holes he makes. Sinister forces want people in Harlem to commit their own deaths. Finally, the invisible man has fallen into a manhole, where he takes up residence to await the chaos, to learn to live with his head in the lion’s mouth.
“Dance Dancer” by Andrew Holleran, 1978: “Dancer From the Dance” is largely set in New York in the early 1970s is a hymn to gay liberation in the city, and to male beauty. Cruising is an honorable quest, no matter how filthy the baths or subway station. Magic can happen – see the dark, serious young man who may stay after morning. The beautiful, enigmatic Malone has such a face; he is a Midwesterner who has made peace or is trying to deal with being gay, his ‘limitation’. It’s hard for him to be loyal to one man or stick to what he says he wants, and when he meets Sutherland, a veteran of every high imaginable, who challenges Malone to be real and not kid himself. keep, he has already lost a true love.
We see Malone on his door-to-door travels, and New York City’s gay nightlife is rendered in glittering prose. The novel is saturated with the homoerotic, too mesmerized by the cohorts of the brave to regret it. Holleran was part of a new wave in American literature that said the gay character didn’t have to die by the end of the book. Bringing up the subject of same-sex love no longer meant that a dream hunk had to pay for the vision by being murdered. No one knew when it was published that Holleran’s was to be a portrait of a vanished world, a vanished city: “We only lived to dance.” The best fiction turns into a historical work over time.
“Sleepless Nights” by Elizabeth Hardwick, 1979: New York City is the best place for Elizabeth, the first-person narrator of Hardwick’s “Sleepless nights” (1979), as she concludes early in the book. We know she’s a deep reader, and she’s alone, but was once part of a… we. Hardwick’s husband, the poet Robert Lowell, had extensively covered their marriage and divorce in his work. “Sleepless nights” has obvious omissions. The novel is a meditation on a life and has the feel of lyrical poetry in that the ‘I’ is perhaps meant to indicate the general meaning of the lonely self.
Hardwick’s “I” is a woman, and the experiences of others she questions about are usually those of women. Her social reach is wide: a rich girl is a Stalinist with a boyfriend who doesn’t want to change; here’s the sad math of a drawn-out love triangle, and here’s the cleaning ladies she’s watched work. Hardwick remembers from her childhood women alone in their rooms. Or she meets older women on the street who are at the mercy of their decay. Joan Didion noted that Hardwick’s method was similar to that of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in her search for the revealing detail. But Hardwick’s freedom from speculation about the people she meets stems from her ability to achieve equality with whoever she thinks or talks to. She never talks down; she was never cheated. It’s a great historical spectacle that New Yorkers are a part of, those who live in this place where people come from to come from elsewhere. In Hardwick’s work, the city is a drama of those who don’t fit elsewhere, a group of souls crying out for remembrance.
Jessica Hagedorn
“Latin Moon in Manhattan” by Jaime Manrique, 1992: A droll picaresque like no other. Manrique’s fantastic cast of characters includes performers, crooks and a cat – alive la vida loca in the low Times Square of the 1990s.