Recently, literary types gathered in Bryant Park’s al fresco “Reading Room” to learn more about the trope of tropes: the New York writer. New York City native Thomas Beller moderated the conversation among four authors whose tales have made indelible use of NYC in their recent works. The panel included Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill, Alice Mattison and Jonathan Ames. With two European ex-pats, a native New Yorker currently residing in Connecticut, and a longtime New York resident who admittedly grew up “in the banlieues of New York” (…a.k.a. New Jersey), the spectators were primed for varied perspectives, each filtered through the panelists’ unique New York experience.
McCann spoke good-naturedly about how New York is very much about the instantaneous, that it draws you in and makes you feel like you can own it. O’Neill heartily agreed with this perspective. Having lived in several countries, he seemed equipped to notice the differences that make this city, well, this city. He noted that New York immediately becomes one’s local identity as nowhere else does. One can declare oneself a New Yorker almost instantaneously, but one can’t be deemed “Parisian” or “Corkian” overnight. The egalitarianism — or perhaps sheer indifference — of New Yorkers with regard to those that surround them, prevents one from ever feeling terribly excluded, so one’s sense of community induction is prompt, McCann said.
Ames took an opposite position, articulating, in his usual deadpan manner, that the New Yorker is a perpetual tourist. The upheaval of daily life and varied encounters make him feel that he will never quite fit; that the city’s mutability, while exciting and even indispensable, is also what keeps him from feeling any sense of ownership, be it literal (“I’ll never hold one apartment,” he laments) or psychological.
Mattison discussed the quintessential native New Yorker dilemma: in growing up here, “you don’t know any other way,” she explained. Her moving to New Haven was posited as the necessary disconnect of leaving where she were raised, as many a transplanted New Yorker can relate to from the other way around.
The panel also chatted about the influence of the subway ride, the differentiation of being “a Brooklyn writer,” and the omnipresence and omnipotence of New York voyeurism. But a satisfying answer to the query “how does New York function in your work?” ultimately proved elusive. Perhaps it’s unanswerable, since the cause/effect forces of how the city influences the literary mind distort through so many inexplicable and circumstantial factors. O’Neill pointed out that “the everything bagel is a crucial threshold” in cementing the authenticity of New York denizen. But carbs and chive cream cheese aside, the literary factors that characterize the New York writer remained sadly at large.
