(no subject)

[skygiants]

N.K. Jemisin's latest, The City We Became, is very much a paean to New York City -- a city I love and have lived in and have a lot of feelings about, and also a city I did not grow up in, and no longer live in, which is also relevant, I think, in how complicated I'm feeling about The City We Became.

The premise: sometimes, very old, very lived-in cities undergo a complicated evolution in which they become sentient entities, born and avatar-ized in the personage of someone who both lives in the city and is powerfully representative of the city's character in some key way. New York is the second city in the Americas to undergo this process, assisted by its predecessor São Paulo (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince having both almost made it but died in the 'birthing', possibly as a result of interference by a sinister cosmic entity, on which more anon) but something is weird and different about New York: a.) in addition to the one Avatar of New York, there are also five separate avatars representing each borough, and b.) the sinister cosmic entity attempting to kill the city at birth has also personified itself and brought its A game to bear against New York in a way that none of the other personified cities have ever seen before.

With New York personified in hiding after a big battle at the beginning, the main characters of the book are largely the humans who have now found themselves as avatars of their boroughs, and they're great characters -- interesting, compelling and complicated. Even with all this, I still find myself stumbling at the level of generalization required to say, 'this person, because of these traits, represents a whole borough.' A whole borough! Cities and neighborhoods have unique characters, of course they do, but like -- there's a bit where Brooklyn and Manny (Manhattan) are trying to figure out how to find the people who have become Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and a lot of that conversation is so true and fantastic about New York and then Manny boils it down to "So we're looking for a hardworking non-techie in Queens and somebody creative but with an attitude in the Bronx" and all of a sudden I come screeching to a halt once again at the idea that one pre-existing person can embody the most Queens, the most Bronx, more than everybody else who lives there too.

And I do think that Jemisin does as well as anybody could do at writing people and characters who embody the level of contradiction required to make this work -- I especially love Brooklyn, former rapper turned city councilwoman, and the Bronx, queer Lenape artist and arts administrator with ferociously stompy boots and a grandchild on the way -- and I love some of the ways this plays out in the way the tensions and dynamics between the boroughs become mapped onto the tensions between the humans representing them, how Manhattan is the one most weirdly invested in the concept of New York As City, how the boroughs all set each other's teeth on edge even as they have to work together. But because the people are all characters and also metaphors, there was a certain exhausting quality to the read, as every time someone did something I had to stop and consider: how do I feel about this generalization, about a place I lived and know and love? About this one? And that one? And frequently the answer was "pretty good actually" and sometimes it was not (I think I'd have a real rough time with this book if I'd ever lived on Staten Island) but it still made it an overall challenging reading experience, for me, personally.

The other thing I have a hard time with is the notion that, like ... okay, I think I would feel better about this if the metaphysics was like "every city's birth is different and complicated in its own way, we just never know how it's going to go because it depends so much on a city's individual character." But to have various other cities come and remark on how special and weird the New York process is, to have it implied that New York is the only city that's complicated and divided and balanced enough to require separate sub-avatars (there's a complicated London Situation that's referred to several times and never elaborated on, but definitely seems to have resulted in just a lone London) is ... it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?

tl;dr;it's a well-written, well-characterized, and compelling book that I have some complicated feelings about on a broader conceptual and metaphorical level, and I think some of my complicated feelings are just 'I don't get on well with books that are more than 50% metaphor'. But also I have a book club discussion about it tomorrow so I'm sure some of my thoughts will change as they come into contact with other people's!

Comments

[raven]

omg, you can tell me your city is more complex than London when you're a city of thirty-two boroughs founded in the first century AD.

And you know, I wrote that out just to be punchy, but I think I'd be put off enough by that idea not to read a book with this as the central concept? Because... London, and also Delhi (the seventh great city on that site) and Liverpool, a city that has been both the richest and the poorest city in Europe, and Singapore, and Tokyo and Hong Kong? And perhaps I'm still being punchy and it would make more internal sense if I read the book, but... no, there's a naivete about that I don't like.

[lirazel]

I had this exact same reaction. NEW YORK, YOU'RE NOT SPECIAL.

[skygiants]

The full detail on the London Situation (as described to the New York avatars) is "there were several avatars when born, then somehow they disappeared and there was a single avatar, we don't know what happened but we assume the primary avatar ate them and that this is also what will happen to you. Good luck finding the primary!" But of courses the other boroughs don't disappear or get et, and to be fair that could be for New York Reasons or for other more complicated reasons that we don't know about yet, but also ... even if it's both New York and London, it does seem very definitely to be New York and London that have ever had multiple embodied boroughs and nobody else .... which on a metaphorical level is certainly not a claim I personally would feel comfortable making!

[asakiyume]

For real: like, you can love New York (and man, New Yorkers sure do), but maybe not generalize out to the whole world?

[dolorosa_12]

This was precisely my reaction, and, combined with the rather flimsy and clichéd characterisation of the other characters who were personifications of cities, left a rather sour taste in my mouth.

[superborb]

This feels like kind of what I wanted Hetalia to be, and what some fanworks almost got to. (Hetalia having leaned in very much to stereotypes without much introspection at all. Though some of the stereotypes were kind of interesting to learn about.)

[skygiants]

lol yeah, I feel pretty safe in saying this is a more complex and nuanced exploration of personified geography than Hetalia ...

[lirazel]

Is it necessary to the plot of the book that there only be a handful of cities that have avatar-ized? Because that in itself seems a form of New York exceptionalism that I find annoying. Like, I'm glad New Orleans at least got a mention, because what I really want after reading this post is a book about the New Orleans avatar. Or what happens to an avatar when a city is destroyed? What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Volgograd and Dresden after WWII? What's going to happen to Jakarta and Miami as the waters rise? How does Rome feel about being sacked so many times? What happened to Constantinople when the Ottomans took over? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

[skygiants]

ALL GREAT QUESTIONS. We get very little detail about any of the other cities -- the main explanation for New York and New Orleans having reached the point before most other US cities is age/accumulation which ... okay, sure, but there are a bunch of cities in the States that are older than New Orleans and nearly as old as New York, and as someone who's lived in both Boston and Philly, yeah, I am a little salty about it ...

[raven]

Oh I am fascinated by those questions, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[asakiyume]

Yeah!! Rome is a still-extant city with a huge history, so... does it have an avatar, and if so WHAT IS ITS PERSONALITY LIKE? And how about Si'an, China, the capital of the Tang Dynasty back in the day??

[likeadeuce]

i had a particularly hard time with this book because of this and because of reading it at the EXACT time that the cities in the world that mean most to me (Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia) were having extraordinary public conversations/demonstrations/ occasional riots about the identity and history of what it means for those cities even to HAVE identities. And that's just on a local scale -- at the same time it was MINNEAPOLIS that had begun driving nationwide conversation.

And, well, if this were a Rivers of London situation where EVERY city gets this, I would have loved to latch on to that mythology but i was so very not in the mood for New York exceptionalism -- even with everything I enjoyed about that book, which was a great deal. The Bronx/Bronca art gallery stuff, esp. THIS is a New York I believe in but haven't experienced, I cannot POSSIBLY internalize another pithy observation about Brooklyn, even with NKJ creating a great character to personify it.

[dimestore_romeo]

These are SUCH good questions.

[asakiyume]

Fascinating. I have a good friend for whom this is their new favorite book, and I've promised to read it--and I will read it--but it's interesting to hear more about what I'm letting myself in for, because somehow I hadn't heard anything other than "a paean to New York," and as someone who's only visited New York a handful of times, that was like.... okay. Like I already know New York (City) loves New York (City) and think's it's the best thing since jam on toast.

--But the point you raise about the utter exceptionalism involved in having each of the boroughs instantiate (the boroughs but not the neighborhoods? And cities have characters, sure, but they do change over time, cf gentrification, so, when/how/what is the character? And where are boundaries? Tokyo's wards are pretty distinct--Shinjuku is sure different from, say Setagaya. UGH.

And yeah, things that are more than 50% metaphor are challenging. Still--it does sound very very interesting and engaging.

[skygiants]

I can easily, easily see how it could be someone's favorite book and I hope to get that perspective from book group or comments!

I will say that the ideas that cities change and expand over time and the boundaries of what's considered 'the city' can be fluid is a major part of the climax of the book, though, again, we don't see how that plays out for anybody but New York. I'll be very curious to see what you think of it when you get around to it!

(I think I would feel so much better about it if it was boroughs and neighborhoods! Gods of big places and gods of little places! But of course that rapidly gets infinitely fractal, the character of this street as opposed to the character of that street....)

[dimestore_romeo]

I think I enjoyed this one, but I did find it tough - because I don't know anything about New York. I'm in the UK, I don't even know much about London - because I don't live anywhere near London, and all the cities and their complications are SO different - so I feel like, hmm, I was missing so much not just as a not-city dweller but also as someone who just doesn't know any of the New York stereotypes (this isn't the word I'm looking for - generalisations about people and place, I guess), and who was constantly flipping back to the map at the front of the book. NKJ absolutely shouldn't have to explain this stuff, she truly shouldn't, because that's not the vibe of the book, but. I'd be so interested to see how different people from all sorts of different places interpreted it, what we caught and what we didn't.

It's a book very lovingly grounded in place and I adore it for that - and I love all of the beautiful, queer avatars of the city... (BRONCA! My love!) but I felt like I was fumbling around in the dark HARD when it came to understanding any of the references or in-jokes, and was googling like wild. I get this is probably the point, it's supposed to be very interior feeling? But I was sinking sometimes, rather than swimming.

TL;DR agreed on the NY exceptionalism? It will be good if we go to more cities and see what she does there?

And also, Bel's dialect was...well, let's just say that I've never, ever heard anyone talk like that except for Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is probably what made me a little grumpy.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I'm glad you came and commented because I'm really curious how it reads to people who don't know all the references -- like, in some ways I am the in-group here, I do know enough of the jokes and references and stereotypes to be nodding along and laughing with and being like "yeah Jemisin really nailed it with that one!" but it still didn't give me quite that sense of sinking deeply into a place that I know that I've gotten with some other New York books (and Boston books, and Philly books, etc.) because I was too busy trying to keep track of stuff on the metaphorical level to get that particular pleasure out of it.

sjd;fljsdI did not feel sure enough of myself to call out Bel's dialect but I was like "this doesn't sound right to me ... but what do I know ......." (Though I was also simultaneously disappointed that Bel disappeared right off the page after his introduction!)

[starlady]

I liked this book a lot, but being from South Jersey and someone who would move to New York if circumstances aligned, I am disposed to. I got the references and to me it was almost painful how New York the story was, and the ending with Jersey City pleased me deeply on several levels. I've heard from other people that it was actively offputting for those who don't know the city as well.

However. The stuff about other world cities was…eeeennnnnhhhh. Like, I'm just not sure about Hong Kong's portrayal. And the more time passes since I finished the book the more Manhattan, and the fact that none of the borough avatars are Jewish, bother me. I get, structurally, why she had to do the stuff with Manhattan that she did and it works pretty okay. But like, make him Jewish! There are plenty of Black Jews, even! That more than anything felt like the perspective of an outsider on the city, or at least on Manhattan, in a way that made me uncomfortable.

[skygiants]

Oh I love to hear the perspective of someone from Jersey on the ending with Jersey City! I did like it but also was unsure about it, but also, see above, re: being from Philly, which gives me a different angle on regional politics ... I do think I would have loved it really wholeheartedly if it had been framed less as "well, we can just swap out Jersey City for Staten Island which we don't like anyway."

oh god I also wished DESPERATELY for a Jewish avatar but then I was like, hmm, am I just being the 'I am uncomfortable when we are not about me?' birb ... But that I think once again gets into the difficulty of having all the representation metaphorically channeled into just six people, because there are so many different cultures who could justifiably say, "well, we're such an essential part of New York and its history and culture, shouldn't at least one of us be --" and you literally can't have all of them but also, how can you not??

[sovay]

New Orleans and Port-au-Prince having both almost made it but died in the 'birthing'

And they don't ever re-arise?

[starlady]

The strong implication is that they've been murdered by the forces of white supremacy. ETA: And the mythology in the book is that cities only get one shot at the becoming thing.

[shadaras]

As a person who hasn't read this and doesn't particularly plan to (NK Jemisin is wonderful but also hit-or-miss for me), I'm very curious what additional thoughts your book club will bring to bear!

tbh I really liked the short story that was the seed of this novel but have been baffled by the idea of there being a full novel just about one city. Like, I want to know more about the politics of cities and avatars and how the avatars try to fuck with each other and how much the avatars change their cities (as opposed to the cities delineating the avatars).

[skygiants]

I'm very curious too! I also had no idea how she was going to pull a full book out of that one short story, and I think it does have enough material for itself (and for a planned sequel I think?) but as you see many questions remain!

[allchildren]

As someone who started out liking but ended up feeling quite grumpy about NKJ's first trilogy, and have been dragging my feet for years toward the inevitability of reading her wildly acclaimed second trilogy: it's good to know that I can focus my energy there, since this is one I will never, ever want to read.

[dimestore_romeo]

I very much enjoyed her second trilogy more than the first! It's more streamlined, very clever, and sticks with the same set of characters and lets them grow. I remember liking the first book of her first trilogy, but then it felt more like interconnected books in the same world rather than a series and the other two left me cold.

[dolorosa_12]

Reading this book was a really weird experience for me, because of my own personal history.

I was born in New York, but have zero memory of the place, because my (Australian) parents who were working there for five years, including the year of my birth, left very shortly thereafter for Australia. I grew up in Australia, and immigrated to the UK as an adult. Apart from a handful of very brief trips as a tourist when I was a child, I have not set foot in New York since the year of my birth, and the last time I was there was more than twenty years ago. My parents loved the time they lived in New York, and fell in love with the city (but never wanted to live in the US long-term, and certainly didn't want to raise children there), and so I grew up with their romantic, starry-eyed reminiscing about the city as a kind of background noise — but obviously my impression of the city is based on what it was like, for them, in the 1980s. So reading the book was a mixture of getting the really obvious references and allusions (if they lined up with things that matched my parents' experiences) and lots of other stuff, particularly about the boroughs in which they had never lived, making sense, but being a bit more distant from my (secondhand) experiences of the city.

I'm someone with a deep sense of place, and who falls deeply in love with the cities in which I live, and as a result I tend to really enjoy fiction written from a similar place of deep love, and sense of place. Obviously that shines through beautifully in The City We Became. But the exceptionalism, and the lack of curiousity and depth with which other cities were treated really grated on me. I don't object to stories deeply grounded in one city (I love the Rivers of London books, for example), but to be honest it would have been preferable if Jemisin didn't introduce any other city personifications at all, rather than the superficial clichés that we got instead. Although I suppose that is accurate for a certain type of New Yorker for whom all other places pale in insignificance before the perceived complexity of New York...

it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?

As you say, this really didn't sit well with me.

[skygiants]

That is definitely a fascinating perspective to come at this book from! (I was also born in New York without growing up there, with parents who were deeply attached to the city, to the point that it felt like almost an inevitability that I was going to go there after college -- but it's quite different to do that from very near than very far.)

[aberration]

Lynne & me after reading this review -

Her: I don't know, I can get why the author would want to write something really praising NYC since it gets put down so much
Me: New York doesn't get put down a lot
Her: Doesn't it? I feel like it does
Me: You've lived in Pennsylvania and Boston
Her: ... touché

[skygiants]

sjdfdjs;fjkd;salkthe ACCURACY

[chestnut_pod]

I'm West Coast Bitter about New York in general, so the "it's just so special and unique" did grate, but I largely could still enjoy it except…

The Latin Americanist in me was and remains furious about the truly blatant US-centrism and anti-indigeneity (ironic, considering the Bronx) inherent in this concept that NYC was the second "New World" city to Awaken. What the heck happened to all the major indigenous cities that didn't actually just disappear into thin air after colonialism? What about Cusco, Cajamarca, all these cities that have been continuously inhabited since well pre-Colón? They didn't just go away, and they were not destroyed. The destruction, murder, and relocations of their indigenous populations were devastating, and some cities, like Tenochtitlán, were indeed fully razed, but many others survived and changed and in several cases persisted as bases of indigenous power and safety within the colonial system right up to the present day. So much of the book is about how cities are fluid and shift and change over time, and the absolute destruction of agency it is to just assume that indigenous metropolitan cultures failed to survive colonization is enraging. They did survive; they are still surviving. I will never believe that NYC is alive but Cusco isn't.

If for the sake of argument we have to submit to that old lie that all indigenous civilizations in the U.S. were wiped out and left no direct connection to the modern world, then I can still quibble with the fact that NYC is only the second city in the Americas to find its avatar. Just off the very top of my head, the Spanish-founded cities of Lima, La Habana, Ciudad de México, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, Quito, Buenos Aires, and Santo Domingo were all founded a century or more before NYC. In an effort to be a little less Hispanophone-centric, even Québec is a tad older. Like, great that São Paulo is in the mix, great that Port-au-Prince and New Orleans tried, and I do understand that it's implied that white supremacy killed those last two and they don't get to try again, but uh… the rest of South and North America exists too, had relationships with white supremacy, and kept on existing, sometimes continuously. On a plot level, most of them don't even recent large-scale natural disasters to attach metaphor to. Considering the implicit points made in the narrative about ethnic and cultural diversity's roles in awakening cities, gotta point out that these Latin American cities were almost inherently more diverse than NYC for a good long time, considering the semi-settler nature of Spanish colonialism, mestizaje, the long west coast sans Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Transatlantic Trade. /rant

So I'll read the next book, but I will probably get it from the library rather than buying it, because I am sick and tired of ""Americans"" forgetting that the rest of the Americas exist.

Lord, sorry, ETA again: I don't mean that Jemisin has to feel about these cities anything like what she feels for NYC, or write her book about them too. Of course she doesn't! In fact, she maybe shouldn't! She has tons of reasons to focus on NYC alone, and those are compelling, interesting reasons that make for a wonderful book. But I don't understand why NYC had to be special to the ahistorical exclusion of real, important, untold history elsewhere in the Americas.

[skygiants]

All this is SO FAIR as a critique! Man, I wish so much that there had been more/different worldbuilding around how and why this happens to different cities; in our book group today we were talking a little (partially inspired in thought by some of the comments above also) about how neat this would be, conceptually, as kind of a shared creative work where different authors got to write about their own cities -- someone from Buenos Aires writes the Buenos Aires book, someone from Mexico City the Mexico City book -- and obviously that's an entirely different kind of project, but how cool to let all these cities be just as special, in their own ways!

[silveraspen]

I really appreciate this review! I enjoyed Jemisin’s previous series (multiple) that I’ve read, but I bounced so hard off of this book in the early chapters that I didn’t finish it and am still struggling to articulate why, so this helps.

[skygiants]

I'm glad it was helpful! I've gotten on with her past works to varying degrees but generally enjoyed all of it; this one definitely hit different and for different reasons.

[reconditarmonia]

I remember the "personified cities" thing being a Les Mis fanwork (where Grantaire was the personification of Paris) that effectively became a fandom of its own as people (maybe also the original author but certainly other fans) started writing about other cities. Not that Jemisin must have plagiarized the concept or anything (I doubt either of them was the first), but it's intriguing to me how much of the criticism of the worldbuilding seems to be similar.

[skygiants]

Oh I had COMPLETELY forgotten that but now you mention that I do very vaguely remember that being a thing! The problem of course with any kind of work based on the concept of cities-as-characters is you can really only do it for cities you know extremely well, but then it seems inevitable that broader universe questions start trickling in no matter what city you pick....

[bell]

This is mostly irrelevant, but I love that you wrote "São Paulo" with the tilde. ♥

[skygiants]

Jemisin in the book is careful to do so as well! :D