skygiants: Betty from Ugly Betty on her cell phone in front of a cab (betty on the go)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2020-08-22 09:52 am

(no subject)

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!
starlady: Raven on a MacBook (Default)

[personal profile] starlady 2020-08-23 05:05 am (UTC)(link)
You're nicer than I am. They voted for Trump by 10 points, which sure is a statement of belonging. But maybe not to New York City.

ETA: You're probably right. But I don't think Jemisin is in a very forgiving mood, and I don't want to suggest that she's morally obligated to be, either.

ETA2: This is the whole point of the trilogy though, right? Like, what happens to Staten Island at the end is A Problem. So the question of whether she can come back, or will, or wants to, and whether the others can accept her despite what she's done, is the whole shebang. I'm not being facetious when I say that I bet the ending of the third book depends greatly on the outcome of the election in November.
Edited 2020-08-23 05:09 (UTC)
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-23 07:09 am (UTC)(link)
But in terms of easily swapping out characters/avatars in the structure of the novel without revisions, Manhattan is the obvious candidate for mildly spoilery reasons imo.

I am spoiler-indifferent and curious.
allchildren: appa is alarmed (⇩ ahem)

[personal profile] allchildren 2020-08-23 07:34 am (UTC)(link)
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: (Default)

[personal profile] dimestore_romeo 2020-08-23 10:13 am (UTC)(link)
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: (sister finland)

[personal profile] dolorosa_12 2020-08-23 12:11 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
dolorosa_12: (le guin)

[personal profile] dolorosa_12 2020-08-23 12:27 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2020-08-23 12:32 (UTC)
aberration: NASA Webb image of the Carina nebula (warm and safe and)

[personal profile] aberration 2020-08-23 05:56 pm (UTC)(link)
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
starlady: Raven on a MacBook (Default)

[personal profile] starlady 2020-08-23 11:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Manhattan is an incoming Columbia grad student who we meet arriving at Penn Station (he has to be taking Amtrak or NJ Transit, but it's not clear from where); at the same moment he becomes the avatar, which gives him amnesia about his personal life. Him being an amnesiac gives other characters an excuse to explain things about New York to him/the reader, which is the structural role in the story I alluded to. All the other avatars were born in the city (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island) or have lived there a while (Queens) and don't lose their knowledge of themselves.
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

[personal profile] chestnut_pod 2020-08-24 12:22 am (UTC)(link)
It is! It's going to be a whole series, so perhaps it will course-correct.
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

[personal profile] chestnut_pod 2020-08-24 12:32 am (UTC)(link)
Hear, hear. When you become a metonymy for the city, I feel like you get to have an avatar. Also, to flip it a little bit so it is about the Jews, NYC has the largest single Jewish population in the world. Bigger than Jerusalem, almost as big as the entire Jewish population of Europe. When it's a demographic pole of global Jewry, it seems slightly important to acknowledge, even if it's only about 13% of the city as a whole (same percentage as people of Asian descent, with some overlap, obviously).

I think one can say, as listed above, "Well, then where do you stop?" Maybe the answer is not to stop, have more avatars or make them different than they are.
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

[personal profile] chestnut_pod 2020-08-24 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
Will vouch for the second trilogy (and also the first duology) being very good indeed! Very different from this new series.
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

[personal profile] chestnut_pod 2020-08-24 12:42 am (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2020-08-24 00:47 (UTC)
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[personal profile] genarti 2020-08-24 12:49 am (UTC)(link)
There is a mention that the Americas used to have other cities, which got killed by colonialism and had to start over. (Killed as animate cities, not the people entirely -- one of the POV characters/avatars is Lenape, in fact.) And there's São Paulo, plus a mention of Mexico City as close to avatarization.

So... it's a YMMV thing whether that's enough (and it's definitely not giving us any more nuanced engagement than that with the extremely varied and complex history of indigenous population centers in the Americas), but it's crossing that low bar of "does this US-authored book acknowledge anything indigenous and/or that non-US places in the Americas exist," anyway. It's not really clear what the tipping point of size/age/mythos/etc is for a city to hit avatarization, but... yeah, I do have some questions about the order here. Not to mention the question of how a city dies and what the consequences are, and what the cause-effect relationship for disasters natural and otherwise is.
Edited 2020-08-24 00:58 (UTC)
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)

[personal profile] genarti 2020-08-24 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
My read of it was that they maybe could but only... like... after going through the process again? Maybe not from zero, but, like, all the layers of myth and age and story have to re-accrete, which functionally means not any time soon, at any rate.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-24 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
NYC has the largest single Jewish population in the world.

I do not think I knew that, or perhaps I thought it was no longer true. If asked point-blank five minutes ago, I might have guessed somewhere in Israel. (I would not have guessed anywhere in Europe.) Definitely could do with an avatar.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-24 01:00 am (UTC)(link)
All the other avatars were born in the city (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island) or have lived there a while (Queens) and don't lose their knowledge of themselves.

That's neat and I see the structural relevance. Does he ever recover his past, or he does just move forward as the avatar of Manhattan with whatever other character traits he turns out to develop or display along the way?

(There are plenty of Black Jews and I don't see a lot of them anchoring novels; I would have enjoyed that.)

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