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!
lirazel: Dami from Dreamcatcher reading ([music] you and i)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 03:06 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
lirazel: Scully standing in front of Mulder rolling her eyes with the text UGH above her head ([tv] seriously mulder?)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, I definitely thought about Boston and Philadelphia! Not to mention the many, many cities in Latin America that pre-date New York by quite a lot!
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)

[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)
lirazel: Anne Shirley from the 1985 version of Anne of Green Gables walking away from the camera through an autumnal landscape ([tv] a world where there are octobers)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-24 01:43 pm (UTC)(link)
That's so weird, though, because Mexico City is so much older than NYC! Even if you assume that once Tenochtitlan was destroyed by the Spanish, the old avatar had to die and you start the process all over again, Mexico City still has at least a century on NYC!

I just can't stop pulling the threads of this one--sorry!
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

[personal profile] chestnut_pod 2020-08-25 05:48 am (UTC)(link)
My little Latin Americanist heart is just mad that Cusco isn't alive, and nor are any of the other cities which remained bases of indigenous power and relative safety through the colonial and national periods of Latin America. Indigenous metropolitanism didn't just vanish! Cultural continuity didn't just end! Presently-Hispanophone America had a different relationship to its colonizers than Anglo- and Lusophone America! Indigenous people have agency, actually, and some darn cool cities that persisted through colonization as centers of culture! Which, honestly, a minimum of research would show. So my mileage is pretty low on this one, alas.
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)

[personal profile] raven 2020-08-22 04:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh I am fascinated by those questions, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
lirazel: Lix Storm from The Hour works on film ([tv] got no bloody film)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:13 pm (UTC)(link)
And it's so easy to keep going with it--what about ancient cities? Are their avatars dead? Or is there a lady hanging out by herself in Machu Picchu? What happened to Tenochtitlan and Quito when they were conquered by the Spanish? Did their avatars change? There are just so many possibilities!!!!
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2020-08-22 04:35 pm (UTC)(link)
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??
sovay: (Rotwang)

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-22 08:05 pm (UTC)(link)
And how about Si'an, China, the capital of the Tang Dynasty back in the day??

I would love to know what happens to avatars of cities that have not been dramatically destroyed, but have just sort of drifted away from centrality.
lirazel: Lucrezia Borgia from the TV show The Borgias looks over her shoulder ([tv] like a renaissance painting)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes! Does the avatar change as the city does? How does it reflect the major major changes many cities go through?
likeadeuce: (genius)

[personal profile] likeadeuce 2020-08-22 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
sovay: (Claude Rains)

one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-22 08:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Is your icon of Liev Schreiber? What is your icon of Liev Schreiber from?
Edited 2020-08-22 20:06 (UTC)
likeadeuce: (genius)

Re: one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] likeadeuce 2020-08-22 08:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, and it's RKO 281, a TV movie from a while ago where he plays Orson Welles. Seeing the snow globe is a lightbulb moment re: his inspiration for the film and I thought it was shot in a compelling way so I made a screencap of it/ thought it was a good semi-ironic user pic for thinky posts :D D:
sovay: (Claude Rains)

Re: one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-22 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Seeing the snow globe is a lightbulb moment re: his inspiration for the film and I thought it was shot in a compelling way so I made a screencap of it/ thought it was a good semi-ironic user pic for thinky posts

Thank you! I like Liev Schreiber and I like your semi-ironic usage.
likeadeuce: (Default)

Re: one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] likeadeuce 2020-08-22 08:19 pm (UTC)(link)
yes, long time fan -- I saw him at an early screening of Everything is Illuminated but was too discombobulated to ask anything during the very short/ informal Q&A :)
likeadeuce: (Default)

Re: one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] likeadeuce 2020-08-22 08:20 pm (UTC)(link)
oh and also saw him on Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway but he didn't stage door, so we saw him walking out the front of the theater toward Times Square VERY QUICKLY. one of these days...
sovay: (Claude Rains)

Re: one hundred percent off-topic

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-22 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
one of these days...

I have never seen him in person! Godspeed.
lirazel: Abigail Masham from The Favourite reads under a tree ([film] reading outside)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:16 pm (UTC)(link)
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

Yes, that is very much how I feel just reading the descriptions about it!
dimestore_romeo: (Default)

[personal profile] dimestore_romeo 2020-08-22 06:36 pm (UTC)(link)
These are SUCH good questions.
lirazel: Anya from the animated film Anastasia in her fantasy ([film] dancing bears painted wings)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you! There are so many more if you keep thinking about it! Honestly, this would be a fantastic idea for one of those multi-author fantasylands they used to write back in the day like Borderlands or Wild Cards. Get a bunch of different writers to write about their own favorite cities or just about cities they think would have an interesting story.
sovay: (Rotwang)

[personal profile] sovay 2020-08-22 08:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Or what happens to an avatar when a city is destroyed?

This is also more or less immediately where I went and is the sort of thing I would want a sequel to answer, although I have no idea if this book is supposed to have a sequel.
lirazel: Final shot of the OT3 from Man from UNCLE ([film] not having a very special day)

[personal profile] lirazel 2020-08-22 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, this kind of worldbuilding could go in so many fascinating directions!
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.