(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

[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 ...

[lirazel]

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]

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.

[lirazel]

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]

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.