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Aug. 22nd, 2020 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsN.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!
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!
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Date: 2020-08-22 05:36 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2020-08-22 05:49 pm (UTC)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??
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Date: 2020-08-22 07:28 pm (UTC)Considering that "New York" has been used as a dogwhistle for "Jewish" since the days of the pre-Codes, I do not think that expecting one New York Jewish avatar is making it all about you.
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Date: 2020-08-24 12:32 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2020-08-24 12:56 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2020-08-24 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 05:05 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2020-08-24 03:23 am (UTC)I absolutely don't think Jemisin is obligated to be forgiving, but the thing about excising Staten Island entirely, just excising it as a part of New York completely and condemning it to its eldritch horror fate, makes me feel like -- okay, to be clear, I don't think actually think Jemisin is doing this, I feel very sure it's going to be more complicated than that as the series goes on -- but you know the inevitable cycle that happens when a Southern state passes some particularly heinous law, and there are a bunch of bad Twitter takes about "well fuck the South, let them screw themselves over, serves them right" and then other people have to come in and remind everyone that there are real people there, who didn't pick this, who have worked against it, who are being screwed over by it? So that's the uneasy feeling with which it left me.
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Date: 2020-08-22 07:33 pm (UTC)I would have bet on Brooklyn as Jewish, personally.
(I have not read this novel: I'm just assimilating the comments.)
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Date: 2020-08-22 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 07:09 am (UTC)I am spoiler-indifferent and curious.
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Date: 2020-08-23 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-24 01:00 am (UTC)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.)