(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.

[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.)

[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.

[lirazel]

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

[tree_and_leaf]

Which makes me realise that Aaronovich's "Rivers of London" is a lot smarter about "avatars" (though his are tied to rivers, not cities). Pretty much any river humans interact with can have one; sometimes they die or are reborn for various historically contingent reasons, but while the novels are focussed on London, there's no suggestion that London is the most special, unique city EVAR!*

He also manages to suggest how the Rivers have changed as the city has changed around them, which it doesn't sound like Jemsin does either?

* Well, Peter, the narrator, probably does believe this, but it's not incompatible with him recognising that magic can and does happen elsewhere.

[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!

[skygiants]

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

[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.

[raven]

The very simple question I would want to ask is why they are anglophone cities with large white populations. HMMM.

[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.

[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.

[asakiyume]

The whole notion of "city" and boundaries seems not entirely thought out. London today encompasses areas that weren't London back in the 1600s, and thinking again of Tokyo or any modern city, where the city ends can be hard to define. I mean: it can be defined legally or jurisdictionally, but what people **feel** is the city will be different.

[asakiyume]

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

[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.

[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.

[gramarye1971]

From the perspective of someone who has written a fair amount of Hetalia, I think the aspect I would want to distinguish here is the idea of human characters as avatars. The characters in Hetalia are not human, for all they appear to be so. They exist on an entirely different timespan from humans, a fact that the Hetalia canon does explore on occasion. It's also suggested that the Hetalia characters don't really have free will of their own, at least when it comes to decisions made in their name or things that happen to them (going to war, getting "married" to another nation, etc.). This book sounds like it takes pre-existing humans and makes them avatars/personifications even though they're still humans, with human lifespans and decision-making processes -- which presents an entirely different set of complications.

To some extent, I think I prefer the concept of "this avatar is a human-looking personification akin to a Greek god, however much of a hand-wavey walking stereotype" to "this actual human character gets to be the avatar because they are the Single Most Representative Human of their locality". Admittedly, this is probably a gross oversimplification of the book's idea, so apologies if I've missed the mark.

[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??

[davidgillon]

I've just read "The October Man", the Rivers of London novella set in Germany with German characters, and Morgane, the baby goddess of the Mosel, is emphatic in pointing out she speaks "French, German, and Luxemburgish" - so clearly multiculturalism is something that comes automatically with being a river that contacts many places.

There's even the Spirit of the Grand Union Canal in one of the stories in the collection Tales from the Folly (Tyburn is emphatic she doesn't count as a goddess, but that's Ty being Ty).

[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!)

[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....)

[asakiyume]

But of course that rapidly gets infinitely fractal, the character of this street as opposed to the character of that street.... ---YES! And/but that's something that could (should?) be acknowledged? I mean there's something fractal about the nature of identity in general, from "We're all Homo sapiens" on one end to "I'm the only me" on the other.

I think I'll enjoy reading this and chewing over these problems :-)

[skygiants]

To be clear, once the human-avatars are 'born' and become their cities, they become (I think?) functionally immortal -- there's reference to the avatar of Hong Kong living through the Opium Wars, for example -- and things that impact their city impact them, but also vice versa (São Paulo gets cosmically punched and it causes a small earthquake.) So there is a fair amount of complexity/ambiguity there in how much the avatars decision-make for/act upon the city, and how much is the city acting through them, if that makes sense?

But still, in a lot of ways I like the concept of 'this avatar is a human-looking personification rather than The Person Who Got Chosen' better too, because it allows for that avatar to be sort of all things to all people within its borders at once -- it feels more fluid and like it has more room to encompass wide variety of perspectives it contains. On the other hand, in practice Hetalia (from what I know of it) paints nations in extremely broad strokes and The City We Became is by its nature a lot less cartoony and more interested in digging down into the complexity and inherent contradictions of any attempt at defining local 'character', if that makes sense.

[dimestore_romeo]

I wasn't going to write a mini essay...but then I had a lot of feelings.

I would have loved more of Bel, but also, yes, the dialect definitely isn't right. (Most of the dialect words Bel was using were probably more for someone a gen older than him, and they didn't...match up together, I guess? But the most egregious award goes to when Bel starts tossing pound notes. Which haven't existed since 1988.)

So because of that - how much Bel's dialogue was out of whack - I felt I didn't get enough of his essence as a character, when there are so many little details that hint that I would love him! But because of how intensely stereotypical his dialogue was he ended up reading as a flat character to me, because he didn't sound like a real person at all.

This is, you know, the teeniest tiniest gripe in a big book. But it's made my confidence shake, a bit, because if future books are set in other cities then...are other international readers going to get the same vibe? Is the premise going to work, going global, when NY and its characters are so lovingly painted?