Five Three Oh
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 30, 2009
Filed Under New York
At 5:30 AM, you know who is truly fearless. Early birds shuffle into the guarded lobbies of fitness centers, jutting their chins and sticking their hands into hoodies not for warmth, but for protection against the unpredictable aperture between the end of night and the promising onset of the sun. A man rattles the locked door outside Starbucks, wanting his quick fix as the workers unpack big metal bins from the fridge and talk shop before putting on a customer-friendly face. A more subtle addict stands outside a diner with a Voice stuffed with bills and hands it over to his seller, who then hands a shopping bag filled with illegal merch, and proceeds to breakfast. Inside the diner, you can just grab the first batch of home fries and catch several snippets of the manager ordering this week’s supplies. The manager’s conversation is in Spanish and the numbers rattled into the phone reveal how his business is doing (not well). Delivery trucks rattle and stop, followed by taxi cabs, a few buses, and the odd automobile or two. Stacks of newspapers form outside newsstands and stores. Security guards are permitted to yawn. Mysterious vans pick up less secure workers at corners, where a few huddled souls begin a long day in Queens or Jersey with payments guaranteed out-of-pocket.
5:30 AM unleashes strange truths. A Duane Reade manager — a middle-aged man with an untrimmed moustache — shouts loudly about how much he enjoys hurting people just after welcoming you through the doors. It’s all about Modern Warfare 2, the latest twitch game making the rounds. He smiles as he talks of gunning down civilians and using bounce grenades to kill a crowd. Urination is more publicly practiced, but the rats are too tired to gnaw on the trash. Temporal minority groups welcome each other. The lonely chat with strangers: some demanding a response to “Good morning” and some looking for a two-minute friend. Social cues are more awkward at this hour. The lonely feel compelled to force intimate questions upon strangers in less than a minute. Requests for change carry a slight delay. No one quite knows the timing because you can’t always tell if someone’s just risen out of bed or about to head to dreamland. You can’t sit on a stoop, but you can bunch your frame near a door. In fact, it’s better that you do. The last thing you need is a property manager jostled before his alarm.
A man sans yarmulke sways in the wayward wind, singing a Jewish hymn. The smell of fresh bread careens from bakeries. The hardcore dog walking crowd, friendlier than the vigilant fitness freaks, conclude their constitutionals. A man takes his shirt off and hangs it over his head just because he can. And the normal sounds are preternaturally minimalist. Thin metal struts squeak in the breeze. The bright bus shelter signs are most visible at this hour. The signs advertise ghastly financial products and mirthless talk show hosts with rum, oversize jaws, but the messages won’t reach the people stirred up at this golden hour. Because this is the time when things are real. At no other time is the city so half-awake yet alive.
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Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Modern Warfare 2 isn’t out for another week. Are we talkin’ pirated here?