The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 January 2014
by Pete Hamill
There are eight million stories in the naked city. Pete Hamill, author and New York raconteur, has made much of his living telling some of those stories. He observes the city as it is, how it sits in the world, and he looks back upon what the city was like in his youth. His is a view heavily weighted with the nostalgia for lost landscape, the old bars where working-class men from the docks and the newspapers hung out after long days and nights of work. These were his glory days, the romantic rough-and-tumble streets of New York in the middle of the 20th century, especially the war years and after. Hamill's is a richly populated landscape of memory, nostalgic and elegiac. But he also sees the city as it is, and accepts that today is the heyday for the young prosperous people who populate its busy streets. This novel is full of Hamill's love of people, of women, of New York, and of his memories of that city. It takes place over one long eventful day. There are several intertwined individual stories, each full of memory, tragedy, and longing. Arguably the main character, Sam Briscoe is a newspaperman at the end of the age of newspapers. He works with a crew of dedicated reporters and writers who have not yet given in to the less serious world of internet news. (One of Hamill's jokes is to name another of these reporters Matt Logan, a reference to Briscoe and Logan (Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth) in Law & Order. The book may have many other such jokes, but this reader didn't always pick up on them.) It is the start of the work day for an afternoon paper, the New York World, which is to say, midnight. The book jumps from one scene to another during the night, as we are introduced to a socialite raising money for the library, a cop on the terrorism task force, an amputee soldier rolling down Manhattan, a young radicalized American Muslim, a wise-ass blogger, an aged artist living in the Chelsea hotel, and several others. Hamill weaves their stories together and gives them all their own histories and motivations. All the while, he looks over the city, particularly the late night city, and sees its changes, the shadows of its history. There is much to drive this fast-moving narrative, death and destruction affect many of its characters. Briscoe will experience more than his fair share of loss. The World may be coming to an end. Hamill portrays the city's reslience, though, the energy that ties together the many cultures that weave together New York's cultural landscape. It is an elegiac tale, but also one of hope and endurance. Change and loss are inevitable, but here, says Hamill, is also life, love and strength. It is a love-letter to the city, to the lost culture of the old-style newsroom, to the people who gave the city its color and character, the people who drive it still.
Also by Pete Hamill: [Downtown: My Manhattan]