A captivating homage to the city and the restless souls inhabiting it.
A woman’s besotted affair with New York is celebrated in these exuberant writings.
Australian-born novelist Emanuel’s rambling memoirs of her sojourns in New York and her short fiction set in the city blend together into a love letter that views Gotham’s iconic scenes and experiences from off-kilter angles. Chief among these are Emanuel’s wanderings through the city’s art scene, viewing everything from classical sculpture to Rembrandt self-portraits to avant-garde gallery offerings. (“I can only think of kneepads,” she remarks of a performance piece in which the artist crawled across a concrete floor strewn with glass shards.) She also got distracted by a man’s jiggling leg during a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera; went on many a shopping expedition (at one boutique, she absentmindedly shoplifted a purse); ruminated on John Lennon at the Dakota and Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern; encountered celebrated street performer The Naked Cowboy, clad only in undies, on 42nd Street during a blizzard; battled a balky MetroCard reader; savored the fish section at Zabar’s food nirvana; and listened patiently to the yackety anecdotes of natives. (“As I gets out of the car, I closes the door and my coat catches in the door. Ira the stupid klutz starts driving away.”) Later sections of the book feature flash fiction, also about women wandering New York, drawn by tenuous romantic leads but mainly just taking in the city’s aura. A final story removes itself to Sydney to plumb the fraught relationship of an insecure art student and her melodramatic friend—before returning to New York for melancholy reflection on the friendship’s tragic demise.
Emanuel’s feuilletons unfold as a swirling kaleidoscope of impressions that add up to an urban odyssey reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus’ passage through Dublin in Ulysses. Her gorgeous, evocative prose renders even a subway annoyance as a standout image: “In the seat opposite us, sits the exact opposite of tantalizing, a stoner ogre slumps half asleep, legs sprawled, a claw hammer poking out of his pocket.” As the city emerges through her layered atmospherics, Emanuel conveys the dynamic of loneliness and longing playing out in them. (“In the shadow of a fifth-floor walk-up, a chain-smoking figure presses his face to the window pane. The tip of his cigarette smouldering red. We face each other at twilight. Two lone voyeurs. Me eating a Twinkie and him slouching on the razor’s edge. Oh Jesus.”) At times the writing breaks free into a surreal lyricism that’s right on the edge of incoherence—“A film, a robot, the city of rationality remembers me giddy as a goddess and maggot man dancing on stained carpet, punching the jukebox as he upends packets of chips into my open mouth of that Sunday, do I whisper, Come home with me”—yet somehow makes sense. Anyone who has lived in—or dreamed of—New York will find here an engrossing portrait of its mundane magic.
A captivating homage to the city and the restless souls inhabiting it.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955196-79-6
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.
A biography of American late-night television’s biggest star.
Zehme, author of biographies of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, had a lifelong love of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. In 1973, at age 15, Zehme was “already a full-blown Carson fanboy.” As a reporter for Rolling Stone, he tried unsuccessfully to secure an interview to coincide with Carson’s 1992 retirement after a 30-year run. In 2002, Zehme, now with Esquire, “gets extended face time” with the star for a piece to mark 10 years since Carson’s departure. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005, Zehme began work on a biography. The task was overwhelming—“there was always more to be gleaned”—even before Zehme’s 2013 diagnosis of stage 4 colorectal cancer. He died in 2023, having finished only the first three-quarters of this biography. Thomas, a longtime Chicago arts reporter, has completed the book in time for Carson’s 2025 centenary. The result is an admiring work that nonetheless acknowledges the lows as well as the highs of Carson’s life—he had three divorces—and career, from his ill-fated 1955 variety program The Johnny Carson Show, to his 1957-62 stint as host of the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, to his taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar in 1962. It’s easy to tell where Zehme left off and Thomas took over. The tone changes dramatically, from Zehme’s florid style to Thomas’s drier approach. Those florid passages, which make up most of the book, are baroque in the extreme, with lines like, “And so, like sun and moon and oxygen and ionosphere, Johnny Carson was always there, reliable and steadfast.” Despite the purple prose, the result is an entertaining look at not only a unique figure in 20th-century popular culture but also a bygone era in American television.
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781451645279
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
