New York Books

I recently read two books about New York. One book was too little and the other was too big.

The little book is barely 130 pages long. The title, like the book itself, is too small: New York Sketches. What does it mean? What is it about? The reader is saved by noticing the author’s name: E. B. White, the great New Yorker writer.    

I was surprised to learn that the book is not really about The New Yorker at all, but about White himself. He writes about small events in his daily life, in a way that charms and attracts. Included are a number of poems:   

Communiter—one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;       
A man who shaves and takes the train
And then rides back to shave again.  

Other sections scamper by, on topics such as taxi cabs, mollusks, graveyards, and the Rockefeller skating pond. One gets the impression that the volume, compiled and introduced by Martha White, the author’s granddaughter, was made up of the last thirty-nine fragments she could find. I expect that her next E. B. White book will be blank.

The big book is over five hundred pages long. Even the title is too big, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture.   

Were the Village Voice writers really freaks? Based on the quoted writers, I’d have to say no. They were mostly underpaid and overly ambitious, an unusual though not especially freakish group that came and went at odd hours and for weird reasons.   

The author, Tricia Romano, has assembled over two hundred short interviews which, when added together, equal lots of words but probably not the kind of long book I was hoping for.