The New York Observer, February 4th, 2008
Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.
We’ve seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:
“Love! Attar of libido in the air! It is 8:45 a.m. Thursday morning in the IRT subway station at 50th Street and Broadway and already two kids are hung up in a kind of herringbone weave of arms and legs, which proves, one has to admit, that love is not confined to Sunday in New York. Still, the odds! All the faces come popping in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through everybody’s old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.”
THERE’S NOTHING NEW under the sun. If you won’t take my word for it, ask Frederick Kaufman, author of A Short History of the American Stomach (Harcourt, $23), who has delved “deep into the bloated underbelly of our history” and come up with the not-quite-categorical assertion that “the United States was and remains one of the most gut-centric and gut-phobic societies in the history of human civilization.” (Who’s our competition? Mr. Kaufman doesn’t say.) This rollicking survey of our national food manias from Cotton Mather (“Look after thy stomach”) to Rachael Ray is amiably peripatetic and inconclusive (unless you count as conclusive the repeated assertion that feast and fast, anorexia and obesity have always been with us); and though it is indeed brief, it doesn’t leave us hungry for more.
