Consider the following passages from the first chapter of Saul Bellow's Herzog. Moses Herzog is riding in a cab through the streets of New York on his way to catch the train to Vineyard Haven:

They made a sweeping turn into Park Avenue and
Herzog clutched the broken window handle. It
wouldn't open. But if it opened dust would pour in.
They were demolishing and raising buildings. The
Avenue was filled with concrete-mixing trucks,
smells of wet sand and powdery gray cement. Crashing,
stamping pile-driving below, and, higher, structural
steel, interminably and hungrily going up into
cooler, more delicate blue. Orange beams hung from
the cranes like straws. But down in the street where
the buses were spurting the poisonous exhaust of
cheap fuel, and the cars were crammed together, it
was stifling, grinding, horrible!

What we see here is as much Herzog as it is New...