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EMPIRE_CITY
June 26, 2006
Rev: August 5, 2006
Paul Goodman's novel, "The Empire City".
(1942-1959,
Ye gods, what an exhausting book! all page numbers
Vintage trade paperback
Monumental, dense, strange. edition, April 1977)
I'm not sure what I expected from Goodman --
Social Realism, I suppose -- but it's
difficult to say what this book even *is*...
Some sort of surreal social satire?
In later sections -- this
The beginning of it was written over nearly 3
calls to mind the then decades, beginning in the
contemporary genre of early 1940s -- things get
screwball comedy. increasingly grim, and
Except that it's (Young Horatio is also more fantastic --
written from the very puzzled when as though he needed to
definitely uncloseted the man he's just retreat from the factual
point of view of a met refrains from in order to deal with the
homosexual anarchist hitting on him; reality of the war years.
intellectual. Horatio is forced
to break the ice
At the outset, our himself). The author of the
hero is a young book's introduction
boy, who has (Harold Rosenberg, in
escaped ever going the Vintage edition)
to school, indeed calls it an "abstract
escaped "society" autobiography", which
in general, by is close enough I
sneaking in and suppose.
destroying his
school admission
records before they The introduction also
could be filed: he insists that it is not
learns the ways of allegory, but in
the city on his places it sure seems
own, scrambling like it -- the twin
through the brother's Droyt and
streets. Lefty learn to fly,
and piroutte over the
Goodman sea, hand clasped in
names him hand...
"Horatio
Alger". I was almost through
this 500 page book
This is not just a tale before it dawned on me
of an "urchin", but a what it really is:
"defense of urchinism". an epic prose poem.
(I can't remember SANE_AS_HAMMERS
who said that.)
I thought I might pair this
book with Lawrence Block's
"Small Town" (some sort of
post-9/11 hymn to New York,
I believe), but instead "The
Empire City" reminds me far
more of Ed Sanders "Fame and
Love in New York".
There's that same breezy,
off-kilter, loose grasp of And for me, there
the real... it is not are hints of
unserious, though it's all Delany in that
very funny, in many senses prose...
of the word.
(Delany, I know
read Goodman;
The sense of reading Sanders I would
some sort of fairy have guessed not,
tail -- reinforced though it's
by the use of possible.)
repetitious
language, however
strangely convoluted
13CLOCKS
"Horace, who used to have a little anticipatory
smile, now wore a little participatory smile,
a little debauched, but very pure."
-- p. 263
Section 3, Chapter 15, "Fires",
Part III of Book 2: "The State of Nature"
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