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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 was written over nearly 3
it calls to mind decades, beginning in the
the then early 1940s -- things get
contemporary increasingly grim, and
genre of also more fantastic --
screwball comedy as though he needed to
-- except that retreat from the factual
it's clearly (Young Horatio is in order to deal with the
written by a very puzzled when reality of the war years.
homosexual the man he's just
anarchist met refrains from The author of the
intellectual. hitting on him -- book's introduction
he has to break (Harold Rosenberg, in
At the outset, our the ice himself). the Vintage edition)
hero is a young calls it an "abstract
boy, who has autobiography", which
escaped ever going is close enough I
to school, indeed suppose.
escaped "society"
in general, by The introduction
sneaking in and also insists
destroying his that it is not
school admission allegory, but in
records before they places it sure
could be filed: he seems like it --
learns the ways of the twin
the city on his brother's Droyt
own, scrambling and Lefty learn
through the to fly, and
streets. piroutte over
the sea, hand
clasped in
Goodman hand...
names him
"Horatio I was almost through
Alger". this 500 page book
before it dawned on me
what it really is:
This is not just a tale an epic prose poem.
of an "urchin", but a
"defense of urchinism". SANE_AS_HAMMERS
(As someone
else has
put it,
don't
remember
who.)
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 doubt,
some sort of fairy though it's possible.)
tail -- reinforced
by the use of
repetitious
language, however 13CLOCKS
strangely convoluted
"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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