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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Novels of the City

at the scarwash

19:28 / 19.08.02

I've been thinking for a while about the idea of novels that deal with a city (or cities) in such a way that the very structure of the work is inextricably meshed with the particular urban environment described. Novels like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Berlin Alexanderplatz by whomever, Ulysses, China Mieville's works, Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, etc. I guess that what these novels share is a narrative wholly defined by the character and space of their respective cities, characters who are shaped by the historical forces and cultural traditions of their enviroments, and a great deal of attention payed to the workings between the aspects of the city and the action of the novel. Any thoughts on these works or others? I've been trying to analyze these works in order to look at my own city (Houston, Texas) in a richer way.

19:44 / 19.08.02

Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian made me miss Edinburgh hugely. The whole book is bound up in the city, the politics of the time, and everything that happens is very specific to that city. I can't imagine reading it without knowing Edinburgh and being able to picture where each thing happened, although I'm sure it's perfectly enjoyable that way.

In fact, looking at things the other way round, I've noticed since moving to London that loads of books are based here. Now I've obviously always read books about London and it didn't matter to me that I knew nothing of these places and where they were in relation to one another. But it does add a whole new pleasure when you recognise where something is set.

20:55 / 19.08.02

Okay, this isn't the greatest novel in the world, but Michael Chabon's Mysteries Of Pittsburgh did that for me. When we went to Pittburgh, I was pointing at everything ("Hey! There's the Wok Inn!").

Same for Iris Murdoch's Under The Net. ("Hey! Take a picture of me on Hammersmith Bridge!")

I wonder how they do it. I have never been able to convincingly write place. But then neither have I ever been satisfied with anything written about Chicago, where I'm from.

It could be that Pittsburgh is not so much about Pittsburgh as it is about nostalgia...

22:31 / 19.08.02

You might want to check out 'Dubliners' by Joyce though i guess you probably already have given your post. Also 'eureka street' by Robert Mcliam Wilson. Very, very funny, it's like a love letter to belfast and an attempt to write about the city as more than just a place where 'the troubles' take place. Wilson's book also to a certain extent addresses issues to do with the 'city bad/country good' binary oppositions that are tied to, particularly in ireland, nationalism/politics etc and, if you go back a few years, the Irish literary revival movement.

at the scarwash

23:13 / 19.08.02

Is the narrative of Eureka Street generated by Belfast? What I mean by that is, do its characters and events feel generated from the fabric of the city like Baroque fractal iterations? That seems to be the closest I can get to describing what I'm after. The Alexandria Quartet, for instance, feels as though its characters are the dreams of the city, fitfully considering the ideas and peoples that make it up. I wish I had a copy at hand to quote the bit on the second page of Justine about the ships turning on themselves in the harbor, the trams shuddering in their lines in the Mazarita, or whatever it is. Bringing in wordplay on the various languages spoken there, references to Valentinian Gnosticism that seem to actually reflect on the story (rather than just sit on top as proof of erudition).

Dubliners is almost there, but the city itself is a bit more in the background.

15:44 / 20.08.02

well, it's not a real city, and it's only a novel in the graphic novel sense, but....

James Robinson's Starman series is truly the story of a city called
Opal City. It's the best loveletter to a particular city I've ever read.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

17:06 / 20.08.02

Pretty much all Iain Sinclair's stuff is inextricably tied to London... and you can feel his love for, and fascination with, the place dripping from every sentence.

Yeah, I know, I always go on about Sinclair... but I just couldn't resist it in this thread.

Tryphena Absent

21:48 / 20.08.02

'The City Not Long After' by Pat Murphy, based on San Francisco after loads of people are killed off by disease, very utopian and just... oh I just wanted to be there.

yawn - thing's buddy

11:43 / 21.08.02

Lanark by Alisdair Gray is all about Glasgow and it's fictional twin, Unthank.

Not read it but those who have can't stop going on about it.

Its also got ilustrations by the author.

23:26 / 22.08.02

'Is the narrative of Eureka Street generated by Belfast? What I mean by that is, do its characters and events feel generated from the fabric of the city like Baroque fractal iterations? '

it seems from your last post that you want something very abstract from your city novels. I don't think 'Eureka Street' fits the bill though testpattern.

09:09 / 23.08.02

Lanark by Alisdair Gray is all about Glasgow and it's fictional twin, Unthank.

A few years since I read it but wasn't it about more about, erm, Lanark. I remember one part about a librarian apprenticeship at the library just round the corner from where I lived at the time. That is what I love most about city novels. When they namecheck places and experiences I know.

Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg has a storyline based around Arthur's Seat the hill (or volcanic plug whatever) in the middle of Edinburgh. Climbing it and just sitting in the grass seemed just that bit cooler after reading that book. Also Muriel Spark - all the Morningside books. Not so much because I liked them but because I used to live opposite the flat where she lived. Irvin Welsh is,obviously,a good one for name checks but the city he lived in and wrote about really wasn't the same as mine. If you know what I mean.

I've always thought it would be fun to go to New York and copy the rambling walks of the lad in Auster's The New York Trilogy.

glowworm_wiggle

18:12 / 23.08.02

i was going to bring up dubliners, but noticed someone else reached that conclusion first...

along similar lines is jhumpa lahiri's interpreter of maladies, except the "city" in question is not a city, but a whole chunk of india.

at the scarwash

22:17 / 23.08.02

Let me ask another question, perhaps one that deserves a new topic somewhere else. Do you get a feeling of a personality from the city you live in? For example, I live in Houston, which to me is a giant idiot amoeba god spreading across southeast Texas, eating everything in its path. For years it paid so much attention to eating things outside its borders that its insides began to decay, ghettoes developing and former business centers atrophying as the white middle class rushed to the newly digested suburbs. A few years before I moved here, various inner city Federal Housing Projects were torn down, sending lower-income citizens out to the fringes of the city. The beast has begun to pay attention to its insides again, and fitful, random spurts of new development are cropping up in its guts. THis is occuring in a manner that does no one any good, and in fact seem to be canceling one another out (the installation of a light rail system intended to sweeten Houston's laughable bid for the Olympics in 12 has virtually destroyed a nascent revitalization of the--relatively--historic Downtown area). This particular beast of urbanism seems to be a bizarre evolutionary dead end, kept alive solely by its great size (4th largest in the US), one that should be politely left to shudder and grunt its way off to an unmourned death.

14:06 / 26.08.02

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities may well be the goods.

01:39 / 27.08.02

Invisible Cities is a glorious book. Though I've harped about how great it is before, Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a very beautiful story about New York City and points north which spans a century. It's like a verbal romance with the city itself.

at the scarwash

03:39 / 27.08.02

Jesus, yes! I've forgotten Invisible Cities! Now to track down which of my ex-girlfriends has it in her slimy clutches (dating amphibians--don't do it kids).

at the scarwash

01:03 / 05.09.02

I don't know if anyone cared but me, but I think I found a book that discusses the relations between cities and citizens in the vague abstract sense I hoped for. It's called Soft City by Jonathan Raban. Very nice. "There was a good reason for Cain, the first murderer, to found the first city" (14), he says in explaining the city as a refuge from the uncertainity of nomadic life. So far he discusses the way that the metropolis forces people to relate to one another in terms of codes and symbols in a way that country or provincial city life. In a large city, identity is mutable and easily concealed; to survive one must come to understand a simple language of personal representation that allows for rapid recognition of potetial allies or threats. It's not really a novel, but it fits what I was looking for.

06:19 / 05.09.02

Michael Moorcock's Mother London.

Jack The Bodiless

13:51 / 05.09.02

Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward - sci-fi ad absurdio to begin with, being set in a ridiculously partioned City covering 70% of the landmass of the country, divided into Neighbourhoods where everyone into a particular thing gets to devote their lives to that thing - from colour co-ordination, through being a workaholic, to bland isolationism. Gradually, you beginto see how the City exists as a construct symbolic of the fractures implicit in the personality of the first person narrator, a man known only as Stark, who troubleshoots across the length and breadth, being at home nowhere, in a City where everyone has a place to be. As the novel loses it's light tone, becoming progressively darker, bleaker and more surreal, so do the events in the City, culminating in what I like to call 'one of those Blade Runner moments...

It's bloody good, by the way.

yawn - thing's buddy

16:57 / 30.09.02

Buk: as I said - I've not read it but i was sure it was about Glasgow -I bow to your wisdom for now, but I reserve the right to think 'it's about Lanark, surely not?' - (not matter how stupid this sounds and may prove to be)

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

17:50 / 30.09.02

I'd like to read a Novel of Detroit. Know any?

yawn - thing's buddy

17:56 / 30.09.02

There's always Robocop: the movie adaptation.

16:45 / 01.10.02

Yawn - Lanark *is* partly set in Glasgow, but I'm not sure that it's about Glasgow and its dystopian alter ego as much as it's about Lanark himself, though of course Glasgow and Unthank are very important in the book. And I have read it.