TNY weekend reader: God the novelist and his bedbugs, and birds
This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)
A sweet three pages (something of a literary milk n’ cookies) in The New Yorker this week, Henry Roth’s God The Novelist, is a segment “adapted from the almost two-thousand-page unedited novel manuscript that Roth was working on in the early nineteen-nineties.” Its opening paragraphs were particularly a propos for my travels this week. A sample:
“(...) don’t tell ’em about the bedbugs. It distracts ’em. That’s the landlord’s business.â€
“Bedboogs,†I mocked. “There’s no such word.â€
(Yes, I did dutifully lift the mattress at the Meridien Hotel to check for bedbug droppings.) (No, I didn’t find any, contrary to what trends predicted.)
God The Novelist is simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned (it takes place in May 1939). At some moments I imagined everything in sepia tones. Such as this marriage proposal:
She had been typing somebody’s master’s thesis on a portable—to earn extra cash. And when I said I was in love with her, and asked her to marry me, she replied, “I’m sorry. You’re out of luck,†and apparently agitated over a typing error, she slapped at the portable.
Words like “caterwauling,” eptithets like, “rummy bastard,” and “why, you horse’s neck,” and of course the reference to a typewriter provide the Norman Rockwell-ish colors and strokes. Other scenes could be taking place anytime today:
And at Forty-fourth Street, where there was a construction job for a new building going on, He (...) rolled a cigarette out of Bull Durham and admired the excavation that opened below: the wall of rock had just recently been blasted out for foundation, rock in which the long drill grooves still remained. Mica schist, He thought, Manhattan mica schist. Ah, the pristine, naked, sparkling purity of it, come to light after aeons, as if awakening.
If you’re an out of work artist and take pleasure in seeing your seedy but sublime life beneath the point of someone else’s poetic pen, or if you’re lucky enough to be happily and gainfully employed and wonder what it’s like on that romantic other side of the fence, have a look at New York through the eyes of God The Novelist.
May I also suggest Thomas Mallon’s piece on Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Big Bird, which confirms many suspicions about the work and the movie I never dared breach, since I, like everyone else who’s attended junior high school, have been indoctrinated to revere both as sacred Americana.
And anyone interested in birding or bird watching, have a look at John Seabrook’s “Ruffled Feathers,” about the “secret deceptions of a bird-world hero.” It’s a bit like an episode of CSI: Special Ornithology Unit. Page 50 of the paper version of the magazine, not online.
