“An Island off the Coast of the United States”
Jenny 3/3

My first confession: The book I want to tell you about isn’t a translation. It’s not written by someone with a culturally/ethnically different (from mine, I mean) background. In fact it’s written by a white guy who used to be a lawyer.

My second confession: I haven’t finished the book yet. I’m only on page 178 of its 300 pages.

My third and final confession: It doesn’t take place somewhere unusual, well, to me, anyway. It’s a
“New York-y” book—takes place in Manhattan, casually mentions the No. 6 train, established restaurants, and characterizations that seem purely New York. But since the late (and missed) Spalding Gray once said that he likes to think of Manhattan “as an island off the coast of the United States,” I pose this, my first blog, as a book that SHOULD be translated into other languages or at least read in English in parts of the country that still fears and feels no connection to New York City.

MAYNARD AND JENNICA by Rudolph Delson is told in thirty-five different voices (with sound effects from cicadas, frogs, crickets and an emergency brake on the aforementioned No. 6 train) all somehow connected to our hero and heroine’s stories. The cast of characters ranges from Jennica’s family to rambunctious kids on a subway car to long-dead relatives of Maynard’s.

The overall effect is of a group of people at a cocktail party, in a lovely but too small room, all trying to give their take on our protagonists, Maynard and Jennica. Much of the book is told in M and J’s voices. They are both eccentrics; Maynard, the outward odd duck and Jennica seemingly conventional but sporting a variety of neuroses. Theirs is a love story of two difficult people finding each other in the vibrant and complicated city. I find myself smiling and occasionally laughing aloud at their foibles, observations, and tiny triumphs over the odds of finding love.

I’m now in the midst of M and J’s reactions to the September 11 attacks on the towers and while the love story remains the focus, the tone of the book has darkened some. Maynard, a native New Yorker, in response to the county’s refrain of “We are all New Yorkers now” freaks out:

“You rubes—you have always coveted citizenship to the capital, and it was denied to you because you were weak. The price of being a New Yorker? You couldn’t afford it. You couldn’t afford—the exuberant vermin; the feral addicts; the mindless thugs; the cosmic filth; the ceaseless noise; the heedless noise; the butchering rents; the roads, the public works, the libraries, rusted and stained and stricken with consumption; the parks, rank and unweeded; the friends who give up and move to San Francisco or San Diego; the usurious whims of fashion; the insults; the decades of bad coffee; the decades of bad plumbing; the appalling poor, wailing at you on the subway; the appalling wealthy, kneeing you in the shops; the blasphemous demolition, year by year, of everything you love; the recidivism of the public schools; the rapacity of the taxes; the spite of the blue laws; the indignity! Or—the dignity! Not a one of you can afford the emotional tax of not being as discriminating or worldly as your neighbors! You failures couldn’t last here a week!”

And while Maynard’s polemic stinks of superiority and condescension, there is a tiny part of me that fesses up to feeling this pride in choosing and loving living in this ever so difficult city. I wonder how many of us, worldwide, identify strongly with the place, town, city, state, province, territory, or whatever, we live and whether Planetbookgroupie might be a place to look at books that open and explore those places and the differences and more important similarities that we all share.

Check out MAYNARD AND JENNICA, it may make you smile and possibly check on how much rentals are on the Upper West Side.

Comments

[Connan]

This selection makes me long for the urine soaked streets of the city. I love that city and I love this entry.