Maybe my concentration skipped a bit – if you’ve read it please do fill me in – there is this bit where Katey takes it in her head to resign? I didn’t really understand why. So, there was a great setting both in time and place, a variety of characters – but where this book dipped was with the plot. Many may be called, but few are chosen – and we are taken through Katey’s interactions with a few: Eve, her roommate Tinker Grey, their mutual friend, Wallace, a fine upstanding citizen Dickie, a romantic interlude and Anne Grandyn, the twist in the plot. She goes to bars symbolic of various immigrant communities, she lives with the working class, socializes with the rich, works with the media and manages to rub shoulders with a large array of people. It is a novel about New York more than it is about Katey, our protagonist. This novel is entirely dependent on its setting. The narrator, visiting the exhibition in the 60s is swept back to her youth and the book is an account of her life in 1938. This was all to introduce a “chastened” society, captured (in real life) by Walker Evans in a photographic collection: ‘Many Are Called”. I thought the first couple of pages were genius – especially the parallels between Manhattan in the 1930s and the Manhattan of 9/11 and beyond – very subtly done.
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May 2023
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