New York has meant many things to people through the years, particularly writers. From Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener to Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, New York in literature has come across as a city of power, beauty, confusion and tragedy, and one that can both enchant and destroy.
Here are three great New York novels, listed in chronological order:
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence shows a bygone city of wealth and narrow tolerance. Set in the 1870s, The Age of Innocence gives us a glimpse into the mansions of New York’s most powerful families of the time. The story focuses on Newland Archer, a young lawyer struggling to choose between the monied and traditional New York he’s been born into, and another freer world he’s never had a chance to explore. The conflict is heightened by his attraction to his wife’s cousin Ellen Olenska, who has lived in Europe and picked up unconventional attitudes, and who is also on the verge of a possible scandalous divorce.
Newland soon begins to feel suffocated by a group he once took pride in belonging to, and even though Ellen is also a member of this elite clan, her actions place her in an unfavorable light. New York society of this era spends most of its energies keeping up a defense against those who don’t belong: minorities, divorcees, free-thinkers, or the dreaded "new money."
Director Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence deftly uses Wharton’s text as narration to explain the complex social customs. The book is full of such unique information, from the brownstone homes that look like they’re covered with “cold chocolate sauce” to the terrapin with Roman punch served at dinner parties. We certainly don’t want to see a return of this hypocritical and snobbish New York, but it still makes almost sumptuous reading.
The Blacker the Berry
Harlem Renaissance author Wallace Thurman’s 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry deals with the issue of skin color and discrimination. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” is an old folk saying used ironically here, because Thurman’s heroine Emma Lou Morgan has a dark complexion and experiences increased prejudice as a result. Emma Lou makes her way from Boise, Idaho to 1920s Harlem hoping to find opportunity, but unfortunately the concept of shades of blackness exists in Harlem too. Better jobs are reserved for lighter-skinned girls, and certain men tend to prefer females of “less” color. As one Harlem dandy notes about Emma Lou and why he’s not in the least bit interested: “I don’t haul no coal.”
Worse yet is how Emma Lou feels about her own skin tone, and how her family has taken pride in avoiding darker prospective husbands or wives and becoming “whiter” with each generation. Therefore Emma Lou is fixated on making herself look whiter and avoiding other dark-skinned people. Instead of celebrating her “luscious black complexion,” she is frustrated because it refuses to change “despite bleachings, scourgings and powderings”.
Beyond Emma Lou’s struggle for racial identity, Thurman gives us a firsthand look into 1920s Harlem nightclubs and parties, and the interactions between African Americans and whites in one of the few New York neighborhoods of the time where both races mingled socially.
The Electric Michelangelo
Sarah Hall’s novel The Electric Michelangelo is about Coney Island in the 1930s and beyond, with its main character Cy Parks leaving the seaside British town of his childhood to work as a tattoo artist in New York. Besides depicting a world of carnies and other curious characters, Hall shows Cy’s passion for his craft and how despite the tough nature of many of his patrons, he is able to work with the vulnerable canvas of human skin. Cy’s skill and the tattoos he inks permanently onto people also make us think deeper about the art of tattooing, and how men and women seem compelled to mark their bodies with symbols of love, memory, or just outright defiance. Comic, poetic, sometimes violent, The Electric Michelangelo is a strange and gripping read about the lost world along the boardwalk, and how what’s worn upon the skin may tell what lies deeper within the soul.
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The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (Dover Thrift Edition, 1997)
The Blacker the Berry – Wallace Thurman (Touchstone Books, 1996)
The Electric Michelangelo – Sarah Hall (Harper Perennial, 2005)
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