Wonderful Town, Ed. David Remnick

USPS in Chicago, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Men, it appears, don’t like to read fiction. To serve them, The New Yorker contains fiction seeminlgy written expressly for men, that is, devoid of anything that might arouse passion or provoke an unsettling emotion; fiction written as if by scientists.

Look at Nerve, the sexiest dating site in NYC. Note that a good proportion of the men advertise themselves as readers of The New Yorker, as a testament to their intellect and literary leanings.

But look closer and you’ll find their New Yorkers piled high in a dusty corner of their bedroom next to the furniture they’ve designed and built themselves and 600 thread count sheets, carefully arranged to woo women looking for literate, sensual men who are good with their hands.

The romantic ambitions of these men are apt to go the way of their literary aspirations; a triumph of ennui over achievement.

To save room in your bedroom, a selection of short stories from The New Yorker has been collated in Wonderful Town so, in the unlikely event your date asks what you last read, you can talk with the necessary confidence and intellectual swagger. But an admission that you don’t read it because you don’t get on with the font is likely to reward you with relief and probably a snog at the end of the night.

Whether you choose to go back to theirs to inspect their (alleged) stack of New Yorkers in person is entirely up to you.

 Where to read: Bryant Park Reading Room in summer or New York Public Library in winter

I Just Want My Pants Back, David J. Rosen

Some books give you cultural insight or emotional epiphanies; I Just Want My Pants Back  makes you want to have casual sex in a fridge and saunter home insouciantly with a knowing smile and a new pair of jeans slung low about your hips.  Funny and poignant, it’s pure dick lit. Read it.

Where to read: a cafe on the Lower East Side with a large coffee and a cupcake.

Hack, Melissa Plaut

The prerequisites for a NY cab journey are a) a strong stomach b) nerves of steel and c) a map. The last is most important if your intended destination is off the Manhattan grid. Be prepared to sweet talk/offer to marry your driver and then give detailed directions if, God forbid, you want to travel across a bridge.

In the midst of a quarter-life crisis, Melissa Plaut decided to become a yellow cab driver in NYC. Hack is her account of two years on the road as a cabbie, which is by turns frustrating and frightening.

As a rookie driver, she rails against the allegations that cab drivers are responsible for most accidents in Manhattan, but despite falling victim to several such incidents herself, she fails to revise her views.  This lack of self awareness is disappointing as she gives the impression that she felt intellectually superior to her colleagues at the Queens cab garage.  She also spends rather more time complaining than is entertaining for the reader – especially as her background gives her opportunities that  are not open to her fellow cabbies, should she choose to take them; self-pity in the privileged is not that attractive.

Although it reveals more about the author than she might have intended, she generally describes her fellow cabbies with warmth and insight.

Where to read: on the A train to Brooklyn

Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, Ed Hamilton

The Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street has built its quirky reputation on its infamous residents, who read like a Who’s Who of the 20th century art, literature and music scenes.  This book,  chronicles the lives of some of the more recent inhabitants (who more often read like inmates) of  the hotel , but it’s a depressing and  increasingly irritating read.

The author sets out to write about the darker side of the hotel and its residents, (which I like), but there is no real narrative (which I can live with) and the portraits of his fellow residents are unsympathetic and humourless (which I can’t). Even the hotel, which should be a character in its own right, isn’t particularly well evoked beyond repeated references to people in various states of mental imbalance “wandering these halls”.

This misanthropy seems to extend his girlfriend, who he credits with the idea for the book, much of the research, all while holding down a stressful job to support them both, yet she doesn’t merit a co-author credit. For some reason she’s introduced as Debbie in the introduction and afterword, but is referred to as Susan all the way through the book.

The author describes the book as  “a mix of history and biography, myth and legend, fiction…and nonfiction, memoir and anecdote”, and on reading, the book I agree that it doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to be. When there are so many great  characters living in the hotel  shoudn’t be necessary to throw in some fictional ones.

Although the book fails to give us any real insights into the Chelsea Hotel, it does give us the portrait of a particular type of New Yorker, who comes to NYC from a small town, aligns themselves with whoever they think is ‘coolest’ in the hope that they become cool by association, and then proceeds to look down on everyone else – fellow Chelsea artists (who, as described, seem to have very little talent between them),  hipsters (no sense of irony there), people from (God forbid) ‘the outer boroughs’ and people working in the ‘commercial’ arts such as film, rather than starving  for their ‘art’.

The author slates Ethan Hawke’s directorial debut Chelsea Walls, but interestingly, the criticisms levelled at the movie could equally apply to Legend of the Chelsea Hotel, which seems to be some kind of poetic justice.