New York may be, as Colson Whitehead says, “the biggest hiding place in the world,” but still I hightailed it out of there a couple of days before it officially locked down in March. How long ago was that? Who knows. Time told by the calendar is one of the things I seem to have left behind in Brooklyn. I didn’t think I was missing the city, but I must have been wrong, or why would I have picked up, out of all the long-unread books around me, The Colossus of New York, Whitehead’s 2003 fantasia on his home town? 2003—there were phone booths then, as the book occasionally reminds me, but much else about the life led in offices, apartments, subways, streets, parks, stores, dance clubs, cafes, therapists’ offices, taxi cabs, museums and everywhere else seems like what I remember from just before I left a couple of months back. Whitehead is a novelist, and if this book had been tagged a novel it would have been hard to argue, despite the absence of a plot or of characters who exist for more than a couple of sentences at a time. Or it could have been called an essay, although it keeps veering off into fiction and has no consistent “I”—the word “I” is used, but it never seems to particularly point to Colson Whitehead; it always belongs to one of those nameless evanescent almost-characters that emerge and fall back into the book’s essentially collective discourse like waves in the ocean. Really and truly, The Colossus of New York is a sequence of prose poems. Maybe it should have been titled Spleen of New York. Given its date of publication, I had to wonder: Did Whitehead start it before or after the attacks of September 11, 2001? I’ll make a wild guess: that the writing began, maybe vaguely, aimlessly, before the attacks took place, and became clear and necessary enough to coalesce into a book afterwards. The Twin Towers make a quick cameo appearance at the start in the imagination of a Greyhound arrivant but thereafter remain notable by their absence, like the “e” in Georges Perec’s A Void. Some of the little stories abstractly evoked here could have been made here or made anywhere: “It’s nice to have an activity or hobby you can share with your spouse. These two have decided on spite and it has brought them closer together.” But all of them seem specific to places and times specific yet unspecified, what Whitehead calls “the humble places that helped you in ways you cannot understand, that were there for you on certain nights when you had neither friends nor cabdrivers, only keys”—home, in other words. Such places, or memories of them, become all the more precious in the wake of disaster.
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Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York (2003) is published by Anchor Books, New York.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.