MARCH 10 2018 LISTENER 53
1 THE CAGE, by Lloyd
Jones (Penguin Random
House)2 THE ONLY STORY, by
Julian Barnes (Penguin
Random House)3 AOTEAROA: THE NEW
ZEALAND STORY, by
Gavin Bishop (Penguin
Random House)4 THE SUBTLE ART OF
NOT GIVING A F*CK,
by Mark Manson (Pan
Macmillan)5 STILL ME, by Jojo Moyes
(Penguin Random House)6 FIRE AND FURY, by
Michael Wolff (Hachette)7 THE DIARY OF A
BOOKSELLER, by Shaun
Bythell (Profile Books)8 ELEANOR OLIPHANT
IS COMPLETELY FINE,
by Gail Honeyman
(HarperCollins)9 GOOD NIGHT STORIES
FOR REBEL GIRLS, by
Elena Favilli & Francesca
Cavallo (Penguin Random
House)10 LOST CONNECTIONS:
UNCOVERING THE
REAL CAUSES OF
DEPRESSION – AND
THE UNEXPECTED
SOLUTIONS, by Johann
Hari (Bloomsbury)TOP 10 SALES IN
INDEPENDENT
BOOKSHOPS
TOP 10 FILMS
1 BLACK PANTHER
2 FINDING YOUR FEET
3 GAME NIGHT
4 THE GREATEST
SHOWMAN5 LADY BIRD
6 FIFTY SHADES FREED
7 THREE BILLBOARDS
OUTSIDE EBBING,
MISSOURI8 OPERATION RED SEA
9 DARKEST HOUR
10 SONU KE TITU KI
SWEETY©NIELSEN BOOKSCAN; ©MOTION PICTURE DISTRIBUTORS’ ASSOCIATION OF NEW ZEALAND INCby LINDA HERRICKO
f all the sidewalk retailers waiting to
make a buck in New York City, the
cheap-umbrella hawkers are a special set,
opportunists who rely on sudden down-
pours. Money changes hands, the umbrella is
hoisted, a gust destroys it and it joins “the fallen
in this struggle” in trash cans, “abandoned,
black fabric rippling against split chrome ribs”.
The pain of rain in the Big Apple is addressed
in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York,
a reissued collection of essays on his home town.
He soared into the literary stratosphere with his
slave-era novel The Underground Railroad, which
won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was a
harrowing, masterful work that he said he could
never have tackled until he was more mature.
Now 48, he first published Colossus in 2003.
This new paperback edition reveals a lighter,
more freewheeling writer. It’s very New York:
sharp, snappy and get-outta-my-way.
It’s no travelogue. In the intro-
duction, he explains that each of
the eight million people living
in the ever-changing city has
a “personal skyline”, which
can never be fixed or defined.
“What follows,” he writes, “is
my city.”
The journey starts at
the Port Authority, the
point of entry for bus
travellers. The trip to
New York is long; the
physical discomfort
elevated by proximity to
strangers. People keep
yapping. Someone’s
eating chicken. The
narrative slides between
nameless people, bored,anxious. A man in the loo looks in the mirror:
“Is he actually going to start fresh with a face
like that.” (Whitehead asks a lot of questions in
Colossus, but never uses a question mark.) They
reach “the biggest hiding place in the world ...
this time it will be different”.
“Morning” opens with the clarion call of
garbage trucks grinding along the streets. Blessed
be the snooze button before the citizens have to
hit the streets and get to work. This guy’s jumper
has holes. It’s snowing. He misses the bus. Think
of what’s ahead for the kids: “If they knew it will
always be like this, they would revolt ... the only
sane response, really.”
Whitehead takes us for a walk through Cen-
tral Park: manure, wheelchairs, rollerbladers,
skaters, “always some jerk on a unicycle”.
Down in “Subway”, people stand on the
platforms and peer into the tunnels like “a psy-chiatric disorder”. On board, it’s standing room
only, but then one of the narrators spies an
empty seat. “When you get there soda sloshes.
At the next stop someone sits in it.”
Whitehead walks us along Broadway, Coney
Island (“such a multitude of stenches it must be
summer”) and Brooklyn Bridge (“Let’s pause a
sec to be cowed by this magnificent skyline”).
He concludes by having tourists fly out
from JFK, looking down at what they’ve
just seen. “It was really something,” they
will tell their friends. But what?
“Try to forget,” advises Whitehead.
New York’s inscrutability is part of
its mystique, but Colossus offers
some brilliant flashes of
illumination. l
THE COLOSSUS OF
NEW YORK, by Colson
Whitehead (Fleet $27.99)Whitehead takes us for
a walk through Central
Park: manure, wheelchairs,
rollerbladers, skaters, “always
some jerk on a unicycle”.
Chewing over
the Big Apple
Colson Whitehead’s
essays on his home
town offer brilliant
flashes of illumination.
GETTY IMAGES
Colson Whitehead: addresses the
pain of rain in the Big Apple.