Pangs of New York: Book Review of Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis
This review first appeared in HT.
Pangs of New York
Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney
William Heinemann
trade paperback; 474 pp; L 7.25
If you’ve fallen under the spell of Caleb Carr in his brilliant novel, The Alienist and its sequel The Angel of Darkness, then you might pick this one up believing it to be another atmospheric novel set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City.
After all, Carr turned the detritus of historical detail, research insights, and even the most apparently irrelevant of factoids into a superbly textured and fascinating historical mystery.
The Advisory Editor of the prestigious NY literary zine Paris Review, author Elizabeth Gaffney has almost certainly read Carr before embarking on her ambitious debut.
She’s also read Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, on which the Martin Scorcese film of the same name was based.
And there’s more than a whif of E.L. Doctorow as well, whose Ragtime remains perhaps the single most evocative and moving portrait of New York city of that time period. She’s also done her research well.
Unfortunately, all the reading and research in the world can’t make up for a lacklustre book.
The problem starts almost at once. Metropolis opens with a beautifully drawn map and a series of richly detailed passages of life on the streets in that lost era. You can almost conjure images from Scorcese’s brilliantly designed Gangs to go with the passages here.
But a few dozen pages in, the descriptions start to wear you down, the introspective monologues get tedious, and the pace doesn’t really pick up.
Even that might be acceptable; after all, one of the most brilliant authors of historical literary novels, John Banville, often doesn’t have very much happening in his books, which doesn’t make them any less than goddamn bloody brilliant – his latest nomination to the Booker only confirms his towering literary talent.
Elizabeth Gaffney is far from being a writer of Banville’s prodigious talents. After a few chapters you start to notice the workmanlike prose peeping through the piled-up historical detail, and once the offbeat love story gets going – that’s right, it’s a historical and a mystery and a romance – you begin to wonder just where this book is heading.
It’s heading for the romance section, in my opinion. Because if viewed as a historical romance, it’s far above the average Regency or even the spate of hardcover romances that have overtaken the traditional bodice-ripper on the bestseller lists. But as a literary novel, or even a literary mystery, it falls far short of the bar.
For one thing, it’s quite often just plain boring. Not only does nothing much happen – apart from the romance between the name-switching immigrant and the tough Cameron Diaz-like Irish maiden – but the occasional whiffs of Gangs turn into fullblown stenches, with the plot taking faux-Dickensian Asbury-like twists.
At times, the backdrop threatens to become more interesting than the main plot itself: the story of a city being built, the raising of the Brooklyn Bridge, the paving of streets and laying of sewers…these are fascinating stories in themselves, and could well have become the material for a different, superior historical novel, something like Ken Follett’s masterful The Pillars of The Earth.
But Gaffney seems unable to decide whether to turn out a tribute to Gangs, an immigrant-makes-good saga a la Jeffrey Archer or Henry Denker, nor a straightforward romance, nor even a gripping period mystery. A Caleb Carr she certainly isn’t – for that matter, even Carr has not yet been able to climb out of the shadow of his impressive New York historical thrillers even now, over a decade after the fact – nor is she a Doctorow in literary terms.
Perhaps the opposite of this book would be Michael Chabon’s brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay which gets everything right that Gaffney gets wrong: a pair of protagonists you care about intensely, an involving story, and effective but not overwhelming evocation of the period and atmosphere.
And most of all, Chabon weaves his own fictional world, rising above not only the research but above the sub-genre of historical novels set in New York as well, to create his own minor masterpiece.
In the end, only read this one for the romance and if you’re a big fan of Gangs of New York.
Otherwise, watch it crumble like a badly constructed Brooklyn Bridge of cards. All the meticulous research and all the queen’s English can’t save this ambitious but ultimately disappointing debut.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2005 at 2:03 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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