Bryant Park Reading Room: Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill, Alice Mattison and Jonathan Ames on Writing About New York
For a blissfully sunny lunch hour on July 8th, the Bryant Park Reading Room brought together four talented authors and a moderator who share one great passion: the city of New York.
Thomas Beller, author of several books and founder of the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, moderated the conversation between Jonathan Ames, author of The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction, Alice Mattison (Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn), Colum McCann (Let the Great world Spin: A Novel), and Joseph O’Neill (Netherland.)
Beller’s brilliant website is full of stories about New York City, and features maps pinpointing the locations in which the stories take place, making him the perfect moderator for a discussion about the city he celebrates—well, for the most part.
“Writing about the city as tableau completely exhausted my interest in New York,” he admitted to the crowd gathering around the full house of folding chairs set up facing the Manhattan Library. The tall, dark-haired Beller credited two things with reinvigorated his interest in New York: Blood and Politics, a novel about white supremacists, because, as he put it “people in Idaho and Montana, for them, we [New Yorkers] are absolute public enemy #1, and it made me proud of New York,” he said.
The second?
“Reading these books,” Beller said, referring to the new releases from the panelists before him, who each brought to the table a tome that sings a song—sometimes uplifting, sometimes dark and gritty—about the city of New York.
To kick off the panel, Beller asked how the city influenced each of their books, and if New York acted as impediment to or inspiration for their work.
Colum McCann—in a beautiful Irish brogue, I might add—called the crowd’s attention to the stacks of books under their feet in Bryant Park, part of the extended underground portion of the library whose grand, lion-flanked entrance lay before them. It’s the layers and the possibilities of New York that intrigue, he suggested: “In 1974 [the year in which his Let the Great World Spin is set] this was a park where even pigeons could get high,” he said. Despite this, the books were always there. He talked of the “beauty of it: storytelling: the most democratic thing we have, everyone has a story to tell.” With the millions of people in this city—and millions of books in the library, free for the borrowing—the possibilities are many.
“To be writing in this city is to have your finger on its pulse, on these stories—it’s a privilege and a boon,” McCann said.
Moderator Beller said he met panelist Joseph O’Neill at a wedding years ago, and their conversation about the “pleasures of alternate side of the street parking, its redemptive qualities” was cut short by a “cat tragedy.” Beller offered his condolences, and O’Neill picked off with his ode to New York where he left off during their last chat.
After some back-and-forth banter about city parking, he mused on the immediacy of the transition from “other” to New Yorker: “You are a New Yorker from the minute you arrive in this city,” he said. “No one questions your right to belong here, but go to Idaho, New Jersey [crowd laughs] people ask—even if in friendly manner- ‘where are you from?’ Here, it’s ‘what are you doing next?’” O’Neill said.
“New York city thrives on mutual ignorance and unique tolerance,” he said. “40% of New Yorkers are born outside the US, we have the advantage of forefront of direction in which world is moving,” O’Neill said.
Beller next turned to the silver-haired Alice Mattison, “outing” her as a non-New York resident. Though a native of Brooklyn (where her latest novel takes place) she now lives in New Haven, CT.
“I wasn’t going to admit that I lived outside of New York,” she laughed. But, now that the truth was out, she quickly explained her reasons for leaving: “I had a closed-in, indoor New York childhood. The main character in my novel is closed-in for a large portion of the novel…at the end of the novel, she breaks out, like a kid breaks out in New York.”
The city can be small and large at once, the limited space of our own spatial knowledge counteracted by the sheer number of places most people will never see. In Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, two characters explore a lost elevated train line in New York. Mattison said that she heard that readers were actually going out and searching for the fictional lost train tracks in the book: “the city is big enough to say anything and get away with it!” she exclaimed.
Jonathan Ames, who Beller described as both “Extremely tender and unbelievably raunchy at times,” talked of his New York-by-way-of-New Jersey roots. Ames said that while he was born in New York, he grew up in New Jersey, telling about his wayward youth in the Garden State. He was selected to attend New Jersey Boys State, which he called “a wretched weeklong program to train boys to become governors and politicians.” He evoked the now-famous photograph of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK—Clinton won top honors at Arkansas Boys State, enabling him to meet the current president. Ames was not so lucky in New Jersey: “I was incredibly depressed the whole time, I was the cartoonist for kids who ran for president,” he said.
Ames did recall a very New York moment shared with a female anthology student at The New School. They were sitting in Brooklyn Heights Promenade, he said, when she marveled how, despite the diversity of the city, it has such “cohesion.”
While Ames admitted that he doesn’t consider himself a New Yorker, “I’m so confused about who I am all the time: I never hold onto 1 apartment, I feel like never have a home,” he said, Ames is drawn to New York because there’s “still a lot of darkness, people on the edge.” He then quoted Tennessee Williams’s phrase “the comfort of strangers,” confiding, “I like the strangeness of this city.”
Moderator Thomas Beller then asked the panelists to expand upon the idea of the “instant city” that was brought up earlier by O’Neill.
“I’ve been here [New York] for 15 years, and when people ask me ‘are you American or Irish?’ I reply ‘I am a New Yorker,’” McCann said. “You can’t just go to Dublin and be a Dubliner, you can’t go to Cork and be a Corkoninan, but here, there is a notion of belonging, being thrown into the maelstrom…and you can write about it,” he said.
McCann said authors can have a “terror of writing about other places,” but that in New York, there is a sense that you can “come and own it.”
What does McCann say now when people ask him “what” he is?
“I am an Irish New Yorker,” McCann smiled.
“I say I’m an Irish/Turkish/Dutch New Yorker,” parried Joseph O’Neill. O’Neill said that when he lived in London and tried to write of it, he felt as if he was on the outside looking in, whereas if “you have the presumptiveness to try to describe New York, people who have lived here their whole lives are receptive,” he said.
Alice Mattison said the only possible negative she could think of when writing about New York was the fear that it has been “done before.” She’s come to find that, despite this, it remains a rich topic for her because “there is a whole lot of stuff hidden in plain site,” citing the High Line Railroad that has been “rediscovered” and turned into a popular park as one example of the myriad of New York’s riches waiting to be uncovered.
Colum then asked moderator Beller why he loved writing about New York. He replied “there is the idea of ownership anxiety about property and money in this town, it’s difficult to live here against all these negative currents,” he said. “It reminds you that you don’t have access to physical space. A raised fist about this reality is to write about it,” Beller said.
Beller then turned the question around to the panelists, asking them why they were drawn to write about New York.
Joseph O’Neill mused: “There is a culture of watching and seeing in this city. It’s narcissistic as well—people in New York are dying to hear about their lives, their city, there is a voyeurism and self-realization,” he said. “You almost have advantage if you write about New York,” O’Neill continued, “you are authorized in this city to write about practically anything about it.”
Beller congratulated Ames on the success of his short story, Bored to Death, which HBO is turning into a new comedy series with Jason Schwartzman set to star as the struggling thirty-something writer in Brooklyn who emulates his heroes from Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novels. (sneak peek here)
Beller asked Ames if, now that he is “clutched in the plush bosom of Hollywood,” if he will “no longer have lonely experiences to draw from.”
“I did buy this new jacket and new shoes,” Ames laughed, referring to the spiffy seersucker blazer he was sporting. All in all, though, he’s not worried: “I have a lifetime of low self-esteem to counteract any sugary things that come my way,” Ames said.
Then it was time for a Q & A from the crowd. The first audience member asked the panelists if there is anything they do or say that makes them a “New Yorker.”
McCann recalled a time when he was ordering sandwiches for staff in the Time/Life Building, and among the unfamiliar ingredients to the Irish transplant was mayo: “Mayo?” he responded to the sandwich maker’s question, “No, Dublin!” (McCann says he now knows what mayo is, and that he eats bagels, too!)
O’Neill weighed in, “I think the bagel is a crucial threshold. The everything bagel in particular is hard core!”
In his own experience, O’Neill said, living in New York has made him more “civil.” “It’s an unbelievably polite city,” he says—unlike the episodes of “Taxi” he watched before moving here. “If people are direct, it’s for a very practical reason,” he said.
“You must come from a very rude place!” concluded Mattinson. She says that since moving from New York, she has had to reign herself in, saying, “I can’t insult people in guise of making a joke” anymore. Not everyone has a New Yorker’s tough hide!
“I’m from New Jersey, the banlieue of New York,” Ames joked. He recalled going to DC on a class trip as a kid, and being confused by the kindness of a clerk in a store. “What’s going on? Do they like me?” he joked. In contrast, he described how, in New York, it took him ten years before he developed any kind of relationship with his next-door neighbor, a German wine merchant (he still doesn’t know his last name).
When an audience member asked if the panelists believed in the notion of a “Brooklyn writer,” or if Brooklyn was just “branding itself,” McCann replied: “I have no street cred, I live on the Upper East Side.”
Ames replied that where an author lives is purely a matter of economics: “Now no one can afford Brooklyn…Queens is the new Brooklyn. Eventually New Haven will be another borough,” he joked, referring to Mattinson’s city of residence.
The final audience question asked how the subway influenced each of them as writers, if at all.
Mattinson was the first to admit it: “I’m sort of obsessed with it,” she said. “I loved it when I was a child.”
McCann waxed lyrical, calling the subway “a beautiful metaphor for New York,” calling the “800 miles of tracks like the ‘subconscious’ of the city.” He added: “It’s dangerous and dirty and messy down there, too.”
Ames depicted commuters as “anonymous people lined up like on the edge [of the track] like the edge of a stage,” poetically describing a train’s approach, “the glow of light on two tracks like a candle spreading.”
O’Neill celebrated how, once you enter the subway, “you are temporarily part of a climatic counterculture,” describing how when it’s cold in the summer you can find heat, and when it’s hot in the summer, “coolness.”
While O’Neill may not wait in the same sticky subway stations I do in summer, the sentiment was a noble one. These authors love New York, and after listening to them sing its praises, I fell in love with it again, too.
Thomas Beller reading at a Park Lit 08 Event
