On New Yorkers on New York

Ever since Colson Whitehead's "dazzlingly original" The Colossus of New York was released, I've wondered if I should own a copy. I wouldn't necessarily pay for one, since I'm not a huge Bertelsmann fan, generally don't purchase new titles in hardcover, and have the means to find myself a free copy. But the real point of contention has been this: what could I possibly gain from Whitehead's thirteen-part essay about the City? For that matter, what could anyone get out of it?

According to published reports, White begins his work thusly: "I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else." If that were true about all New York natives, I'd hate every chocolate "frappe" and buffalo chicken sandwich I ate in Boston. We know New Yorkers are arrogant; why start off a book with pure arrogance?

Tim Marchman, writing for the Weekly Standard (and linked above), provides an impressively believable vivisection of Colossus, eventually characterizing Whitehead as "a man who's lived in one place his whole life and is too overwhelmed to say anything about it."

Are all natives inherently overwhelmed? Or do we just get lazy? Could one of those Wisconsin-born Williamsburg kids really evoke New York better than Whitehead's "pointless abstraction" or the "Pages of Subway" I wrote and edited in high school?

When New Yorkers write about New York, what are we saying? A whole lot of nothing, if we allow our inborn geographical familiarity and cultural narcissism to control our pens and keyboards. All New Yorkers--lifelong residents, artistic transplants, immigrants, suburbanites who work in the city and pretend they live in it--are terrified to admit something: New York is just another Anywhere with an Empire State Building in the middle. Sure, it's a terrific and magical place (to use the two hollowest adjectives I could find), but so is any other city or town. For that matter, I'd rather read a literary love song to Lake Okeechobee or Klamath Falls than one to a place we all know so well.