Isolation Drills...

and the great New York City novel

Jul 25, 2022

There is a tent pitched in our backyard, an extra bedroom where my partner will sleep while I am quarantined with COVID. After somehow avoiding the disease for over two years, I tested positive on Saturday morning with some sniffles. I am almost symptom-free after a couple of days, and am looking forward to breaking out of my bedroom and walking around north Brooklyn when my isolation ends Thursday.

Speaking of walking the city, this New York Times list of the most significant New York City novels has been on my mind lately. My personal favorite NYC novel, Teju Cole’s Open City, with its unforgettable flâneur protagonist walking the streets of the city, made the list, but two others I consider great NYC novels did not.

Jami Attenberg’s The Kept Man is a vivid portrait of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in the early 2000s, a book where the setting is as vibrant as its characters.

Kate Christenson’s novel The Astral is unforgettably set in my own Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Christensen brings the neighborhood to life (and shared my all-time favorite Book Notes playlist for the book, which covered her almost 20 years living in NYC).