A Late Encounter with a Young Novelist, Ross Barkan

 

For some time now, I’ve been in a fiction-reading funk. Part of this has to do with the brave new digital world and getting wrapped up in the hyperventilating coverage of our American carnage. But perhaps leaning into that feeling is also the passing—or gradual silencing—of my literary heroes.

 

I particularly related to John Updike’s fiction. He was about ten years older than I am. His five Rabbit novels, chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, were published between 1960 and 2001—years that coincided with the most formative period of my adult life. I read all of his fiction and was struck by how far afield he sometimes went from the Rabbit books: the epic The Beauty of the Lilies; the visionary Toward the End of Time (a remarkable 1997 novel set in the then-future year of 2020, with society on the verge of collapse even as the outward normalcy of life continues); and Terrorist (2007), the last major novel of his lifetime, where he took on the problem of modern extremism.

 

Even if Updike had only been a short-story writer, his 200-plus stories would have placed him on a plane with John Cheever. Add to that his essays and poems, many written for The New Yorker, the publication with which he is most closely associated. There is no writer who can match his productivity and level of art. He was the Babe Ruth of American letters.

 

Philip Roth is a close second in my mind: a great novelist expressing other aspects of American—and Jewish—angst. Between Updike and Roth I felt I had a miner’s safety hat and beacon with which to plumb the depths of the contemporary American soul.

They were writing the great American novels of my time—the golden ring earlier chased by Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway.

 

There are many other contemporary American writers I continue to try to read—Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, et al. But others, Richard Yates, Paul Auster, and James Salter have passed away, and Richard Ford and Louis Begley have succumbed to aging. Ford’s five Frank Bascombe novels are reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit quintet, with Be Mine (2023 bringing closure to the character and making it unlikely that others will follow. His 2017 memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, helped spur the idea of writing my own.

 

Nonetheless, I continued my quest to seek a new novelist who writes in the vein I so admired when younger—a writer who simply speaks to me and my era, passé though I may be in my references and sentimentalism.

 

The times hang heavily—and by times I mean both the temper of the era and my remaining time. The combination is a toxic mix for reading fiction, though not necessarily for consuming the political disaster du jour, which The New York Times and a number of Substack essayists report on repeatedly. The New Yorker recently reported that “in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon,” a trend I found myself embodying.

 

 

It was probably through Substack, a year or two ago, that I came across Ross Barkan. Two attributes hooked me: he is a New York City boy (I can call him that as he’s less than half my age), and if you set him loose on a topic—frequently NYC politics, something I’m far removed from now—he can write up a storm.

 

He wears another writing hat as a cofounder and Editor in Chief of The Metropolitan Review.  It harks back to the traditions of the Parisian literary salon and is reminiscent to the “Little Magazines” of the 20’s and 30’s devoted to literature, culture and intellectual thought.  It’s quite an undertaking, and seemingly effortless on his part.   

When I first “met” him on Substack, he was hawking a book he was writing, Glass Century, even having the chutzpah to imply it might be the next great American novel (I don’t recall him saying that exactly, but the implication was there). He had published a few things before, but nothing on that scale. I said to myself: fine—publish the book, I’ll read the reviews, and then I’ll consider it.

 

He easily got blurbs and some notices, but not even The New York Times reviewed the book when it was published in early May of this year. (Unfortunately, the major publishers all passed on the book, which was finally published by Tough Poets Press. It’s difficult for small presses to get exposure in the major review media. Those major publishers may regret their decision one day.) So I still hung back, occupied with finishing my own memoir, Explaining It: A Life Between the Lines, getting through the summer, and then recovering from an illness that further delayed my return to possibly reading fiction.

 

Unread novels are now stacked in my study. I occasionally pick one up, read a few pages, lose interest, and guiltily put it back on my “to be read” shelf—only to repeat the process weeks later. Nothing seemed to hold my attention long enough. There was a time when I lived for the next novel by my favorite writers.

 

So it was a kind of stalemate. Yet Barkan’s Substack essays kept arriving, each one meaningful. I learned he had even run for office, with a young Zohran Mamdani as his campaign manager. He didn’t win (seen in retrospect, a victory for both of them in terms of life paths).

 

Eventually though I ordered Glass Century for my ever-expanding “to be read” shelves. When it arrived, I looked it over carefully and read about the contents. The cover unsettled me: the Twin Towers are pictured, and that wound still runs deep in my psyche.

Did I really want to read fiction about the agony of that day? It was clear that some characters would be victims and others left to grieve. If I became emotionally invested, I too would be impacted. Did I want to relive 9/11 yet again?

 

For weeks, the book sat untouched.

 

Eventually, curiosity—or perhaps the need to break the silence of my study—won out.  I finally picked it up, perhaps hoping the NYC focus would help me snap out of the reading funk.

 

It begins with a most improbable event: an ersatz wedding between the two main characters, Saul Plotz and Mona Glass, in 1973. The wedding is staged for Mona’s conventional Jewish parents, who want her to settle down and produce grandchildren. She’s in her early twenties, but those were still the times. She and Saul have been carrying on an affair; she was his student at City College. Saul is already married, with two children, and ten years older.

 

Hold the presses! How unlikely is this plot device? Even if only a few know the truth at this pretend wedding, how could it not eventually be discovered by the parents? I found the premise nearly preposterous. But I read on, perhaps because Mona was described as an up-and-coming tennis star and, as tennis is the one sport I still play, I thought: show me what you’ve got in your imagination, Barkan, when it comes to tennis.

 

Well, a few dozen pages into the book, he did.

 

I set the stage. The protagonist, Mona Glass, is playing tennis as a 24-year-old on New York City courts around the time Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs (oh, how I remember the hoopla over that event). Mona is a naturally gifted player who didn’t have the advantages of private lessons enjoyed by many of the women she plays, including her best friend, Liv, whom she now routinely beats.

 

On this particular day, Mona is playing—no, destroying—Liv on a court adjacent to two men pounding the ball. A couple of times, Mona’s ball rolls onto their court, interfering with their play. The third time it happens, one of the men, Alec, snaps: “Ladies, if you can’t keep your ball on your own court, you shouldn’t be out here.”

 

Mona goes ballistic. She is intense on the tennis court, her skill and moxie making up for a shortage of lessons. She challenges him to a one-on-one match, best of three. He is goaded into accepting, and that’s where the following six pages pick up. The first sentence of the first page is not complete, so add: “She had hardly noticed how he played. He was a man,” and then the text continues below.

 

 

To me, this writing captures the raw truth of the sport in the way a piece of program music captures a feeling. By then, I was not only hooked on the novel but, coincidentally, at about the same time, Barkan published a remarkable essay on Substack, “On the Beach: Glass Century, and the relationships that make up a life.”

 

Having just published my memoir, I was particularly drawn to this observation: “The act of writing creates a counter, an immediate parallel universe. Even memoir is a form of fabrication, memories leaky unless they’re eidetic, and you’re left to plumb what is essentially a form of darkness—not evil, but the absence of immediacy.”

 

His novel is indeed a window into his life. I had been asking myself how Barkan could have dreamed up this material—the development of two parallel families sharing the same father. Reading his essay clarified that question. It made clear how what I had initially dismissed as preposterous plot devices made perfect sense within the context of his life and became natural in the novel.

 

The frankness and transparency of the essay reveal the novelist’s mind at work. And at long last, here was a novel in the form I love: an epic spanning roughly fifty years—from the era of my second marriage through the Covid years—set in the city I still love, even from a distance.

 

Barkan’s father was a distinctly Philip Roth–like character. In my opinion, Roth’s finest novel is American Pastoral. Writing about Jewish fathers and sons, Roth observes: “[The fathers] were men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.” The heart of Glass Century is the father/son relationship and Barkan’s love for his own father—while the mother who raised Barkan becomes the foundation for the central character of Mona Glass.

 

My own memoir includes a few short stories, not because I consider myself an accomplished creative writer—far from it, having no such formal education—but because they indirectly reflect my life in some way. While those stories are not memoir, they carry the redolence of lived experience. They inhabit an imagined world of what might have been, not necessarily what was. There is always some form of memoir in fiction and fiction in memoir. Barkan, I think, would agree with this.

 

His essay “On the Beach” explicitly ties events and characters to aspects of the novel. Barkan describes himself as an “unrepentant beach obsessive,” sharing his father’s interests in baseball and politics, describing him as “an inveterate yenta on politics and sports and the city.” Details such as his father living a double life; seeing Richard Nixon in an elevator and talking Mets; attending high school with the man who later became right-wing radio star Michael Savage; the Chinese buffet Barkan and his father frequented; and the fact that his father had a doctor’s appointment on 9/11 drawing him away from a Twin Tower office, all make oblique appearances in the novel.

 

Here are some of Barkan’s key observations on how the novel came into being:

 

“My parents’ drive for secrecy had convinced me it was best to swat away inconvenience. I could imagine, rather, nothing was wrong. And isn’t that what writers do anyway? Imagine? … [T]here remained an unexplained psychic barrier to such probing, one that held my tongue in place. In these lacunae, at least, I could devise my own fictions… The novel, as antediluvian as it might seem in this tech-addled age, was my totem, and I considered it the highest art form—or the art form, at least, where I could channel my skill into an object that would achieve permanence.”

 

The self-revelatory nature of the essay is evident:

 

“Fiction, fiction! I love it so. My father would have liked to have read all of this, and I lament that I never showed him a draft of the novel before he died. If he was secretive, he appreciated a good show, and as a deep admirer of Roth, he could never begrudge the writers who raided their own lives. A meditative memoir and essay like this one would conventionally conclude, in some form, with the old father-son heart-to-heart, all secrets revealed, all threads tied, closure obtained. That’s not how it works with flawed people.”

 

I will leave the rest of the novel’s machinery for the reader to discover. Even without the roadmap of Barkan's essays, I would still have found Glass Century a satisfying journey, though some elements of the resolution strain credulity. I needn’t go into those here; as a first effort, this is a meaningful page-turner. I’m grateful simply to be back in the swing of reading fiction, and I have Ross Barkan to thank for that.

 

Reading Barkan reminded me of a conviction I shared in a 2012 essay, “The Novel as Social History,” where I made the case that few historians can capture the zeitgeist of an era better than some of our novelists. In my time, Updike and Philip Roth were on the cutting edge, and before them John Dos Passos, among others. I think of Glass Century as belonging to that tradition of social commentary and lived history.

 

Barkan is dreaming big. He has a forthcoming novel, Colossus, and another (yet to be titled) that he is presently completing. As if he hasn’t already thoroughly examined the writing process in his “On the Beach” Substack essay, he goes further in “The Alchemy of the Novel,” a recent piece published in Arcade Publishing’s newsletter (Arcade being the publisher of Colossus, scheduled for April 2026, roughly a year after Glass Century).

 

There he writes:

 

“Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor [Teddy Starr] in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure from my last novel, Glass Century, and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the 2020s. The untitled third novel in this set, which is nearly done, will share a certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus.”

 

“The Alchemy of the Novel,” along with “On the Beach,” is an important examination of the urgency to write and publish relevant fiction for our times. As Barkan says, “Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction that peaked sometime in the 2010s or early 2020s, and they want literature, I believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human condition.” Indeed!

 

I was accustomed to waiting years—sometimes decades—for a new Rabbit novel by John Updike or a new Frank Bascombe novel by Richard Ford. Not one a year, but spaced out over a lifetime. Now, suddenly, that old sense of anticipation has come rushing back.

 

 

Remembering ‘Rabbit Remembered’

 

Why reread Rabbit Remembered, Updike’s unexpected coda to his Rabbit Trilogy (included in his collection Licks of Love, 2000)?  Perhaps to seek refuge from the extreme craziness of today’s world. His writing remains as relevant today as when it was written 25 years ago.  Family dramas endure. Here we revisit the vestiges of Rabbit’s family, as Y2K is approaching.

 

Janice, Rabbit’s wife, is now remarried to Ronnie, a glad-handing ex insurance guy, with still some clients around, but basically he golfs with the boys at the Club.  He used to be Rabbit’s rival, for women particularly. Other than Janice, they’ve shared the sleep-around Ruth and Thelma, Ronnie’s now deceased wife with whom Rabbit had an affair as well.  These two guys have crossed metaphysical swords before and Ronnie’s antipathy to Rabbit lives on.

 

Rabbit’s son, Nelson is now divorced from Teresa who has moved to Ohio with his two emotionally damaged children.  He has an email relationship with the 14-year-old Roy, while his 19-year-old daughter Judy has withdrawn into a Walkman headset (if written today, she’d be a TikTok dependent). Nelson now lives in his childhood home with Ronnie and his mother.  He has recovered from his cocaine addiction and fiscal irresponsibility and Nelson now ironically has a job as a mental health counselor at the Fresh Start Day Treatment Center.  

 

Suddenly Janice is visited by a woman in her 30s, Annabelle, who claims to be Rabbit’s child. Her true father’s identity was revealed to her by her mother, Ruth, on her death bed. Nelson now has a half-sister.  He is elated and sees a path to his own “fresh start,” for him and his family.  Updike deflates such delusions and retains his gift for observing minutia, making it an important part of setting the emotional story:

 

[A] cloud passes overhead, and the shadow is almost chilling: that’s how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper, and darker and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer, the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards were no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless.

 

Janice still thinks, even lovingly, about Rabbit in one of her reveries: how beautiful he had been…. in those high school halls– the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail, but trailing off in like sexy strands like Alan Ladd’s across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big, graceful, white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy half-mast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention, of course, to her, a ninth grader, a runt.

 

Nostalgically she also remembers the town of Brewer driving through it: Brewer pours by in her Le Baron, a river of bricks and signage….Janice can scarcely believe so much is gone and she is still is here to remember it…. She navigates without thinking under the Norway maples that she can remember half the size they are now, small enough that a child could reach the lowest branches with a jump…. Now the maples are grown so big, the sidewalks in some sections of town are buckling.

 

There is no end to the speculation about what Annabelle wants. “Ronnie,” Nelson almost never uses his stepfather‘s name, and says it now, swiftly, “This may be my SISTER. Dad used to hint sometimes there might be a sister. Here she has come to us, putting herself at our mercy.” “But what does she want, Nelson?” Janice asks. She feels better, cleaner in her mind, finding herself now on her husband’s side. “She wants money,” Ronnie, insists. “Why, she wants,” Nelson says, getting wild-eyed and high-voiced, defensive and, to his mother, touching, “she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.”

 

Nelson’s job as a mental health counselor gives Updike the opportunity for extensive social commentary about his modern world (what would he think and write of today’s?).  The inner voice of Nelson speaks: Schizophrenics don’t get wholly better…. they don’t relate. They don’t follow up. They can’t hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together, as well as they do: what a massive feat of neutron coordination just getting through the day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don’t bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world, there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others…. [B]ut it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love, and its opposite, all the sickly interned can’t-get-away-from-itness of close relations...If society is the prison, families are the cells with no time off for good behavior good behavior…..

 

Janice is not the only character with Rabbit reveries.  Nelson is frequently thinks about the larger-than life Rabbit, Updike continuing his portrait of a man lost in America:  his father, had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness, at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater, giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat their two shadows were linked it seem forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world, but he didn’t believe his father would ever die.

 

Nelson takes Annabel for lunch at a “new green” restaurant that he’s gone to for years and becomes hyperaware of his half sister – and Updike even dangles a question mark of the nature of this new found love – and in watching her he has an epiphany of where they are, swathed with symbolism:  [S]he still has, after living 20 years in the city, a country girl innocence that, if she has taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment, he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery -- ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many Forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those years grabbing a bite at the corner, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their back turned, a boy and a girl wearing old fashion, German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.

 

At the heart of the novel is a family still in turmoil, the remaining wake of the passing ship of Rabbit:  [F]amily occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first, our parents and elders, and then our children and their children…Nelson thinks about Rabbit’s sister, Aunt Mim: [A]t  Dad‘s funeral, Aunt Mim seemed an animated, a irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners, but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.

 

And that sense of doom hangs deeply in the novel: Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake up in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world, too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.  But Nelson is on his own to deal with his angst.  His mother loved Nelson for all they had been through together, but she was past the age where she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other’ needs one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start anytime now.

 

The ghost of Rabbit wanders throughout the novel.  In spite of Ronnie and Nelson’s adversarial relationship, Nelson turns to him and says, “Another reason I like you, Ronnie,” Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, “is that you and I are about the last people left on the earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion, and didn’t get it. He was worse than we are, but also better. He beat us out.”

 

The Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike still has the relevancy of a great family drama, no matter what the times.

 

Evoking John Updike and Philip Roth

I woke up this morning and had John Updike and Philip Roth on my mind.  They are the writers I grew up admiring the most and I’ve made a point of that repeatedly in these pages.  So why am I now dreaming of them in the half light of dawn, both now gone?  The answer came as I was exercising in our pool this morning (one of the few pluses of being self quarantined in Florida): the pandemic of course.

I’ve discussed their attitudes towards death in past entries, almost as if being a dress rehearsal, and aren’t we all more acutely aware of our own fragile existence during these times? Roth’s preoccupation with death gathers momentum in his later works while Updike’s is less transparent, although Rabbit at Rest is fairly unambiguous, not to mention poems like “Perfection Wasted.”

Their demise leaves a void in serious American fiction.  Imagine what they would have to write today.  I mostly read fiction to understand our world, not to hear a “swell” story. There are other forms of entertainment for that.   Navigating COVID-19 without those heartfelt companions is almost like performing on a tight-rope without a net, such as the image from Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me:” the “bear” (the body) “howls in his sleep because the tight-rope / trembles and shows the darkness beneath.”

This sudden longing for Updike and Roth made me curious about the progress Blake Bailey has made with the biography Roth authorized before his death, giving Bailey extensive interviews and documents.   Updike’s workman like biography was written by Adam Begley and published some six years ago.

But alas, after Googling the matter, Bailey (who I thought would write the Updike biography after writing magnificent ones of John Cheever and Richard Yates) is still working on the Roth biography and it is tentatively scheduled for publication in April 2021.  

 

However, there was an unexpected bonus in doing this research and that is coming across an absolutely breathtaking article by Charles McGrath who, as a former writer and editor for The New Yorker, knew both Philip Roth and John Updike.  His article, succinctly entitled “Roth/Updike” and published in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Hudson Review sheds a floodlight on their commonalities and clandestine competitiveness.  An abstract of this well written and impassioned article cannot do it justice, so here is a link.  Suffice it to say these two leading American writers will be remembered and studied for centuries to come.  No wonder they are on my mind.

Two Unlikely Companion Pieces

I just read my first illustrated book, an idiosyncratic history of New York City, Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York by Julia Wertz.  The genre is “comics,” but the New York Times gave it such a glowing review, and since my love of NYC – where I grew up and lived as a young adult --- is so deep, I couldn’t resist owning this fetching coffee table book.  It’s easy to read and a candy feast for the eyes for an old New Yorker, although as a kid I grew up in Queens, but that still counts!

Obviously, it can’t be a comprehensive history.  Wertz takes bits and pieces of the city’s history – the ones that particularly appeal to her -- and weaves them together in a graphic time machine of sorts, frequently juxtaposing the “then” and “now” scenes.  Just a glance at the “Table of Contents” underscores the eclectic nature of the history:

She tends to focus on those aspects that are not touristy.  It reaches across generations.  She’s young enough to be my daughter or perhaps even granddaughter.  As she is not a New Yorker by birth, and no longer lives there, she sees the city in a way a native New Yorker might not, in the way that I do.  I took all those sites for granted and it makes more of an impression in retrospect than it did then.

I enjoyed her journey through parts of NYC I’ve known and other parts I did not know.  Also I appreciated her quirky selection of topics such as the origins and “formula” for the “egg cream” which took me back to my childhood at a local luncheonette in Richmond Hill, Queens, 107^th Street and Jamaica Avenue, called Freers.

In fact, if there is one disappointment in the book, it is that she tends to give short shrift to Queens, as opposed to Brooklyn where she lived in Greenpoint during her NY years.  Missing are iconic scenes of my youth and I think of the confluence of Myrtle, Hillside, and Jamaica Avenues as ground zero where Jahn’s, the RKO Keiths, and the Triangle Hofbrau still live large in my memory!.  All gone now.

Those figured prominently in my teenage years whereas during grammar school days other beloved places were in South Richmond Hill, 107^th St near Atlantic Avenue.  One of the first Carvel’s was there or some days we’d bike over to Jamaica, Queens where there was a Wonder Bread factory where workers would give us hot bread from their oven.  There was also a slaughter house not too far away and we’d peer through knotholes to see chickens dancing around without their heads before we were chased away.  Also on Atlantic was a park on 106^th St. where we played stickball, punch ball, handball, any kind of game you could play with a Spaldeen.

Along Jamaica Avenue I remember the Gebhardts bakery off of 111^th street whose crumb cake was divine.  Also there was a fish store around 112^th where they also cooked greasy French fries and served them wrapped in newspaper.  We got our school supplies from Lipchitz or Woolworths.  Right near Lipchitz was the Richmond Hill Savings bank where my mother encouraged me to open an account to save my pennies, and I always felt I was entering a church when I went there with my junior savings account.

Overhead was the Jamaica Avenue El which on rare occasions was our escape into NYC, a great adventure as a kid, but I usually took it early Sat morning to go to the Van Wyck Lanes where I could bowl a few games for 15 cents each if I got there before 9.00 am with my own ball (I once bowled a 227). 

We’d play ball until dark, a round sewer top for home plate, or stoop ball, eat dinner and then wait for the ring of the Bungalow Bar Man, begging our parents for a 10 cent chocolate pop.  The games we played.  Anything to stay out of the house.  Steal the bacon, Ringolevio, yo-yo duels, card games like war, flipping baseball cards, dodge ball and the list goes on.

Forest Park was a draw, with a carousel and later in my teenage years, a walk along the railroad tracks with friends, putting pennies on the rail and then running back to see them after a freight train had passed.  The Park was also a great place to build a secret fort.  Or for sledding.  And for playing baseball at Victory Field.

On Halloween we would get apples, popcorn or crackerjacks, just take a handful, no need to worry back then that there would be a razor blade in the apple or the popcorn poisoned.  And on Thanksgiving our parents would blacken our faces with burnt cork, dressing us as bums, and we would go around the neighborhood asking "anything for Thanksgiving?"  I think we normally received a few pennies.  Into the bank account!

We got around on our Schwinn bikes, clothes-pinning playing cards to the wheel frames so the spokes would make a racket.  As teenagers we sought out older kids to cruise Queens Blvd (preferably in a 55’ Ford such as this one I saw recently at an antique car show – 

strange to be looking at “antiques” that were just part of my life) or hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach where we would work hard to get a tan, but usually left with a blistering sunburn (my Dermatologist now thanks me for my stupidity).  Also part of our teenage years was spent at the Hillside Rollerdrome Skating Rink on Metropolitan Avenue.

I could go on and on.  But I see I am digressing into reveries, none of which I could criticize our author, Julia Wertz, for not including in her “unconventional history.” It would have been nice though to include the institution that was Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor!  I’m also sorry she failed to carrry the Brooklyn Paramount in her illustrations of iconic NY theaters, which as you can see here is now one of the gymnasiums belonging to LIU. 

Her writing this history has naturally given rise to these memories and her work is a “must have” for an incurable (albeit former) New Yorker.  Plus there are a number of scenes which struck home in the book, but I’ll mention only a few.  The first is her illustration of Max’s Kansas City, a joint, restaurant, theatre which I used to go to with other colleagues on special occasions from the publishing company I worked for in the mid 1960s.  We always had to have one of their iconic Bloody Mary’s.  Sometimes they would have an experimental theater production on the second floor, the kind you’d see at Café La MaMa in the East Village. 

But the illustration that really hit home is coincidentally both on the cover and at the end of the book, a stroll down the Bowery.  I kept looking at it and said I know this illustration for some reason.  Well, when researching the history of my family photography business, Hagelstein Brothers, I found the building my great grandfather and great uncle bought in 1866 to begin a business which would survive 120 years in NYC.  That building was 142 Bowery and there it was in Wertz’s book as well as her selection for the cover.  Here’s her illustration and a picture of it today.  So, I found that sort of thrilling.

She’s also irreverent, and I don’t mean that in a nasty way, but very respectfully.  She’s downright funny, as this illustration of “subway etiquette” illustrates:

As well as her quip about “micro-living” this, as she points out, is a trumped up idea of justifying astronomical rental fees for small spaces: 

She can also be very philosophical as one illustration has her on one of her “long city walks” saying to a friend, “I’m, perpetually fantasizing about a time I never experienced, and imagining a life I’ll never live.”  I might know a little more about the former but we’re in the same boat regarding the latter.

Most of all, I am regretful that I didn’t take more careful notice of everything when I was roaming NYC, having lived in Queens, Brooklyn (Park Slope and Downtown), the East Village (only briefly with a friend), and then the upper West Side.  See this entry for fuller information on that.  And, not only regretful because of that, but my encroaching old age makes only an occasional return to the city possible now, never to live there again.

While I was reading and enjoying Wertz’s “comic” table top book, I was also engrossed in another work by a New Yorker, the great writer, particularly known for his professional writing on baseball, Roger Angell.  But he is so much more than a baseball writer, and I’m closer in age to him (he’s turning 98 and still writing!) than I am to Julia Wertz.  They actually have The New Yorker magazine in common, Wertz contributing cartoons and Angell a long, long established writer for them.

This Old Man: All in Pieces is a potpourri of memories, the consequences of what it means to be the last man standing, the losses, and homage to NYC.  I feel that I’m right behind him on the journey,  the realization that my much operated on body is moving into the category of “this old man” as well;  I feel it.

The title of the collection is derived from his essay which appeared in The New Yorker in 2013.  It is a must read and it gives one an appreciation of his writing talents, so effortless and natural. 

It includes “farewells, letters, and tributes” to those he has known , “our dead are almost beyond counting and we want to herd them along, pen them up somewhere in order to keep them straight.  I would like to think of mine as fellow voyagers…Here in my tenth decade, I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news.”

His tribute, “Over the Wall “ to his late wife, Carol, written only months after her death starts with Carol doesn't know that President Obama won reelection last Tuesday, carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania and Colorado, and compiling more than three hundred electoral votes. She doesn't know anything about Hurricane Sandy. She doesn't know that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, in a sweep over the Tigers. More important, perhaps, she doesn't know that her granddaughter Clara is really enjoying her first weeks of nursery school and is beginning to make progress with her slight speech impediment. Carol died early last April….

What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind. But they're in a hurry, too, or so it seems. Because nothing is happening with them, they are flying away, over that wall, while we are still chained and handcuffed to the weather and the iPhone, to the hurricane and the election…..

There are scores of writers he worked with and befriended, one in particular, John Updike, who comes up again and again in these essays, bringing the writer to life with personal quips.  He also recognizes the genius of Updike’s writing:   

Updike's writing is light and springy, the tone unforced; often happiness is almost in view, despite age or disappointments. He is not mawkish or insistently gloomy. Death is frequently mentioned but for the time being is postponed. Time itself is bendable in these stories; the characters are aware of themselves at many stages. This is Updike country: intelligent and Eastern, mostly Protestant, more or less moneyed.

Angell relates an anecdote regarding how Updike accidentally got to see and write about Ted Williams’ final at bat of his career at Fenway Park, hitting a home run.  Updike was in the area to meet a woman at her place on Beacon Hill and was stood him up!  So he made his way to Fenway and was there to witness the consecrated moment and famously wrote about it in a piece for The New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”  Here is the confluence of literature and baseball, a legend elevated into a literary masterpiece:

Fisher threw [a] third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. [Center fielder Jackie} Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and vanished. Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs-hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

In accepting the J.G, Taylor Spink Award at the American Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. Angell acknowledged his debt to baseball:

My gratitude always goes back to baseball itself, which turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and exacting, so easy-looking and so heart-breakingly difficult that it filled up my notebooks and seasons in a rush. A pastime indeed. Fans know about this too. Nowadays we have all sports available, every sport all day long, but we're hanging on to this game of outs, knowing how lucky we are.

Roger, I know what you mean!  In this crazy world baseball remains essentially unchanged except for the amusement park nature of many of today’s fields.  I liked it more in the days of no mascots, flashing scoreboards, fireworks, enclosed stadiums, constant “music.”  Let ‘em play ball!

Tying these two books together may be a stretch, but there is also Roger Angell the inveterate New Yorker.  In a letter to Tom Beller who was researching a book about J.D. Salinger, Angell imagines what Madison Avenue was like when he probably passed “Jerry” as he refers to J.D., both unaware of the other….

I'm pretty sure that Jerry Salinger would have walked toward Madison, not Lex, in search of that pack of cigarettes. He could have tried at the little Schmidt's Drugstore, two doors north of 91st Street on the NE corner of Park, but probably that was still a pure drugstore. It had one of the pharmacist's vases of mauve water hanging in the window…. Madison then was nothing like Madison now. The gentrification began in the 1980s, I believe. It was a businesslike avenue before that, and in Jerry's time, with two- way trolley tracks in the middle. All traffic was two-way. It had newsstands, a Gristede's (on the NE corner of 92nd); a liquor store or two; a plumber's store, with a bathtub in the window (mid 91st-92nd, on the east side of the avenue); a florist's (J. D. Flessas, on the SW corner of 91st); numerous drugstores (including Cantor's on NE or SE corner of Mad and 93rd, depending on which year we're talking about, and, maybe a bit earlier, a nearby Liggett's); plus shoeshine and shoe repair shops, hardware stores (probably Feldman's, even then), etc., etc. The Hotel Wales was already there, east side of the avenue between 92nd and 93rd, but much seedier then.

Lexington was much the same, also with trolleys-the trolley cars on the two lines were not identical in appearance-and with the same stores, maybe more groceries or butcher shops, but all of them cheaper and with a slightly less affluent clientele. More laundries; more of those basement ice, coal & wood places. Maybe some deli's but they weren't called deli's then. Lexington and I think 93rd had a Lucky Lindy coffee shop. But neither of the two avenues felt affluent; they were useful. Almost all the buildings along them were four-story brownstones. Madison, as you noted, was on the same geographical level as Park; Lex was downhill from Park. There was some construction going on in these blocks all through this time, depression or no depression.

Salinger and the younger me probably passed each other more than once on the street back then, all unknowing. We each knew that the wind was from the east on gray mornings when we woke up with the smell of hops in the air, blown from the huge Ruppert's Brewery, which lay east of Third and north from 90th Street.

Two entirely different generations, but dealing with life in the Big Apple, then and now.