Dear readers,
To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel store.
A true New Yorker, of course, metabolizes these moments and moves on, cool cucumbers in the face of all but the most outrageous disruptions (a professional sports rival, maybe, or an actual Beatle). Still, I never get tired of the low-wattage zing those run-ins can add to a routine and colorless day, like finding a flamingo on the subway.
In literature, as in life, a clever writer can do the same, taking real historical figures of some renown — the kind whose main-character energy usually fills a room — and weaving them neatly into someone else’s story.
Though they hail from wildly different genres, identities and points of view, both books here approach their famous-person cameos with satisfying restraint: just a few flamingo feathers, judiciously used.
—Leah
This one is a bit of an inside job; Broyard worked as a book critic and editor at The New York Times until not long before his death in 1990 at age 70.
“Kafka Was the Rage” recalls his time as a G.I. turned downtown gadfly in the second half of the 1940s, looking for better living through cheap postwar rent and Czech existentialists. In Greenwich Village, he found a whole playground of poets, wastrels and pretty Ivy League coeds “with art history in their eyes.”
A girl he calls Sheri Donatti — a light scrim of a pseudonym for the painter, poet and muse Sheri Martinelli — offered to show him an apartment in her tenement building on Jones Street; instead, he almost immediately ended up in her bed.
Though Sheri’s cramped walk-up was filled with her abstract canvases, her main art project seemed to be her own life: Meals, conversations, even sexual encounters were an obscure performance piece that made Broyard feel confused and conventional. Still, sex! So he moved in.
For less strenuous kicks, there were classes at the New School (including an American culture course taught by the very German Erich Fromm) and long hours spent in the bookstores and watering holes that other young strivers in the Village gravitated to.
Broyard’s heroes could often be found in those places too, sometimes as close as the next bar stool. He recalls watching a distracted W.H. Auden crash into Sheri at a stationary store — “he had a curious scuttling gait, perhaps because he only wore espadrilles” — and spending an awkward evening with a fading but still vainglorious Anaïs Nin. (“While I could not imagine her in bed with Henry Miller, that may have been his fault.”)
An afternoon shopping for suits at Brooks Brothers with Delmore Schwartz and several sozzled field trips to Harlem dance halls follow. Caught up one night in a drunken standoff between Dylan Thomas and his “angry intellectual milkmaid” wife, Caitlin, Broyard wisely excused himself from an attempted seduction in the couple’s Chelsea Hotel room, knowing he was outmatched.
“Kafka Was the Rage” moves into more tender, reflective territory with the sudden loss of a friend and is just getting into some interesting stuff about gender roles when the book somewhat abruptly ends. Broyard had plans for the rest of his bohemian rhapsody, a postscript says, but died before he could finish it.
Read if you like: Abstract Expressionism, bathtubs in the kitchen, hunting down old copies of Partisan Review.
Available from: Knopf Doubleday, or the bookshelf of anyone who ever smoked clove cigarettes in high school.
“I’m a Fool to Want You,” by Camila Sosa Villada
Fiction, 2022
Most of Sosa Villada’s first story collection, “I’m a Fool to Want You” (translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude), is set amid marginalized characters in or near her native Argentina — sex workers, underparented children, victims of the Spanish Inquisition — and daubed with magical realism (a generational curse, a talking fox).
The title story is a lovely outlier, a throwback to 1950s New York narrated by a hairdresser from Mexico named Maria (born Carlos). As trans women trying to pass — they prefer the term travesti, though cops and cruel strangers tend to use different words — Maria and her roommate, Ava, are mostly focused on sex and survival. One night at a Harlem speakeasy, though, they find an unlikely ally: Billie Holiday. They know her name, if not her music: “There’s no point in lying; we didn’t really like jazz much. It’s so boring, darling.”
Strung out, lonely and artistically thwarted — after a stint in prison for drug possession, an obscure city law mostly kept her from performing — Billie decides that Maria and Ava are her kind of girls. She offers glamour, hydroponic weed and the clothes off her back; they supply a safe haven and homemade posole.
Louis Armstrong, Tallulah Bankhead and Sara Vaughn also waft by, mostly as background color; though Holiday was as big a star as any of them, her mix of hope and squalor suits Sosa Villada’s band of misfits. Watching her onstage for the first time, Maria finally understands her friend: “I’m strange fruit too.”
Read if you like: Rhinestones on white satin, the 2017 Chilean movie “A Fantastic Woman.”
Available from: Other Press in the U.S., and probably the gift bag at a good drag brunch.
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