Most large cities have inspired fiction and non-fiction, but New York may be the city that’s been written about the most. The sheer density of New York, and its history as a portal for immigrants entering the United States, has helped create a unique cultural and political ecosystem that has both attracted and repelled millions, inspiring a constant stream of literary output. The typical New York story drips with nostalgia. Everything was better, we are told, in the old days. The old days might be the 1900s (as hard as it is to romanticize tenement life), or the 1920s, or the 1960s or the 1970s, and so on. There are, of course, unsentimental portrayals of New York, or portrayals of it simply as a city, but these are not the most popular, or best known. In Joshua Marston’s deeply underappreciated film Complete Unknown, characters make their way through the city in their everyday lives: the result is a more intimate, complex view of New York. But the misogyny of critics who hated the central female character (she shows no remorse for being an adventurous reinventer of herself; we can only imagine that a male character in the same position would have been declared daring and admirable) means that the subtleties of the film’s relationship to the city have largely gone unnoticed. Most audiences want to hear about a New York that is charmed by, even obsessed with its own past; writers and filmmakers over decades have obliged.
Gopnik is a typical example of this latter tendency. In his hands, New York is frozen in amber, part Gershwin melody, part Sinatra paean, and mostly a fantasy that is sometimes so unreal as to be ludicrous. Consider, for instance, how he writes about his wedding to Parker in December of 1980: “When I say ‘married in New York’ I know that it might sound rather like top hats and morning coats and a ceremony at St. Thomas Episcopal. In fact, on a bleak December day, we would take the 5 train to City Hall…” Who in the 21st century actually pictures “top hats and morning coats” when someone says that they got married in New York? Even in a pandemic, we haven’t retreated so far into imagination that we think New York is actually trapped in the 1920s. That’s on you, dude, all on you.