The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and Station Eleven

I went on quite the Fiction bout this week, devouring two novels in just three days. Both came at the recommendation of a respected friend, and both were excellent, even though they left a little something to be desired.

The first was Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which chronicles a series of relationships between Brooklyn literary type and Harvard educated Nathaniel Piven and various women who are also part of that scene. Much of the novel felt like an extremely accurate portrait of a certain Brooklyn milieu: my favorite part was when Nathaniel went grocery shopping and bought two boxes of cereal, one healthy and one Lucky Charms (he would have the Lucky Charms as his breakfast 'dessert'). It was a book very tightly calibrated to social class distinctions and nuances, between different types of university educations (there was a hilarious conversation at a dinner party about how Lindsays seemed to populate NYU, but not Harvard or Yale), and within different Universities (gradations of coolness/connectedness at Harvard).

There's also a feminist bent to the book. Nathaniel P. claims he is sensitive to a lot of the issues brought up by modern feminism (claiming he was raised in a post-feminist household) and is definitely less outwardly misogynistic than many of his male friends, but still perpetuates plenty of sexism, most noticeably when he constantly thinks about women's appearances, even when they are engaging him in intellectual conversation. Nate definitely isn't a sexist caricature, he's a real character who shows many thoughts that conform with widely-held cultural standards. That Nate's creator is a woman should not take away from this characterization. She's writing a real human being.

What I didn't like about the book as much were its comments on the continuing gentrification of Brooklyn. That the characters rarely interacted with people of color made sense, but the constant references to decreasing numbers of white people on the subway as it went deeper into Brooklyn, to the latest new farm-to-table restaurant, to the gentrified cafe, felt kind of stale, and did not offer any fresh takes on gentrification, that hopefully an intellectual Harvard snob like Nate might actually possess. It's a minor gripe, but instead of taking me to new territory (as it did with its sharp commentary on relationships) it was mostly rehash of stuff I could read on any old Brooklyn blog.

The second book I read, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which also came at the recommendation of my friend's Goodreads page, has one of the most interesting premises for a book I've read in a while. A massive pandemic has wiped out most of the world's population and 20 years after the fact a group of travelling actors and musicians perform Shakespeare plays around the territory near Lakes Michigan and Huron. Their slogan is "Survival is Insufficient" (taken from Star Trek), which is a theme throughout the book.

It's about the power of art to transform and elevate, even in the most dire of circumstances. That might be a little cliched, but it feels fresh here. This is not an ugly dystopian novel where the default is that people are all cruel and murderous; no, people in this world care about each other, care about art, care about objects, care about self-affirmation just as much (if not more so) than people before the crisis.

The book operates with a series of time jumps before, during, and after the pandemic, kind of similar to A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It's a literary device that kept me hook. I wanted to keep reading to find out how each character was related to one another. Which ones survived the pandemic? Would they eventually reconnect? How did they come to care about the same thing/person/idea so much? Mandel really has woven together a beautiful plot. Her imagery is just as beautiful: fake snow falling on a stage, a candlelit traveling stage in rural Michigan, unoccupied planes lined up on a runway. There are more disturbing images as well: abandoned skeletons and the like, but for a post-apocalyptic novel, it is very pretty (not a bad thing!).

The one weakness here is the thinly drawn character of "The Prophet". After first hearing about him it's pretty obvious who the prophet actually is (though there isn't an official reveal until much later in the book). His is a back story we only get bits and pieces of before he becomes a cartoon villain. I understand why we only get hints at his story (to put us in the same place as his father, who didn't really know his son before he died) but then I'd rather have him be a more thickly drawn villain.

Anyway, it's a minor gripe with what was otherwise a very moving book.

The New York Festival of Light, or, how far are you willing to go to get that perfect Insta?

I read about the New York Festival of Light on the skint newsletter, which comes into my inbox every day. Occasionally I skim the skint, but hardly ever go to any of the events listed. I read about this event, but had no desire to trek down to DUMBO to see this show. After Shabbat ended, though, I got a text from my friend saying that he was interested in going. I was already out for the evening, in the East Village, which was close enough to DUMBO. My sister and cousin decided to come too.

We should have realized something was up when we got on an extremely crowded F train at Delancey Street (we walked from our East Village Ukrainian restaurant, which is one of the strangest places I've ever been to in New York: you don't enter directly into the restaurant from the street, you have to walk down a suburban strip mall-like corridor with horrible tile and fluorescent lighting first; the restaurant itself feels like a European lodge, covered in wood and decorated a little like Grandma-from-the-old-country's house with bowls and prints hanging on the walls). Usually on a Saturday night that stop is pretty hopping, but barely anyone got off the train. It turned out that everyone (including us) intended to get off two stops later, at York Street in DUMBO, close to the light show.

Now the York St. subway station has to be one of the most poorly designed stations in the system. There is only one exit, and to reach it, you have to go up a long, inclining corridor. Then comes the exit, then the stairs to the surface. There was probably the equivalent of two entire subway trains of people trying to exit all at once. The crowd moved in an orderly way, but if even one little thing had gone wrong (pushing, falling, running, etc.) things could have gotten very dangerous very fast.

After a long, slow walk to the exit we finally made it to street level and headed one block over to Pearl Street, where the event was taking place. It appeared there was a very long line (we didn't know what for), and then a more general area where people were milling about. We didn't want to wait on line for anything, especially because my friend would be meeting us soon, so we went to the general milling area. At this point, my cousin decided things were too crazy and went to a different Subway station to head home. We later heard that the York Street station would temporarily be closed because of the insane amount of traffic it was receiving.

My sister and I slowly made our way through the crowd closer to where a series of projections were being displayed on the side of the Manhattan Bridge. On our way we saw five columns of light reaching up to the sky, an interesting interactive instrument, and some black lights. They were interesting enough, but we still weren't sure what the main attraction was supposed to be. By the time we saw the projections on the side of the bridge (the coolest ones used the architecture of the bridge as a base, and then distorted it; others had racing reindeer; another, abstract imagery in black and white and color; my sister got an Instagram of that one, so I guess the whole ordeal was worth it.) we were crushed in on all sides by people. Fluid dynamics came into play; it was impossible to move unless we were in a stream of people moving in the same direction. If there was no movement, or worse, if people were moving in the opposite direction, making any progress was impossible.

Our end goal was to see what it was people were waiting in line for, which seemed to be some kind of laser show party happening underneath one of the arches of the bridge. Apparently there was also a disco ball man hanging out there. Slowly we inched our way forward, trying to stay together, and trying to stay calm. It was really hard! There was clearly not enough space for everyone, there was no organization from either event planners or police, so it was every mob member for him or herself. If someone had tripped and fallen, he or she may have been crushed! It was absolutely terrifying.

In the middle of being in this crush of people, someone came on the loudspeaker to announce that the event would be ending because there were too many people. I immediately texted my friend not to come, which I hoped he'd get while riding the subway. My sister and I were a little nervous that the crowd would turn around on us and start going the other way. Eventually though we found a stream of people moving in the direction we wanted to go in and finally made it to a clearer area.

Needless to say, we were both pretty shaken up by the experience; it was one of my scarier moments in New York. While it felt freeing to be able to stretch out our arms once there was room, it was pretty boggling that there were no pre-planned measures to ensure safety at this event. Like I said before, one wrong move and there could have been a disaster. And it wasn't just adults at this event: it was early enough in the evening that families had brought their children with them!

Alternate plans came to fruition and I ended up having a good time this evening. What the New York Festival of Light demonstrated is that word spreads like wildfire about cool-sounding events, and that crowd control is really so important at these kinds of things. It was a lesson learned for me to stay away from these kinds of events in the future and I hope for the organizers and for the NYPD to be better prepared in the future!