What she doesn’t count on is the cruelty of others. Lily Bart has neither solid family connections nor money, but she has beauty, and she is determined to use it to climb the social ladder. This feeling-that one corner of a city can be both the center of the world and a world unto itself-is made real in NW, as much as London is made real by a writer who knows the place deep in her bones.Įdith Wharton’s first major novel, from 1905, is the classic tale of a doomed striver in Gilded Age New York. Smith once said that, as a child, she thought her neighborhood, Willesden, was the center of London and that Oxford Street was the suburbs. The friends’ paths diverge and converge, in a gritty urban landscape evoked by Smith’s fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration: “Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock.” Meanwhile, the overlapping stories reveal the way that identity markers (race, class, gender) interact with our desires as we try to build our adult lives. The book tracks four friends, all trying to gain distance-geographical and metaphysical-from the housing project where they grew up. In her fourth book, NW, published 12 years later, she returns to her old stomping grounds. Smith is from northwest London, which is the setting for her breakout first novel, White Teeth. Only some of these books tell happy stories, but they are all reminders of what is possible in these metropolises and why so many people keep coming back for more-and they might make even the steeliest city dweller feel just a little less alone. The locations themselves, each with a distinct flavor, are more than just settings they are forces, shaping the characters’ choices and rushing them along toward the novels’ end. They form relationships and wreck them they join the party and grow tired of the party they struggle to stay afloat and even to stay alive. The eight novels below are all about people trying to find their place in bustling cities-Lagos, Chicago, Paris. The trick-for fictional characters as much as for real residents-is to figure out how you fit into that giant, dense human puzzle. But urban life also forces us into contact with other people, another complicated gift. White wrote that New York will bestow on its residents “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” You can indeed feel utterly alone in a city in a way you can’t in a suburb or a small town, because the city so easily goes about its business and forgets all about you. The rewards of city living, though, can be dubious. Millions of people feel the irresistible draw of big cities-the opportunities for art, culture, and business the excitement that pulses through daily life-and many novelists likewise choose to set their stories in these rich cityscapes.
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