Among the Wonderful, and some thoughts

I am reading 'Among the Wonderful' and I'll confess, I feel like I'm rushing through it. I'd like to stop and put it aside, wait until Christmas break to finish it. It's quite an interesting book. Colorful, one would probably be inclined to say. Vivid. Full of life.

While I was reading it, I was struck by this minute detail:

"A distant but growing rumble disturbed Guillaudeu's meal; he walked around the side of the church, looking east until the steam engine appeared. So he was still on Fifth Avenue. The sleek coaches of the new Harlem Railroad clattered by on what must be Fourth" (Carlson 183).

I sometimes feel very privileged to know, even in a vague sense, the area an author describes. Here, she is describing Murray Hill. Even if she were not, I know Fifth Avenue, I know Fourth, I know the feeling of turning down both and examining them. There is something, I think, very special about this. Even if the New York Carlson describes is well over a century behind us,

Michael Cunningham, whom I have a particular fondness for, has similar moments.

In the excellent The Hours:

"Under the cement and grass of the park lay the bones of those buried in the potter's field that was simply paved over, a hundred years ago, to make Washington Square. Clarissa walks over the bodies of the dead as men whisper offers of drugs (not to her) and three black girls whiz past on roller skates and the old woman sings, tunelessly, iiiiiii." (14)

Again, in his new book By Nightfall:

"Finally they reach the corner of Eighth Avenue and Central Park South, where the remains of the accident have not yet been entirely cleared away. There, behind the flares and portable stanchions, behind the two cops redirecting traffic into Columbus Circle, is the bashed-up car, a white Mercedes canted at an angle on Fifty-ninth, luridly pink in the flare light." (6-7)

I think often with Carlson and Cunningham and a million other writers that this gift of describing the city isn't affected. I mean to say, I don't think they leave their apartments or houses and walk, take notes, and write. I think they have so much lived the city that they cannot do anything but write in this this much detail. Clarissa, the character of first Cunningham passage, walks through Soho to pick up flowers for her ailing friend. Cunningham describes her crossing Houston, walking down Spring to where to the florist shop is.

It isn't forced. I see clearly where she is going. I imagine he too sees where she is going because he has taken a similar path. Other writers of other places do this as well. Everything metropolitan writer, I think, has constructed a mental map of their city in their head and their characters live in, walk in it, through actual physical streets.

When I say Carlson's book is full of life, I am talking to some degree about plot because that is there an evident. But I believe mostly I am responding to the way her characters interact with the city as if the city itself was a living organism, a character as well, as detailed and varied as anyone else.