But the dynamic is different, with the sun-drenched pollution alternating with a contaminated Eden to generate a sense of degradation and despair quite different from whatever the ugliest sides of New York represent.Ĭertainly, however, the most important aspect of the presence of New York (that is, throughout here, really Manhattan) in Rechy's novel turns on the way in which New York City had, by the sixties, become both an emergently visible gay mecca and a gay dystopia. To be sure, later for Rechy, City of Night and his subsequent fiction, Los Angeles will, as it had for other writers, also take on this role. The much vaunted, and much lamented, anonymity of the city, its seemingly infinite universes of human experience (including infinite and alluring sub-universes), the many ways in which it was the creative capital of the country, and the many but always legitimate economic opportunities were features that drew the restless in and enfolded them in its constantly mutating dynamic. This is true to the extent that, after World War II, also certainly long before but perhaps with less intensity, New York was where one ended up to reinvent oneself, no matter what the reasons were.
One can speculate on the reasons for this: Rechy's own personal circumstances (after all, aren't all first novels essentially autobiographical?) the way in which parts of the novel were written for independent publication and many of the most important literary reviews are located in New York, making it reasonable to set a narrative in that city and the way in which New York-well, really, Manhattan-in the sixties, while not free of homophobia and systematic police persecution, was the epicenter of the gay movement. (1)īut Rechy's inaugural novel, The City of Night (1963), is strategically situated in New York City in its first long segment (approximately one fifth of the novel) after the introit involving the narrator's El Paso roots.
Along with other novels like Numbers (1967), Marilyn's Daughter (1988), and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), Rechy has probed eloquently and efficaciously the human geographies of Los Angeles with an intense narrative discourse that few others have matched. JOHN Rechy is primarily a Los Angeles novelist, and his Bodies and Souls (1983) is easily one of the best novels ever written about that city. And because I believe that, its lure, for me, was much more powerful. The world of Times Square was a world which I was certain I had sought out willingly -not a world which had summoned me.
0 kommentar(er)
