Pennsylvania Station, in west midtown, is the busiest railroad station in the Western Hemisphere. It is also a shabby, haunted labyrinth. I was there recently with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and city planner who has been involved for decades in efforts, most of them futile, to improve the station. We entered from Seventh Avenue, going down a narrow escalator with so little headroom that I flinched and ducked. On our left, a man was wrestling a baby carriage up a staircase, bumping step by step toward the street.
“It’s the architecture that tells you where to go in a train station,” Chakrabarti said. In Penn, the architecture generally tells you to go away. The area where we had entered resembles a dingy subterranean shopping mall, dominated by fast-food joints—Dunkin’ Donuts, Jamba Juice, Krispy Kreme. Three railroads and six busy subway lines converge in Penn Station, but from where we were it was hard to find your way to any of them. “Down here, the signage has always been a huge issue,” Chakrabarti said. His tone was equal parts earnest concern and professorial detachment; he was a professor at Columbia for seven years, worked as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s director of city planning for Manhattan, runs a global architecture studio, and lives with his family about a mile from Penn Station, through which they are often obliged to travel. Chakrabarti is fifty-six, tall, with a well-trimmed white chin-strap beard.
I have, on numerous occasions, experienced the superstore as a great human meeting place, a spectacle; the first time, I felt this acutely and with a certain sense of shame. In order to write, I had isolated myself off-season in a village in the Nièvre, but I was unable to write. Going to Leclerc, five kilometres away, brought relief: by being among strangers, I was “back in the world.” Back in the necessary presence of people. And thus discovering that I was the same as everyone else who drops by the shopping center for entertainment or an escape from loneliness. Very spontaneously, I began to describe the things I saw in these supercenters. I saw an opportunity to provide an account of the real practice of their routine use, far removed from the conventional discourses, which are often tinged with an aversion that these so-called non-places arouse and which in no way correspond to my experience of them.
One of those zombie tropes is that Los Angeles isn’t a walking city. Actually, Los Angeles is a fantastic walking city. Exploring it on foot is how I started to make sense of things. Of course, L.A. isn’t concentrated like Manhattan, or pedestrian-friendly like Tokyo. It’s not aesthetically breathtaking like Rome. The built environment is often rough and grainy, almost deliberately antipretty, with gantlets of warehouses, parking lots and industrial parks unprotected from the sun. Crosswalks are infrequent, and drivers often ignore them; the city only recently stopped ticketing residents for jaywalking. Probably most of Greater L.A. is awful to experience on foot. Yet there’s so much of it, radiating from multiple cores, that the amount worth walking is colossal.
When my son was born, I became obsessed with making. It was as if his coming into the world flipped a switch somewhere inside of myself that compelled me to create things with my hands. This desire to make was not necessarily anything new—I come from a long line of makers on both sides of my family—but I had until then always been lackadaisical about my projects, only taking them on from time to time, usually with a lot of space in between. There was something about the arrival of my son that suddenly made this business of handwork feel extremely, viscerally important to my everyday life.
“Your Driver Is Waiting” roars to life when Damani becomes more of an active participator making her feelings known and her singular voice heard. She is a fascinating creation: a woman with attitude and an agenda, who displays her vulnerability but also shows her tough side and is unafraid of using the titanium baseball bat in her trunk and the switchblade in her pocket. “When I go fast, I am invincible,” she tells us. Strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.
Katherine Mansfield died a hundred years ago this winter at age 34. Although she was so young, she has a special place in the literary canon as someone who changed the course of the short story in the 20th century. As a young writer I remember reading some of her stories many times, trying to pin down how she could take the most ordinary of events — for example, moving house in “Prelude” — and create a story so vivid that I can still tell you about those children and their parents and aunt and grandmother in great detail. In those days I knew that Mansfield, New Zealand’s great treasure, was a magician with words, that she was considered a “modernist,” that her best work shimmered with an unusual tenderness, and that her characters could creep into your heart, leading to comparisons with Woolf and Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalist Percival Everett won another prestigious award this month, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, for his newest book, Dr. No. Taking a sharp turn with his first novel since the triumphant success of The Trees, Everett's Dr. No is a delightfully escapist romp as well as an incisive sendup of espionage fiction.
King’s style in this book regularly recalls those of the great cartographers of similar imaginary spaces, like Mervyn Peake and Gene Wolfe, though his aims are different. His prose is not as wonderfully ornate as theirs, but it has its own smooth lyricism and evocative imagery, helping the book’s pages turn quickly. King loves extravagant lists full of quirky details: of the city’s strange landmarks, of a room’s various odors, of the housekeeping habits of professors, of one character’s many seedy associates, of another’s erotic fantasies.