METROPOLIS
By Elizabeth Gaffney
Random House
416 pages
$24.95
The
best piece of advice I ever got about writing came from Dan Conaway,
my editor at HarperCollins, after I presented him with a chapter
which I modestly described as “a bit of magical realism.”
“Oh,”
said Dan. “We don’t do that here.”
No,
we don’t. The form perfected by a generation of Latin writers
was a means of underscoring the incredible, horrible things that
actually occurred in their societies. Being Americans, we don’t
want magical realism…only magic.
Elizabeth
Gaffney’s Metropolis, is a case in point. Gaffney,
a short-story writer, translator, and Paris Review editor,
has chosen an iconic American plot for her first novel, the story
of a penniless immigrant boy, adrift in the slums of 19th-century
New York.
Her
hero is a skilled young stoneworker who has fled his native Germany.
Through a series of misadventures, he crosses paths with Gaffney’s
heroine—the formidable Beatrice O’Gamhna, a member
of the Whyos street gang—and adopts a succession of new
jobs and identities, ending up as an Irish stoneworker named Frank
Harris. Together and apart, Beatrice and Frank spend most of the
novel seeking love and ducking the wrath of a pair of rival gangsters,
Dandy Johnny Dolan, the beautifully tailored leader of the Whyos,
and Luther “the Undertaker” Undertoe.
This
is ground that has been worked by writers as diverse as Horatio
Alger, Kafka, and E.L. Doctorow, but it remains fertile soil,
at the center of the American preoccupation with immigration,
and reinvention. Gaffney has done considerable research, and she
can turn a nice phrase, whether she is describing “the Hamburg
skyline with its five great church towers braced like God’s
daggers against the infidel sea,” or a tower of the rising
Brooklyn Bridge that “bulged from the water like the crown
of a new molar,” or a jail warden ending visiting hour by
“banging his nightstick on the doors and dislodging one
woman after the next, like leeches from their criminal lovers’
lips.” Her descriptions of the manual labor Harris takes
on—in the city’s sewers, then paving its streets,
then in the caissons and atop the stonework of the bridge—can
be enthralling. I have no idea if they are technically accurate,
but it doesn’t much matter; they are at least plausible,
recognizably human worlds.
Which speaks to the heart of the matter. Everywhere else, Metropolis
is ceaselessly undermined by Gaffney’s resolute indifference
to the social realities of life in post-Civil War New York, or
to the physical realities of life, period. To list only a few
of her more bothersome contrivances, indigent, friendless suspects
accused of arson and murder were not released from jail until
an attorney could be found to represent them. The crooked pols
who ran Tammany Hall did not pool their ill-gotten gains and keep
them in a big hole in the ground. It was Tammany that controlled
the street gangs, not the other way around. Had said gangsters
ever attempted to make off with Tammany’s cash—or
to rob New York’s main post office—they would have
been crushed like bugs.
Far
worse is Gaffney’s reinvention of the Whyos—one of
many loose conglomerations of thugs that roamed Lower Manhattan
at the time, but which she has turned into “the unofficial
rulers of the city”. The real genius behind them is not
Dandy Johnny Dolan but his mother, Meg, who sees to it that the
gang is run as a sort of proto-feminist, “quasi-socialist
utopia for thieves, hookers, and killers.” The Whyos have
their own, fully equal female division, the “Why Nots,”
who turn tricks only if they want to, practice effective birth
control, and even take over polling stations to cast votes fifty
years before women’s suffrage. As the former leader of the
Newsboys’ Choir, Meg Dolan has also devised the Whyos’
secret means of communicating, or “whyoing.” Gaffney
obsesses over this device, describing it—for starters—as
“every sort of sound you could imagine, from creaks and
sighs and whistles to songs and subvocal tones,” “the
inverse of ventriloquism”; and “musical variation
and various mimicked sounds of the city, from animal noises to
slammed doors”. It’s a skill that enables the Whyos
to stay in “constant, covert contact with one another all
across the city,” to influence “the behavior of their
victims,” report “on the whereabouts and activities
of potential victims, potential rivals, and of course the cops,”
and which leaves them “quite capable of fixing any jury
in the world from a distance of up to one hundred yards.”
It’s
not coincidental that such flights of fantasy erode the rest of
Gaffney’s narrative. Luther the Undertaker is a promising
villain, but what individual would stand a chance against an operation
as formidable as the Whyos? What army would? Beatrice and Frank
never seem truly threatened by him or anyone else. It’s
refreshing to read a historical novel that deals with how its
female characters prevent and abort unwanted pregnancies. But
too often, Gaffney’s feminism morphs into a utopian streak
of political correctness. An Irish abortionist’s lack of
hygiene proves fatal. A black-and-white team of female doctors,
meanwhile, has never lost a patient, and a Chinese physician does
the trick by inserting painless, smoking opium needles just beneath
the skin. Don’t try this at home.
The
novel’s several black characters (including one named John-Henry)
seem to exist mainly for the worst of reasons; that is, to underscore
just who the admirable white people are by how they react to them.
This may be unfair; in her consuming passion for whyoing, Gaffney
is content to render almost all of her supporting characters the
purest cardboard. But then, throughout Metropolis, it
is difficult to divine its author’s hijinks from mere sloppiness.
Whole themes peter out into dead ends. A highly annoying, omniscent
narrator pops up repeatedly in the early parts of the book, disappears
for many chapters, and then makes another appearance or two near
the end. We are peppered with anachronistic phrases that destroy
the atmosphere of the time. Characters “have an attitude,”
“have any number of balls in the air,” feel “it’s
all good”; “push [people’s] buttons” or
“debrief” them or “mess” with them. They
“abort” plans, “access” things; “call
for backup” when presented with “a security breach”;
or “deliver detailed situation reports,” and serve
as “special-agent[s]-in-training.”
Strip
a people of its social conventions, its language, even its physical
realities, and what is left? Gaffney’s whyoing, feminist
neverland might as well exist in outer space. Purposely or not,
she has stilled the mystic chords of memory—and in so doing
has stripped her own story of meaning. The New York of the nineteenth
century actually existed, as fantastic and roisterous a city as
it may seem to us now. Its people were as real as we are today,
and their struggles and triumphs still inform our lives.
Yes, the fantastic can find a place in historical fiction. In
Doctorow’s The Waterworks, for instance, a science-fiction
plot serves as a brilliant metaphor for the grasping zeitgeist
of the same place and time that Gaffney is writing about.
Gaffney’s
fantasy, by contrast, seems to be set in the past only because
that is now the place where any sort of whimsy can be deposited.
From Mark Helprin’s overblown, Wagnerian fantasy, A
Winter’s Tale, to Steven Millhauser’s mannered
Martin Dressler, right up through Michael Chabon’s
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay—that feel-good
story about the Holocaust—history has become the dumping
ground of an overly precious, self-indulgent, oozingly piquant
school of American letters. Like a hired entertainer at a child’s
birthday party, this is not a literature that promises to inform
us in any way—only to divert us for a little while with
more cheap magic.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novels Dreamland and Paradise
Alley.
©
Copyright The
Los Angeles Times
