Some years ago I was visiting Disneyland and had a culture-clash encounter there with my one of fellow Americans. I was standing with my daughter on the miles-long meandering line for “It’s a Small World After All” and I fell into a conversation with another mom; when this woman found out I was a native New Yorker, she treated me to her verdict on the city: “It’s so dirty there!”
Well, ye-aaah. Of course, it’s dirty. Dirt is the price you pay for a place being interesting. If, unlike that woman, you want to know anything about America’s greatest city, you’ve got to be willing to get grimy. Two new books about New York — a novel and a narrative history — do more than put up with filth, they positively wallow in it. Anyone looking for some good unclean literary fun should step right up and lay their money down.
It’s been almost 20 years since Caleb Carr’s best-selling Olde New York crime novel, The Alienist, was published and I can’t count the number of times since then that someone has asked me if I can recommend a suspense story anything “like it.” Well, New York has inspired lots of terrific thrillers, but I’ve just stumbled on one of the worthiest successors yet. Lyndsay Faye’s novel, The Gods of Gotham, is set in 1845 — a year that transformed New York for two reasons: it saw the founding of the city’s first police force and it marked the failure of the potato crop in Ireland. The ensuing Great Famine propelled hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants over to America, where many landed deep in the muck of New York City.
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