The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Empire City by Paul Goodman
Thomas Hove

Paul Goodman. The Empire City. Preface Taylor Stoehr. Black Sparrow, 2002. 598 pp. Paper: $17.50.

This unconventional, forgotten masterpiece deserves recognition as one of the most interesting fictional works of the American 1940s and fifties. A true renaissance man, Paul Goodman wrote on subjects as diverse as politics, sociology, education, architecture, and aesthetics. Incorporating many of these interests, The Empire City reads like Gaddis, Heller, and Pynchon doing a mid-twentieth-century version of educational romances like Rousseau’s Emile or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Its episodic, sprawling plot focuses on a small set of nonconformist characters and their diverse (and perpetually failing) attempts to resist the insanities of American mainstream society. The timespan reanges from just before the outbreak of WWII to the early years of the Cold War, and the main protagonist is a young street-kid, ironically named Horatio (Horace) Alger. We follow him from his derelict, off-the-record childhood, through his involvement with revolutionary movements, through romance and marriage, and we finally take leave of him in the middle age as he fights the temptation to live at peace with—horror of horrors!—the Eisenhower era. This antirealist, darkly comic narrative spends little time portraying the socioeconomic causes of its characters’ maladjustments. Instead, Goodman tries to convey various psychological manifestations of their discontent with a world where “the behavior of our society is leading us to disaster; but the only way that we know how to behave, and that is available to us, is the disastrous behavior of our society.” This technique manages to foreground the social and ethical importance of attitudes. But one slight drawback of Goodman’s style is his tendency to address readers as if they already share his characters’ disaffection with what he calls “the Sociolatry.” In spite of that, however, and in spite of the novel’s occasional rough and desultory feel, The Empire City is a truly remarkable achievement. Black Sparrow Press and Taylor Stoehr have done American literary history a major service by putting it back in print, and Goodman is well worth the attention of anyone eager to broaden the canon by rediscovering important but neglected authors. [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Empire City by Paul Goodman Thomas Hove Paul Goodman. The Empire City. Preface Taylor Stoehr. Black Sparrow, 2002. 598 pp. Paper: $17.50. This unconventional, forgotten masterpiece deserves recognition as one of the most interesting fictional works of the American 1940s and fifties. A true renaissance man, Paul Goodman wrote on subjects as diverse as politics, sociology, education, architecture, and aesthetics. Incorporating many of these interests, The Empire City reads like Gaddis, Heller, and Pynchon doing a mid-twentieth-century version of educational romances like Rousseau’s Emile or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Its episodic, sprawling plot focuses on a small set of nonconformist characters and their diverse (and perpetually failing) attempts to resist the insanities of American mainstream society. The timespan reanges from just before the outbreak of WWII to the early years of the Cold War, and the main protagonist is a young street-kid, ironically named Horatio (Horace) Alger. We follow him from his derelict, off-the-record childhood, through his involvement with revolutionary movements, through romance and marriage, and we finally take leave of him in the middle age as he fights the temptation to live at peace with—horror of horrors!—the Eisenhower era. This antirealist, darkly comic narrative spends little time portraying the socioeconomic causes of its characters’ maladjustments. Instead, Goodman tries to convey various psychological manifestations of their discontent with a world where “the behavior of our society is leading us to disaster; but the only way that we know how to behave, and that is available to us, is the disastrous behavior of our society.” This technique manages to foreground the social and ethical importance of attitudes. But one slight drawback of Goodman’s style is his tendency to address readers as if they already share his characters’ disaffection with what he calls “the Sociolatry.” In spite of that, however, and in spite of the novel’s occasional rough and desultory feel, The Empire City is a truly remarkable achievement. Black Sparrow Press and Taylor Stoehr have done American literary history a major service by putting it back in print, and Goodman is well worth the attention of anyone eager to broaden the canon by rediscovering important but neglected authors. [Thomas Hove]

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