The Review of Contemporary Fiction

City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses by Alex Shakar
Joseph Allen O'Rear

Shakar, Alex. City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses. FC2, 1996. 164 pp. $19.95; paper: $11.95.

Imagine for a moment the New York City of the last ten or so years of contemporary fiction—that dark, cynical landscape of Easton and Janowitz, where violence is mitigated only by irony, hopelessness by resignation. Now imagine a giant hand reaching down to a corner of the city and pinching in its fingers an edge of this sheen of despair: slowly it peels back the gritty film, exposing below the surface a city shivering not with angst and moral inertia, but with imagination and vision and heartbreaking hope. Suddenly the vision of the city given us by the yuppiehacks of the eighties and early nineties seems jaded and false; a new city emerges, mythic and grand and unsentimentally beautiful.

This newly unmasked city is the setting of the six stories in Alex Shakar’s City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses, winner of the 1996 FC2/Illinois State University National Fiction Award. In these stories (which find their inspiration in the Metamophoses of Ovid), Shakar’s eminently memorable characters perceive the landscape of fin-de-siècle New York City through lenses of mythic imagination. The opening piece, “The Sky Inside,” tells the story of a museum guard who attempts immortality by literally inscribing himself upon the city; told in multiple voices, its forty pages accelerate toward a climax more visceral and evocative than many novels achieve. In “Waxman’s Sun” Danny Waxman’s search for his lost father below the subway tunnels of Manhattan is both tender and heart racing, sad and redemptive; based on the story of Icarus, Shakar’s version transmutates into a wholly surprising, original myth. All of the characters in the collection are recognizably human, yet striving to be more than human; what a refreshing contrast to the de riguer solipsism of contemporary fiction’s urban dwellers!

And these stories are technically innovative in the best way; that is, Shakar’s structural “experimentation” is always at the service of, indeed, dictated by the thematics of his story at hand. The last story in the collection, “City in Love,” is remarkable for both the sophistication and absolute necessity of its startling narrative technique: based on the story of Narcissus, the threads of a secondary story, “the voice in your ear,” are woven into the primary story by way of an intricate authorial “game” that would make Georges Perec clap his hands wildly. Still, Shakar’s often profound literary inventions never overshadow the emotional intensity of his fundamentally romantic fictions—the reader feels not detached admiration, but engaged marvel at the resilience of the characters and the ways they find not merely to survive in the city but live, even, sometimes, after dying. [Joseph Allen O’Rear]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses by Alex Shakar Joseph Allen O'Rear Shakar, Alex. City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses. FC2, 1996. 164 pp. $19.95; paper: $11.95. Imagine for a moment the New York City of the last ten or so years of contemporary fiction—that dark, cynical landscape of Easton and Janowitz, where violence is mitigated only by irony, hopelessness by resignation. Now imagine a giant hand reaching down to a corner of the city and pinching in its fingers an edge of this sheen of despair: slowly it peels back the gritty film, exposing below the surface a city shivering not with angst and moral inertia, but with imagination and vision and heartbreaking hope. Suddenly the vision of the city given us by the yuppiehacks of the eighties and early nineties seems jaded and false; a new city emerges, mythic and grand and unsentimentally beautiful. This newly unmasked city is the setting of the six stories in Alex Shakar’s City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses, winner of the 1996 FC2/Illinois State University National Fiction Award. In these stories (which find their inspiration in the Metamophoses of Ovid), Shakar’s eminently memorable characters perceive the landscape of fin-de-siècle New York City through lenses of mythic imagination. The opening piece, “The Sky Inside,” tells the story of a museum guard who attempts immortality by literally inscribing himself upon the city; told in multiple voices, its forty pages accelerate toward a climax more visceral and evocative than many novels achieve. In “Waxman’s Sun” Danny Waxman’s search for his lost father below the subway tunnels of Manhattan is both tender and heart racing, sad and redemptive; based on the story of Icarus, Shakar’s version transmutates into a wholly surprising, original myth. All of the characters in the collection are recognizably human, yet striving to be more than human; what a refreshing contrast to the de riguer solipsism of contemporary fiction’s urban dwellers! And these stories are technically innovative in the best way; that is, Shakar’s structural “experimentation” is always at the service of, indeed, dictated by the thematics of his story at hand. The last story in the collection, “City in Love,” is remarkable for both the sophistication and absolute necessity of its startling narrative technique: based on the story of Narcissus, the threads of a secondary story, “the voice in your ear,” are woven into the primary story by way of an intricate authorial “game” that would make Georges Perec clap his hands wildly. Still, Shakar’s often profound literary inventions never overshadow the emotional intensity of his fundamentally romantic fictions—the reader feels not detached admiration, but engaged marvel at the resilience of the characters and the ways they find not merely to survive in the city but live, even, sometimes, after dying. [Joseph Allen O’Rear]

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