Discovering Gotham: One Chapter Can Make a Book

In my Kindle adventures over the last six months, I have sometimes detoured from classic literature into contemporary fiction for no other reason that to survey "what's out there." Last fall, purely on a whim from Kindle suggestions, I decided to download and read New York For Beginners, a translation of a German novel by Susann Remke. It came via my Kindle Unlimited membership, so it was free.

The novel is a third-person narrative of a young woman from Berlin who gets a job managing the digital media division of a fashion magazine in Manhattan. Of course she does, I thought to myself. I've seen this movie before.

Reading the novel lived up to my expectations from almost the first page. Naturally it starts out the way every "young woman in the world" story starts namely with the protagonist, having just dumped her loser boyfriend, swearing off relationships and men in general. A couple chapters later, she's hopping into bed with her boss (without knowing yet who is).

The most disgusting but revealing aspect of the novel was the salivating fascination with American Pop Culture. The pages dripped with references to famous actors and politicians (including the ne plus ultra personalities Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton). Analogies are thrown out to television shows, including, brazenly, Sex in the City. 

Everything in the book seemed to prove the maxim that in this decadent age at the tail end of the Establishment Era, the empowerment of contemporary feminism is mostly about having a shot at being a prostitute for the elite.

After three chapters, I strongly considered abandoning the book as unreadable. Then I turned the page, and for one glorious chapter, I felt like I was reading a real novel.  It felt like a different book by a different author. We learn how the protagonist explores a new city. I found these pages actually moving, and readily identified with what she was describing about cities in general, and especially about lower Manhattan.

The chapter could have easily stood on its own as a short story, with hardly any addition. Unfortunately by the next chapter, the author had reverted to the style of chick-lit Millennial Gilded Age fanfic. Not surprisingly the protagonist abandons the urban exploratory mission she describes here, getting no further than Prince Street in Soho, at which point, using her smartphone, she ducks into a bar to meet a guy. It was perfect metaphor for the book as a whole (that, and the fact that she chose to skip going into the Staten Island Ferry Terminal).

(later)