Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Love Me Yet, novelist Jonathan Lethem returns to the territory that has proved particularly fruitful for him this past decade - his home town of New York City. Yet, unlike Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, his latest, Chronic City, is set across the East River, in a Manhattan just a few degrees askew from reality. Lethem spoke to TIME about the American obsession with its own pop culture and why book readings are typically a snore...
There are many surreal elements in Chronic City: a mysterious fog, snow in the summer, a giant tiger. Is there something about Manhattan that makes it an unreal place in your mind? It's both real and unreal. The pressure of money and ambition and the forces of aspiration and yearning that make up that island also make it into kind of a virtual reality. There's something about Manhattan that's half a concept. People are living inside this concept as much as inside the real territory. But it is also real, and I wanted to capture the texture...
...were born in Manhattan, but have mostly lived in other parts of New York City. When you were younger, what popped into your head when you thought of Manhattan? Any New York City native has a complicated relationship with Manhattan because it's the place that everyone's aspiring to get to. Even in Brooklyn or Queens you can have that feeling. And yet you also feel a sense of possession. It belongs to you; you're a New Yorker, you're entitled to it, but disenfranchised from it at the same time. I loved Manhattan in a very traditional...
...guess, as a Brooklyn-ite, I'm predisposed to see the things that are being lost in the equation, lost in the constant glamorous renovation and the veneer of new money that's always being laid over the top of things in Manhattan. There's this constant adjacency of the present and the past. The past doesn't go away just because the present arrives. It just moves over one step...
...economy, though, does it reflect a time that has passed? I hope the book floats in time a little bit. It was certainly meant to. It doesn't even mention a year. But the money never goes away. I mean, the restaurants and bars are full in Manhattan. It can sometimes seem almost like zombie money - it just goes on doing what it did even though it's not alive anymore...