NEW YORKERS

A lively portrait of a city in constant transformation.

“Even if, statistically, New York was now smaller than Baoding and Tianjin and Hyderabad and many others, it still overwhelmed in its old familiar ways.” So writes Canadian transplant Taylor in this fine and fearless follow-up to Londoners (2013)—fine because it’s so thoughtful and revealing, fearless because the author’s method is to engage strangers in conversation that quickly becomes oral history. “So, are you looking for boldface names?” asks one woman, to which another interlocutor says, “No, he’s looking for the lightly italicized.” No matter the typeface and/or whether rich or poor, New Yorkers have a common fixation: money. One rapper exalts, “I mean, New York, New York, man, dollar slices.” If one could live on dollar slices alone, that’d be fine, but as a personal assistant to a chain of idle-rich people remarks, “The wealthy in New York—what they’re buying is time and so they don’t care,” particularly about how others’ time is spent waiting on them. A well-to-do worker in the financial sector says he wouldn’t want to raise a family in the city, citing a boss who says it costs him $25,000 per month to live comfortably there. One of Taylor’s subjects recounts time on Rikers Island; a blind man tells him about the smell of sex that used to pervade the air around the Port Authority bus terminal; a car thief instructs him in the art of evading police; and a sometimes-homeless man teaches him about the “three to four degrees of homelessness” that beset those down on their luck. “New York isn’t a real place,” complains one weary soul, while another, recently arrived from Arkansas, says, “I feel like I’m in a movie….I feel like it’s going to be a happy ending.”

Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.