Slaves of New York

New Yorkers vs New York. Required reading for every social studies student. The title is a perfect description of the contents. Desperate people in desperate situations do desperate things. Life is hard, wear a helmet. To do is to be. Plato To be is to do. Socrates To be or not to be. Shakespeare Shew be do be do... Sinatra If you like this book try the book "Go Ask Alice". If you like this book try the movie "Go Ask Alice". If you like this book try the movie "Going South".

Interlinked stories about Greenwich Village artists in the 1980's. The shades of "Trilby" "La Boheme" and "The Moon and Sixpence" hover. The word `deadpan" was used by other reviewers and is very appropriate to the way shocking behaviors are described without an authorial nod or wink . The characters are eccentric or bizarre, in the traditional mode of starving artists. People are monstrously vain or childlike with the narrator, even a first person narrator, abstaining from moral judgment, although esthetic ones abound. Janowitz never uses an adverb and the suffix "-ly" does not occur. A minor irrelevant problem re-reading my Washington Square trade paperback copy from 1987 was that it has the kind of binding misleadingly called "perfect" that causes the book to split apart.

I first read this book on a train ride from Paris to Bretagne - cover-to-cover in one trip. I thought the characters were great, the images were so colorful, and I loved the humor. Now, twelve years later, someone has absconded with my copy, and I have to buy a new one. After reading this, read "A Cannibal in Manhattan" and "A Certain Age". Tama Janowitz is one of my favorite authors. Her writing is like visual art on paper. If I had to compare her writing to the work of fine artists, I would say she is like Gustav Klimt meets Faith Ringgold.

I've read this book so many times over that I've actually become sentimentally attached to it. Most of the enjoyment from it is reliving the time in which it's set, the 1980s, an interesting time in the way that the clothing was: at times conservative, other times colorful, overall intriguing, but there's still no way in hell you'd want to BE in it again.This book captures the lives of the wacky, egocentric NY artists who reflect their hated yuppie counterparts in that they're upwardly mobile, albeit nonconformistly, greedy and self-centered. But unlike yuppies, the artists of the Lower East Side present far more colorful stories and egos to capitalize on.Fortunately the book has Eleanor, the self-deprecating protagonist to whom we all endear. She keeps the book light-hearted and comical, as she is the offbeat among the offbeat, the miscast in the world of misfits. She is the self-conscious woman who clashes with, and makes uncomfortable, her fellow carefree artists. But she eventually finds her ground in the big city. We root for because she conquers the city the way we wish we could: by keeping intact our integrity, humility, and naivete, and not succumbing to the cynicism and selfishness of the "Me" generation.

I enjoyed this book, and its own flawed view of the perceived nobility of the starving artist. It sort of romanticized the idea of living in Manhattan for me. I read this book while living in Miami, and I now live in Queens. So, I dare say, this book did have an impact on me. I recommend it for its "look back" at the pre-Dot.com mania now possessing New York. Is it foreboding that those with artistic ambitions are still trying to figure out how to pay the rent fifteen years after this book was written?