Booklist has given a starred review to The Painting and the City.

At a friend’s party in Manhattan, sculptor Jacob Lerner sees an 1842 portrait of a young woman and quickly becomes obsessed with it. He sets a librarian friend searching for information about artist and subject, which eventuates in finding the painter’s journal of his New York sojourn for the commission. Philip Schuyler’s testimony (which appears in two separately paginated inserts in a different typeface) discloses that the painting is one of five that together constituted a threat to the subject. That threat is tangentially related to the commercial growth of Manhattan, another of Lerner’s obsessions and the motive behind a pair of installation pieces, one a dour vision of modern New York, the other a serener conception. As he sleuths the painting and builds the installations, Lerner has hallucinations in which, guided by a glass marionette, he observes scenes related to Schuyler’s and his subject’s fates, in which a not-quite-conspiracy of property owners, dating from Manhattan’s Dutch colonial days, is implicated. Seemingly informed by an artist’s eye and driven by its fantastic elements, this complex, enthralling novel is concerned with relations between art and commerce, and nature and commerce; the importance of the past; the everyday oppression of capitalism; and how art may shape history. —Ray Olson

So run over to the PS order page and get yee a copy or two.

PS has put up a pdf sample of The Painting and the City.  Click here to read the first two chapters.

Here’s the nice treat that came in the mail yesterday.

The Painting and the City is off to the printer, so I thought I’d post on its origins.

The first particle of what became the novel occurred April 22, 2001 (although I wrote 2002 in my notebook, which confused me a lot when I went back to find the entry—from the very beginning, I was warping time…).

I had an image of two friends, one showing the other his new painting.

I was in Israel to attend my nephew’s bar mitzvah.  My suitcase was missing and I had to wear my brother-in-law’s clothes.  I was reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. This proto-idea came out with a Latin American setting and characters, likely due to my being in a foreign country, wearing someone else’s clothes, reading a book by a Polish writer that was written in English and set in South America.

Hernandez called Saturday morning to tell him of a new painting. “I didn’t want you to see it, Gerardo. I know you’ll love it as I do.” Hernandez possessed great pride over his artistic and gastronomic tastes. They agreed to meet on the plaza for coffee first.

Gerardo had known Hernandez since college…

A couple of days later I made this list:

– visits friend to see painting again, and again

– party, looks at painting with others

– woman at party, friend starts seeing woman

– woman doesn’t like painting

And there it lay for many months, until I began unearthing the rest of the story, setting it in New York, without the Hispanic names.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this picture of Manhattan half urban/half made over into its natural state.

It came from a New York Times article here.

The article references the Mannahata Project, which is also the source of the photo. According to the website: “The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today.”

There’s a book coming out in May called Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City and an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. The Mannahatta website talks about some neat stuff, like an interactive map that allows you to overlay the contemporary street grid on the 1609 landscape.

I stumbled on the Mannahatta site at some point during my research for The Painting and the City, but at the time, the site didn’t have much on it and I forgot about it.

In my novel, there are many references to Manhattan Island’s past topography, streams, hills, the Collect Pond. The sculptor-main character becomes fixated on the idea of Manhattan Green and creates a diorama combining an urban downtown that ends at the Dutch wall that is now Wall Street and a green and natural landscape above the wall. I also have a situation in which art can be used to affect what it depicts, if the necessary complex magical elements are used. So for the cover art, I was interested in showing the city being broken, with a landscape emerging in places.

Continue reading “Manhattan Green” →