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A review by thelizabeth
Lost Lustre: A New York Memoir by Joshua Karlen
2.0
Well, I do really like winning Early Reviewers books. Unfortunately, I really didn't like reading this one.
These essays are almost unbearably dry. Not like Hugh Laurie is dry, but like Prohibition was dry. It reads a little like someone writing a college paper. (How to fill up another half a page? Let me restate my themes.) Other times the level of detail is like reading someone's journal. You always think you want to read someone's journal, but really, it's boring.
Generally, there is a problem with artistry. He dumps in quoted dictionary definitions more than once, in order to state, this describes me perfectly. Which may be accurate, but the problem is that there's nothing at all literary about that. Why write it? Why mention it if you don't want to say anything about it yourself? He also block quotes extensively from friends' emails, which just seems weird, in order to sort of back up what he's been saying. It's like he's challenging us: See?
The central story about his friend who has died is the nicest one, and I did like reading it. It even had a line that struck me: "With an inner shudder of tenderness, I recognized the squalid surroundings framed in the snapshot." Not all of the writing makes so much sense, though. Sometimes, even when he's explaining something, he states the obvious to a stultifying degree. "Our sadness was for a lost friend, or boyfriend, whose memory also had become intertwined with nostalgia for our youth, who was frozen in our minds in our teenage years in New York in the seventies and eighties." What is this, SEO?
A lot of this book is about his troubles and fears in his very bad neighborhood growing up, when the East Village (around Avenue C) was in terrible shape and filled with drug crime. I confess, I was impressed by the photos of blocks of rubbled apartment buildings in the area. I didn't imagine it so drastically. As a kid, he was mugged there about once a year, though he makes it sound like it was every day. I'm sure it was really scary every day, but something about his approach to explaining his feelings about this just makes you want to nitpick. Somehow what he's written sounds ignorant and defensive, as if we won't believe him -- which, makes a reader want to doubt him.
Also? The perspective is a little bit racist. Not every reader may agree with that, but I wasn't super comfortable. I recognize it is sensitive to describe facts involving race, like the environment in which you live and the descriptions of people who attacked you. I don't think it's wrong to write about or specify, but I suppose I just don't like the way Karlen does so. At best, he mentions non-white people at an arms-length separation, and at worst makes it sound like really it would be nicer for him if their culture didn't exist at all, because it scares or alienates him. They're not all gangsters of course, but he would just be more comfortable if they weren't all speaking other languages, or playing music with horns in it. How do they think that makes him feel?
There are some other really unflattering stories, like the one about his first girlfriend -- which I liked, until it got all stalkery -- and the one about being a surly tourist in Peru. The thing is, he tells these stories with some perspective, such as saying he made a mistake or had a bad attitude. But there isn't much more framing than that. He isn't acknowledging how that impacted anything, and so I'm figuring he's not too interested. For such a self-described artist, punk, and bohemian, this man sounds so unenlightened. Why do I feel more enlightened than him? He's the author of this book. What's wrong here?
There is a funny element wherein he reminisces at length about Homer's diner (in the 1980s), which used to be across from my school (in the 2000s). Meg and I discovered it during our sophomore year, I think, and spent a lot of lunch breaks there, and then when we came back junior year, it had closed over the summer and we felt like we'd let it die while school was out. I think it was junior year. See: if I was the author, I would write now about, why don't I remember what year it was? How funny that so many years go by and all I remember are the cheese blintzes that were the bad kind you could get frozen at the grocery store, but I don't remember what we were saying or what we were wearing. How many other cheese blintzes have I forgotten? I left my office and stumbled out into the rain to Sixth Avenue, driven to revisit the block where the restaurant had stood, not knowing what I was seeking, finding only an upscale bistro where once I had sat in my thrifted clothing. Memory makes you remember.
There's just many weirdly elementary conclusions of this kind. The opening piece almost did me in. Did you know the 1960s can be defined in many ways, but particularly by the Beatles? It's... true. In another one, the comparison, "as though they were lining Times Square temples devoted not to Apollo or Bacchus, but to Mars or Ares." To... the...? MARS AND ARES ARE THE SAME ONE. OMG seriously. "Where were the heathen pageants and orgiastic fertility dances?" I... it hurts.
However. Another star, because some of this is genuinely thoughtful, and Karlen cares about what he's saying. And because I like New York so much, I like the Village, I like the period and what details Karlen can offer of it. I like people's struggles with memory in general and NYC's constant, unsettled changes in particular. They're rich conflicts for a book. And I will be very happy to read another, different book about them, by somebody else, also.
These essays are almost unbearably dry. Not like Hugh Laurie is dry, but like Prohibition was dry. It reads a little like someone writing a college paper. (How to fill up another half a page? Let me restate my themes.) Other times the level of detail is like reading someone's journal. You always think you want to read someone's journal, but really, it's boring.
Generally, there is a problem with artistry. He dumps in quoted dictionary definitions more than once, in order to state, this describes me perfectly. Which may be accurate, but the problem is that there's nothing at all literary about that. Why write it? Why mention it if you don't want to say anything about it yourself? He also block quotes extensively from friends' emails, which just seems weird, in order to sort of back up what he's been saying. It's like he's challenging us: See?
The central story about his friend who has died is the nicest one, and I did like reading it. It even had a line that struck me: "With an inner shudder of tenderness, I recognized the squalid surroundings framed in the snapshot." Not all of the writing makes so much sense, though. Sometimes, even when he's explaining something, he states the obvious to a stultifying degree. "Our sadness was for a lost friend, or boyfriend, whose memory also had become intertwined with nostalgia for our youth, who was frozen in our minds in our teenage years in New York in the seventies and eighties." What is this, SEO?
A lot of this book is about his troubles and fears in his very bad neighborhood growing up, when the East Village (around Avenue C) was in terrible shape and filled with drug crime. I confess, I was impressed by the photos of blocks of rubbled apartment buildings in the area. I didn't imagine it so drastically. As a kid, he was mugged there about once a year, though he makes it sound like it was every day. I'm sure it was really scary every day, but something about his approach to explaining his feelings about this just makes you want to nitpick. Somehow what he's written sounds ignorant and defensive, as if we won't believe him -- which, makes a reader want to doubt him.
Also? The perspective is a little bit racist. Not every reader may agree with that, but I wasn't super comfortable. I recognize it is sensitive to describe facts involving race, like the environment in which you live and the descriptions of people who attacked you. I don't think it's wrong to write about or specify, but I suppose I just don't like the way Karlen does so. At best, he mentions non-white people at an arms-length separation, and at worst makes it sound like really it would be nicer for him if their culture didn't exist at all, because it scares or alienates him. They're not all gangsters of course, but he would just be more comfortable if they weren't all speaking other languages, or playing music with horns in it. How do they think that makes him feel?
There are some other really unflattering stories, like the one about his first girlfriend -- which I liked, until it got all stalkery -- and the one about being a surly tourist in Peru. The thing is, he tells these stories with some perspective, such as saying he made a mistake or had a bad attitude. But there isn't much more framing than that. He isn't acknowledging how that impacted anything, and so I'm figuring he's not too interested. For such a self-described artist, punk, and bohemian, this man sounds so unenlightened. Why do I feel more enlightened than him? He's the author of this book. What's wrong here?
There is a funny element wherein he reminisces at length about Homer's diner (in the 1980s), which used to be across from my school (in the 2000s). Meg and I discovered it during our sophomore year, I think, and spent a lot of lunch breaks there, and then when we came back junior year, it had closed over the summer and we felt like we'd let it die while school was out. I think it was junior year. See: if I was the author, I would write now about, why don't I remember what year it was? How funny that so many years go by and all I remember are the cheese blintzes that were the bad kind you could get frozen at the grocery store, but I don't remember what we were saying or what we were wearing. How many other cheese blintzes have I forgotten? I left my office and stumbled out into the rain to Sixth Avenue, driven to revisit the block where the restaurant had stood, not knowing what I was seeking, finding only an upscale bistro where once I had sat in my thrifted clothing. Memory makes you remember.
There's just many weirdly elementary conclusions of this kind. The opening piece almost did me in. Did you know the 1960s can be defined in many ways, but particularly by the Beatles? It's... true. In another one, the comparison, "as though they were lining Times Square temples devoted not to Apollo or Bacchus, but to Mars or Ares." To... the...? MARS AND ARES ARE THE SAME ONE. OMG seriously. "Where were the heathen pageants and orgiastic fertility dances?" I... it hurts.
However. Another star, because some of this is genuinely thoughtful, and Karlen cares about what he's saying. And because I like New York so much, I like the Village, I like the period and what details Karlen can offer of it. I like people's struggles with memory in general and NYC's constant, unsettled changes in particular. They're rich conflicts for a book. And I will be very happy to read another, different book about them, by somebody else, also.