The first thing that came into my mind after reading Gone to New York was a song — ‘Why, oh why, oh why, oh/ Why did I ever leave Ohio? Why did I wander to find what lies yonder/ When life was so cosy at home?’
This splendid, nostalgic song from the 1953 Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town, recently revived on Broadway, has assumed some real-life significance at last.
For one can’t help wondering why Ian Frazier, who spent an idyllic youth in the little Midwestern town of Hudson, Ohio, chose to abandon it for ever to become a writer in New York, a city whose night- marish aspects he assiduously chronicles in this book.
The last piece in his collection of essays, the only one that doesn’t concern New York, is about rural Hudson, where he lived from the ages of five to 18 and for which he declares unqualified love. ‘Why did Hudson enchant me? Why was life, there and then, so sweet?’ he asks bemusedly.
By contrast, Frazier’s first years in New York, where he got a job in the 1970s on the New Yorker magazine, were anything but sweet. He lived amid constant mayhem and traffic roar in a converted factory above an army-and-navy surplus store in Canal Street, where he had a flat with no door, no bathroom and no lavatory.
And when later he was married with children and living more conventionally in Brooklyn, he was still in a world of delinquency and homelessness and litter and graffiti. Now he lives with his family in a traffic-choked suburb across the Hudson River in New Jersey, which doesn’t sound much fun, either.
But for many Americans, as for many people everywhere, New York has an irresistible appeal.
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