Low Life

"Well, I think when people come into New York, if they’ve never been here before, they think of all the possible dangers—purse snatchings and peep shows, that sort of thing—and that’s part of the appeal. In any giant city that has this many people so close together, those things are going to happen. White’s mission was to go out and make sense of all of it. It’s an extremely engaged, really fun and smart book about these things. (The movie Gangs of New York is in some ways a more political look, but it’s that sort of feel.) The book goes all the way up to the early 20s, but it starts in 1840, so it basically covers the Civil War, the turn of the century, and how the industrial shape of the city changed up to the 20s. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When you read Power Broker, you can still see the traces of most of what Caro talks about in the modern city; the bridges are all still there, the buildings are largely still there. But if you peel away one whole layer, then you get to Low Life , and suddenly a lot of these things you’re reading about are not there; they’ve been built over, they’ve been paved over. For me, the nicest thing about this book—and I want to say this as a compliment and not have it come off as an insult—is that it’s kind of ‘baggy pants’. Some books are really tight; they work like corsets, and are super-meticulously edited and pruned. This book has a lot of overgrowth. There are sections that are rambling, and there are these fantastic digressions. Sante seems to be on the edge between myth and true grad-student level three-source reporting. There are all these stories about criminals—here’s how this or that murder gang operated—and you think they’re probably true, but it’s not like these people had reporters embedded with them. Words everybody uses when they talk about this book are ‘secret’, or ‘under’—those kinds of words. The idea is that Sante is bringing something previously unseen into the light, and I like that a lot. I feel that when you go to a city you should have that; you should have the ghosts around you. When you’re walking around, you should know if it’s the case that on this corner 150 years ago somebody got a bullet put in their head. Busch is a writer whom I especially like, but I don’t think he’s that widely read now. I don’t know if everybody wants to experience cities in the same way, but I like to read about the places I’m visiting. Then you can come at them weirdly sidewise. This book goes right back into the middle of 19th-century New York City. When people think of the Civil War , I don’t think they think of it as affecting the northern cities, really—you always think of the big fields, and soldiers lined up on either side of a meadow. This book is about a guy who was a sharpshooter in the war who then returns to the city; it’s a good complement to E B White’s book, because it takes place 100 years earlier, and it’s fiction, but in a way it’s the same kind of thing. (What’s also interesting is that the protagonist lives in Five Points, which is the neighbourhood that’s very prominent in Low Life —it’s a crime-ridden, gang-infested neighbourhood in lower Manhattan.) It’s a very weird story. The guy is disfigured and he’s a war survivor. He meets Herman Melville as the story goes along… There’s a lot about the city’s literary heritage. It’s a great book that’s very difficult to sum up, but I want people to read it. It’s filled with masks, and there’s a lot of strange violence in it. It’s sort of about what happens in cities after wars, when everybody comes back to them with all the things they can’t forget. It’s relevant now—people are coming back from wars now, obviously. One reason this book is good for me now is that it’s a very good post-trauma book. The city is still a post-traumatic city because of 9/11. Yes. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary next year. It’s not that people walk around with a weight on their heads, but it’s always there on some level, and, in a very different way, it’s there in this book. The way Fredrick Busch deals with these kinds of things—violence and disguise and all these grand literary themes—is great. I am interested in the period he describes, and in the way that certain kinds of culture began to spring up around then. It starts with the Harlem Renaissance [of the 1920s and 1930s], which you read about in high school—but then it goes outward from that and you start to see how all of the music, art and literature blossomed from that movement. It’s a very good, very well researched history, a wonderful social history of the city. Rather than letting you limit your experience of the city to Soho, Union Square, and Times Square, this book gives you the idea that there are other places in the city that have incredibly rich histories—places where every building is interesting; places which have gone through many evolutions over the years. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But it’s only one of a number of books like this. You can find equally good books about the Italian neighbourhoods in New York, or the Jewish neighbourhoods, or the Irish neighbourhoods, or the suburbs, or the Bronx. So I say, find the version of this book that will interest you the most. If you’re coming here and you’re Dutch, find a book on where the remnants of the Dutch settlement are in New York. If you’re coming and you’re Irish, find that book. New York is the most diverse city in the country, and there’s a book for almost every part of it."