I don’t know New York City well, or at all really. I have spent a total of ten days there on holiday, and I loved it as much as anybody who visits when they are 21 and have just finished university might. Over lockdown, though, I have been there often. By coincidence or not, much of what I’ve read over the past year, and what I have watched, has been set in the city.

Netflix launched a seven part special in January of this year, Pretend It’s A City. Each of its episodes focuses on a theme or topic upon which apparently permanently blocked writer, and humorist, Fran Lebowitz waxes sarcasm with Martin Scorsese. Linking all of these topics, athletics, transport, libraries, is the city of New York. Lebowitz and Scorsese punctuate their on-stage or bar-side conversations with walks around the city, venturing as far as Queens but mostly staying in their beloved Manhattan. 

It’s compulsively charming viewing, and maybe more than any Nora Ephron movie, is a heartfelt love letter to the city Lebowitz made her home five decades ago. Watching it, I walked vicariously with Fran and Marty, brushed shoulders with subway crowds and sipped negronis in dimly lit bars. 

But it’s true that these glimpses are just that, small glimpses into slivers of life in a city of over eight million. Like Ephron’s perma-fall Upper West Side, Lebowitz’s New York is one in which poverty exists only artfully, and only in the 1970s. She complains about the level of debt she is in, but it is debt which has allowed her to live in an apartment in Manhattan with only 15,000 books for company, not debt accumulated to pay for utilities or food.

But should we expect a humorist to offer us a panoramic view of a city and critical insight into its social ills in a Netflix series? Lebowitz offers us these flashes of her vision of what New York is and what New York was, for her. What more can a person do when describing a place but offer us these fragments of memory and experience? How else can a person be? The ways in which we consume culture and live our lives is essentially fragmented. A two minute glance at a long-read here, a see you soon text there, ten minutes with a book at the end of the day.

As Lincoln Michel writes in BOMB Magazine, “Fragments are the dominant literature of today. Our text diet is composed of tossed-off tweets, Instagram updates, and the two sentences of articles that autofill a Facebook post. Texts from a friend. A snippet of a novel read between subway stops.”[1]

Michel allows the fragment to shatter his article, too. He writes: “As I’m writing this, I have twelve tabs open in my web browser. I’m texting with a friend about dinner plans. I’m getting emails from my father. Refreshing the news. I’m writing this review, but only in fragments. Just a little bit at a time.”[2]

As I write this, I pause to look around at the other masked people focused on laptops, at desks spaced three metres apart. We are little isolated pods of work, plugged into the library’s panelled reading room wall. I have several tabs open on my screen, some are articles I have not finished, some are half finished bibliographies for university assignments, some are train timetables. 

I steal glances at the window to my right, to look at the framed glimpse of this in-between part of the city, which I have always liked. But whatever glance we’re stealing, whichever fragment we’re enjoying, is at the expense of another.

This is not a unique ill of modern technology. In his 1925 Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos shows us several lives in fragments, which make up a noisy kaleidoscope through which we see pre-WWI New York City. Though they overlap, these lives never quite blend or merge, and the broken glass is always visible around their edges. Dos Passos’ characters don’t come together to form a tapestry of life, but a mosaic. The joins are always visible, never too neat, and are sharp.

The novel’s Phil Sandbourne is distracted by a beautiful girl in the street, and is hit by a car. His few seconds of distraction by a beguiling femininity in a city he experiences as mostly masculine costs him serious injury and hospitalisation. There is a price to be paid for transgressing the boundaries of your own lot, your own little bit. 

The polyphonic roar of New York in Manhattan Transfer is a roar of industrialisation, of new technologies and a rapidly changing society. But more than this, it’s a roar of the mistakes people make when they look the wrong way, when they try to transgress the boundaries of this fragmented city.

In vignettes, we meet Dos Passos’ characters time and time again. We meet them in the bar, on their way to Atlantic City and running down the street, as we might come to know the people in our own neighbourhoods. These glimpses of their lives build to create an image of their character and a judgment on our behalf about their person. 

And we see characters’ mistakes repeat themselves time after time in these overlapping vignettes. We see Ellen have one misguided affair after the other, we see Stan finish bottle after bottle and we see Herf’s unhappiness fold back upon itself to create a layered wall of disaffection which neither Herf nor the reader can penetrate. 

The novel’s fragments create a messy image of flawed humanity which eventually might come to resemble a mosaic-like mirror for the reader. It’s uncomfortable reading.  And perhaps that’s the intention here. As DH Lawrence said of the novel, it depicts “the vast loose gang of strivers and winners and losers which seem to be the very pep of New York.” Dos Passos shows the city how he saw it. And for Dos Passos, the threads binding the fragments of something like society are fraying.

Dos Passos rejects the strictly linear, like Joyce, going some way to subvert the narrative and temporal tradition of novels before them. His novel, preoccupied as it is with the evils of advertising and early consumerism, rejects the capitalist straight line of progress and time. Manhattan Transfer shows the unsanitary and unproductive sides of life that slip through this net, and into the folds and crevices of our days and our memories.

Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 is named for one of these crevices. Four minutes past ten. A specific minute of an hour of a day of a life. 10:04 is a neatly defined fragment working as a title. Its protagonist is a young writer, deeply worried by the possibility of his heart dissecting as a result of his recently diagnosed Marfan’s Syndrome. He is worried, quite literally, about the pieces holding his body together fragmenting. 

While his body threatens to fall apart, his professional life is thriving. He, who it is generally accepted is an autofictional Lerner,  meets his agent for lunch in a restaurant where they eat obscenely expensive lobster and talk about writing and money. In this glimpse into how the moneyed, or at least the eager to impress eat, Lerner shows us the industry behind creativity, the industry which has brought this metafictional novel into our hands. 

Roberto, the young boy he tutors, hails from a New York so different it might as well be an altogether separate city. He takes Roberto to the Natural History Museum and later arranges for a book he has written to be self-published, into beautiful hardback editions he hopes Roberto will treasure. Roberto is less delighted by the gesture than he expected. Roberto seems to be aware that what has produced his book is just money. These books are just vanity projects. But then, what else do reviewers for certain papers call autofiction? 

Lerner’s undermining of his own project reads undermines what it is we might have come to a novel expecting. We might not receive the truth in these pages. These interwoven fragments might be as void of artful meaning as a self-published volume about dinosaurs. It is only by exploring another part of the city, geographically, socially and culturally, that Lerner reveals a core vulnerability of his own. All of these novels reach the centre and the truth of their characters and their cities by moving away from them, by denying their total dominance of the narrative and the page, and by questioning their entire project.

In Alex Preston’s 2015 Guardian review of the novel, he references a passage “where the narrator and two friends are walking through New York and the sounds and sights of the city intrude and overlap upon the protagonist’s consciousness. It builds up into a glorious tessellated sequence of ambulances, Rihanna singing Umbrella, neon billboards, text messages, the narrator’s conversation with his friends, his internal musings.”[3] The passage is masterful. In it, Lerner brings in the noise and with it the lives and the quotidien of everyone his characters brush past to the page. Reading this glimpse of a city was the closest I got to boarding a crowded subway carriage and becoming part of the cresting wave of a crowd in a year.

We travel with Lerner’s auto-fictional narrator to galleries and lofts where his not-quite-girlfriend is exhibiting paintings, to clinical waiting rooms and into the suffocating insularity of an apartment prepped for the worst winter storm in decades. We experience all of the things he might become, and the men he might wish he was. And all of these longings and shortcomings combine to make something like a life.

Arguably, 10:04 is not a fragmentary novel. If compared to Renata Adler’s 1976 Speedboat, say, its narrative and structure appear to be utterly conventional. Speedboat isn’t a novel that readily offers itself to a reader. It takes, or at least took me, some time to sink into it. But once aboard, Speedboat’s fragments reflect a dazzling clarity.

One of Adler’s few breaks from the fragment, one of her few concessions to any sort of homogeneity comes in the line: “In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re too hard on yourself.”” Like Lerner, Adler’s centre is vulnerability.

Otherwise, the privileged set of writers, financiers and professors Adler deals with are utterly fragmented. Dislocated from themselves, from one another and from their surroundings. “They thought of selling their boat again and returning to Geneva. The jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations.”

In an attempt to understand these fragments more fully, I search for the streets Adler mentions on Google Maps. I drop the little yellow person onto the blue line and I am there. I click the arrows pulling me further and further uptown or downtown or east or west and I wonder what has changed since the 1970s.

Fran Lebowitz tells me most likely everything has. In one episode, she tells the story of an arts centre and music venue that simply fell down. Her peers were not surprised, given the state of the building. Another tab I have open tells me that this building was the Mercer Arts Center, at Broadway and West 3rd Street. Now, a building belonging to New York University’s law school stands in its place. 

Dos Passos, Lerner and Adler’s novels are all peppered with a sense of change. Their fragments might blow away at any time as easily as the confetti at Macy’s Day Parade. Whether through a rapidly evolving economy, the looming threat of climate collapse, or gentrification, these fragmented novels know that the city cannot stay the same. The kaleidoscope must turn.

Perhaps glimpses of a city in a moment in time, even those we know the best, are all we can ever really have. For city-dwellers, those little glimpses are what add up to living here. The neighbours, the regulars in a grocery store, the local characters known by nicknames based on their antics. 

After a year or longer of being confined to our homes, these glimpses are beginning to look very different. Some restaurants may not reopen, some office blocks lie empty, and some neighbours have moved to the countryside. But if we look to learn anything from these fragmented novelse, it is perhaps their rejection of the idea that we can expect things to remain in any state. These books deny us the chance to feel nostalgic for what has passed, for it was never anything fixed. There is no portrait of the past to look back on in these novels, only the clumsy and difficult mosaics of our memory. These experimental novels might come closer to depicting reality than any of the realist traditions they reject.

[1] https://bombmagazine.org/articles/fragments-as-form-mary-robisons-why-did-i-ever/

[2] https://bombmagazine.org/articles/fragments-as-form-mary-robisons-why-did-i-ever/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/10-04-review-ben-lerner-great-writer

CLAIRE THOMSON is a Glasgow-based writer and communications professional. Her work has previously appeared in Dear Damsels, Severine Literary Journal and Ta Voix. She is studying for an MA in Art History in her spare time.