lower east side librarian

This is the kind of thing I eat up--teenage dancer dealing with race issues. Vicki is enrolled in a competitive program at the School of American Ballet. The 14-year-old hestitantly leaves her divorcing parents and younger sister in New Jersey and spends the summer with her aunt (mother’s best friend, not sister) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Well, she’s psyched to do it; she loves to dance, but it is daunting.

Cantwell’s memoir begins after she graduates from Connecticut College 1953 and moves to New York City to be a writer. She is a Catholic from a WASPy town in Rhode Island, but passes well enough. Her mother is not impressed when she marries a Jew fairly soon after graduating. But she’d slept with him, what could she do? I don’t mean to mock. On the outside Cantwell isn’t someone I can relate to, but the quality of her writing voice really got me, both its competence and its appeal, if that makes sense. It seems like the better the writing I’m reviewing the worse my own gets.

This is such a Rivington Street readalike that it’s hard not to compare the two. Both begin in Russia around the turn of the 20th century and move to the Lower East Side after a pogrom. Both are about young Jewish female union workers and both have lesbian characters, and both depict the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

A biracial Manhattan School of the Arts comics geek does the Metamorphosis thing, and in the body of a fly gets an eyeful in the boys' locker room. Sounds great, right? Which is why it's a little disappointing--high expectations. It's a smart romance novel, and ends on an activist note, so what am I complaining about?

It's weird to me that Carrie Pilby seems to be marketed as a romance novel. Check out the Harlequin Teen edition cover. Although there is some dating, Carrie Pilby is not boy crazy. What she is, is crazy crazy, and seeing a shrink. A 19-year-old Harvard grad, Carrie is a little socially maladjusted, probably from skipping three grades. Her brilliant mind is inflexible, and she really can't make small talk. When we meet her, motherless Carrie has no friends and a frequently-traveling father. Her therapist gives her a to-do list and through completing the tasks on it (e.g., join something, go on a date, do things you love, etc.), she gets over some of her rigidity, superiority, and loneliness. It's surprisingly believable.

When you're an anti-consumption mainstream-culture-eschewing car-hating vegan it's highly unusual and extremely gratifying to read a travel guide written expressly for your weird demographic. Even those who loved to shop and think no trip to NYC is complete without seeing Phantom and dining at the Hard Rock Café should find some stuff they'll want to do in here, much as I hope they don't. There are plenty of kid-friendly activities listed in the guide, but be warned, the f-bomb gets dropped 25 times in the book, more if you count Fly's signature spellings, "fck" and "fckn." While we're counting words, those orthodox in their food choices will rejoice as I did that the word "vegan" appears 85 times in the 256 page book.

Read the rest of the review.

Patti Smith's adventures with Robert Mapplethorpe and lots of the happening artists and musicians of the late 60s/early 70s--pretty neat to be inside her head like that.