City: An Essay (review)

Brian Lennon's City: An Essay won the 1999 Associated Writing Program's award for creative nonfiction and is certainly the most experimental of the books to have won that prize.

City is among a group of works that fall generally under the rubric "lyric essay"—a form championed by, among others, John D'Agata in the Seneca Review. This is elliptical nonfiction prose that pushes toward the suggestive use of language, which has traditionally been the stock in trade of poets.

Lennon's work, like much of the work by writers mining this literary vein, points toward the lush potential of such an aesthetic. In the eleven short sections that comprise "Broadway," the book's first and most successful piece, Lennon places image on top of image—a palimpsest in which the writer's late twentieth-century life is layered over the smudged remains of the nineteenth: Edgar Allan Poe's house, a block-long experimental subway unveiled in 1871 and subsequently forgotten, a public transportation system a single loop long.

"The work now was excavation," Lennon writes. "Perhaps that's why I didn't walk much at first, out on the Great Public Road, but watched it from my window instead—"

There is throughout City that sense of watching rather than participating. Lennon seems more concerned with the shape of a thing than with the thing itself. As he writes at the beginning of "Broadway," "Red taillight waves: s-shapes bobbing on an asphalt sea; streaking, bleeding it. There was a late night TV advertisement, a time lapse film of Broadway traffic: just lights, surging in double time as the sun sank and rose over the City." It's the shape of the lights, the long time-elapse shapes they leave behind rather than the actual cars or drivers, which is the subject matter.

As a theory, a tactic, a way into a subject, all of this is potentially exciting—a postmodern capturing of the ghost of our material selves. However, City finally seems too thin. Like the music of Phillip Glass, what makes a minimalist approach ultimately work is its willingness to go to extremes. Glass's experiments in reshaping the three-minute pop song were in the end far less interesting and successful than what he could do with a movie sound track or an opera.

Lennon and others are testing the possibilities, searching for the boundaries of narrative in nonfiction. However, the essentially intellectual approach finally leaves the reader wanting more. Experimentation is vital to literature. Language that becomes complacent is incapable of exploring new ideas, of finding expression for the fresh challenges the world continually presents us with. Yet City seems to play it safe. As his essay "Nineteen Italian Days" suggests, Lennon's sensibility is that of a tourist—someone who's just here for a visit.

The "lyric essay," with its love of connotation and willingness to play around with the tyrannies of time and place, holds out the promise of work that weds a poet's love of truth (as Faulkner said) with the prose writer's love of fact.

City is still a blueprint of the buildings to come.