New York! New York! As we continue our stroll through novels for every region of our Empire State, WHAT can represent New York City? Burr? Ragtime? The Waterworks? All-Of-a-Kind Family? Cities in Flight? Auntie Mame? The Cricket in Times Square? The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge? A thousand other tales of America’s literary, cultural, and financial capital? Well, let’s take a plunge!

With apologies to Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I choose Wonderstruck (2011) by Brain Selznick to hint at New York’s cultural glories. Two world’s fairs… Broadway… silent movies… the Museum of Natural History… and an independent bookshop… all weave together in the story of a newly-deaf boy finding his born-Deaf grandmother. Two time periods alternate, just as “graphic novel” sections alternate with text sections. Maybe it especially resonates with me and my life-long mild-to-moderate hearing loss, but I find it at once comforting and overwhelming.

Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War (1964) is a juvenile, and yet it captures something of the struggle to keep the city human – a struggle personal and cultural, but also political, economic, and social. Published at the height of a conflict epitomized by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, The Pushcart War pits pushcart vendors – some of the city’s least significant humans (financially, economically, socially, politically, geographically) against ever-more monstrous trucks steamrolling through the streets. Resistance is so subtle that the truck faction doesn’t even notice — at first.

Winter’s Tale (1993) by Mark Helprin is the tale of a fantasy New York (and maybe all views of New York are in some way fantasies). Peter Lake, cast adrift as a baby by immigrant parents being refused admission, raised by semi-wild dwellers in a salt marsh and exiled by them to turn-of-the-century New York, is forced into crime by city gangs and rescued by a supernatural white horse – a horse that he finally realizes has come to him in order to be freed. It’s a long book, and its magical-realism isn’t for everyone. But let it flow, and you’ll feel some of the city’s magic, along with the city’s grit.

A more prosaic magic abounds in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon. The title characters are teens, first cousins in immigrant families, who become architects of the brand-new medium of comic books, and the even-newer genre of superheroes. It’s a great American novel, sprawling from Prague to New York to Antarctica, taking in comic books, immigrants, stage magic, American Jewish life, refugees, the Holocaust, World War II, the Empire State Building, Al Smith, the golden age of radio, and the postwar suburbs, yet never setting a foot wrong. Wow. (By the way, comic-book giant Dick Ayers, who lived in Pulteney and attended school in Hammondsport during the 1930s, was one of Chabon’s sources.)

Speaking of Wow – I first read Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin as a teenager, and I’ve read it at least once since. Wow. A mountain of a novel: a Black novel, an American novel, a religious novel, a New York City novel. A human novel. The Grimes family lives a life of crushing conflict – how could it be otherwise, for an American Black family in the first half of the 20th century? But there is also conflict, even abuse, WITHIN the family. There’s conflict in the church that Gabriel Grimes pastors. And teenaged John recognizes, and is troubled by, conflicts within himself, conflicts that we can see are pulling him away from his church and his family. For now he can only see himself, and express himself, in religious terms. But as he dances in the Lord, SEEMING to fall even deeper into his stepfather’s world, he begins to dance away from his upbringing.

On a brighter and lighter side, we end our City list and our State list with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote. Maybe most people know it through the movie, but the book’s better. In a lot of ways, we can tie it to The Great Gatsby, on Long Island – bright these folks may be, but they’re also brittle. We can smile our way through Tiffany’s, but we need at the same time to see how shallow, how hollow these people are. You can find yourself in a great city, but you can also hide yourself there. For all their failings and even their wrongs, the people in Go Tell It on the Mountain are twenty times better than the characters in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

So – that’s our list, through every region of the state! If you’ve got better choices, comment or let me know! Happy reading!