‘Brooklyn’
by Colm Tóibín
262 pages, 2009 Scribner
 
and

‘Let the Great World Spin’
by Colum McCann
350 pages, 2009 Random House

The City that Never Sleeps. Gotham. The Big Apple. The Capital of the World. The Empire City. Whatever you call it, New York is one of the most historically and culturally important cities on the planet. Every year, dozens of movies and television shows and hundreds of books are based in NYC. And while it was beginning to seem like an old hat to use NYC as a setting, two Irish authors have recently written such remarkable novels about a particular time in the city’s history that it seems impossible to doubt that it will ever go out of fashion. Both bring NYC to life not only as a place but as a character itself.

‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’ by Wells Tower
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages

Wells Tower’s short story “Leopard,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and is included in his debut collection “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” is the kind of story that easily, graciously, commands attention. Written in the second person, it places the reader squarely in the awkward body and consciousness of an 11-year-old boy suffering two major indignities: an upper-lip fungal infection and a sarcastic stepfather. The former draws the unkind attention of an alpha-male classmate at school, who sets the whole cafeteria to name-calling with one incisive insult (“Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line”).

Denis Johnson’s latest novel is characterized mainly by its abruptness. It begins abruptly, with a compulsive gambler named Jimmy Luntz getting forced into a copper-colored Cadillac by a large, lumbering man named Gambol. Luntz owes some debts that he’s in no position to pay, and Gambol’s intentions appear less than friendly. Where they’re going or what, exactly, Gambol has planned, is left to the imagination.

“On this kind of trip, you don’t want to ask where it ends,” Gambol explains.

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A feeling of unreality was Dick’s stock in trade, and his novels and stories—including “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “VALIS” and “The Man in the High Castle”—are full of trips into parallel realities, mind-bending hallucinations and mysterious transmissions from ultra-dimensional entities. As if Dick’s fictional worlds weren’t complex enough, his personal life was also mentally taxing. Plagued by mental illness and addictions to various drugs, Dick had no choice but to ask some serious questions about the true nature of reality.