It’s as if Whitehead has heard all of our conversations, smelled our fears, tasted our successes, recognized our falseness, tapped our phones and our fantasies, and, yes, felt our pain. reading him is as natural (and as uncomfortable) as looking in a full-length mirror. You don’t need that stuff to understand me.” And his paragraphs will drive pedantic grammarians wild (even as they will delight the liberated), for he segues smoothly from first person to second to third-in both singular and plural-as if to ask (without the question mark and comma, of course), “Hey, what’s the difference?” And yet. He eschews question marks, commas, and much other interior punctuation, as if to say, “Slow down. The difficulties all arise from his poetic language. Whitehead makes it both difficult and easy for readers in this astonishingly evocative view of Gotham. As ebullient as Walt Whitman and as succinct as Emily Dickinson, a young novelist ( John Henry Days, 2001, etc.) looses his five senses on his native New York City-and allows the sixth some play, as well.
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