New York

 

New York – by Edward Rutherford

The seventh novel by Rutherford, and the seventh I’ve read (I’m reading them sequentially). This one was, for me, easily his best.  Now, if you’ve managed to come across my other reviews of Rutherford’s works, you’ll note that I tend to say pretty much the same thing in every one of my reviews.  This one won’t be any different.  The “goods”, though, are much more prevalent this time around, and the “bads”, while still present, are minimal.

Like the great James Michener, Rutherford’s books are centered around places.  The characters in the book within the stories all have the particular place within the backdrop of the stories, and whatever happens to be occurring during the particular time in history, the geography plays a major part.  Maybe it’s because this is Rutherford’s first (and so far only) book that takes place in the U.S. is why I favored it (I reside in the U.S. as well). 

Yes, it’s always nice to learn about a city, country, or location, but Rutherford does sometimes lay the history on a bit thick and forgets to tell an actual story. One recurring theme in Rutherford’s books (it’s here, but not as often) is when he’ll have characters, say, eating dinner. Their conversation during the meal is nothing but the political climate of the time.  These conversations tend to be long and quite boring.  This is basically how Rutherford “quickly” teaches his readers about all of the politics about the place and the time.  It’s a bit much.

Also, in some of his books, the novel begins thousands of years ago, and each chapter jumps ahead at random intervals.  When you read some of his books that start out in, say 1000 BC, and then jump to 100 AD in the next chapter, and then 600 AD right after that, etc.  it can be a bit of a whirlwind and it’s hard to keep all the characters straight in your head.  Most of the time, each main character in a new story is a descendant of the early characters that we just read about, although the particular ancestor “existed” hundreds of years ago.

This isn’t so much the case with New York. He starts the history “late” for his standards, in the 17^th century, when the Europeans first settled the area. So the whole novel takes place over a span of about 350 years. That sounds like a lot, but not for Rutherford.  This was a huge advantage.  What’s common for Rutherford is to introduce us to 3-4 families in his first chapter or two, and as mentioned, we read about the descendants of the original families in latter chapters. So we’re getting several huge family trees to process, so to speak.  What works well in this novel is that the author really only focuses on ONE family throughout the entire book. This is actually a huge relief. He doesn’t even feel the need to include a ubiquitous family tree diagram at the beginning of the book that the reader has to constantly flip to and keep their bearings.

Yes, there are other families in this book, but many don’t get introduced to us until well into the overall narrative.  For example, there’s one family of Italian immigrants in this book, the Carrusos, that get quite a lot of focus, yet they don’t show up until the early 1900s when they arrive on Ellis Island. This actually worked very well and I hope Rutherford continues this practice with his future works. One doesn’t feel that their brain is quite as scrambled with so many related characters throughout the centuries.

So, yes, the star of this novel is New York (not the state, the city) and like all novels of this sort, it really does make one yearn to learn more about the city’s history. Sometimes, though, the storytelling is so good, that one forgets about New York altogether and becomes engrossed in the tale.  A good thing.  A problem with a novel that focuses on such a grandiose place, is that the author has to really limit some of the stories due to space constraints.  This book is almost 900 pages, but it could have easily been longer.  Some parts of New York’s history get a lot more page space. The Revolutionary War in the late 1700s, for example, easily commands about 150 pages, but other times, we’re forced to quickly skim through small chapters and we’re not allowed to focus on certain periods as much as we might like.

In fact, the last 100 pages or so (which details about 1950 onward) seems awfully rushed. My guess is that the author simply didn’t want to tack on several hundred more pages, so he did the best that he could when forced to be concise.  One almost wishes he would have stretched this book over two volumes. (He did this with a story on Ireland, and to be fair, those two books did end up a bit bogged down with detail.)

His best in my opinion, and a must if you’re a native of New York, or if you just want to learn more about the place.