We Need An Interurban Trolley System

There's a very memorable scene in the 1975 historical novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015), in which a character, who I think was a Jewish immigrant, traveled 138 miles from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Springfield, Massachusetts. He reached his destination by transferring to various trolley lines. The novel is set in the early years of the 20th century. I don't know if such a transit system existed back then or was just a product of Doctorow's imagination, but I do know that this system is not available today. And that's too bad, because an interurban trolley system would help reduce bumper-to-bumper traffic and polluting car emissions.

An Affordable Manhattan Apartment, In 1965

I  recently found Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2019) in a Little Free Library kiosk in Harlem. This historical novel is set in New York City, in 1965, when a young woman fresh from Ohio named Alice Weiss comes to the big city with the dream of becoming a photographer. To her complete surprise, she ends up as the secretary to the editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, on the heels of publishing her bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, has been chosen by the Hearst Corporation to revive the half dead Cosmopolitan magazine.

When I read the paperback's storyline on the back, I instantly knew I had to take it home with me. Novels like this one and Pete Hamill's Tabloid City (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) that take the reader inside a media workplace rarely fail to fascinate me. So far I'm enjoying Park Avenue Summer.

There is one thing in the book I should note that caught my attention. It's a scene in which Alice finds a semi-furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $110 a month (paid for by a weekly paycheck of $55). The thought came to me that if rents in 2025 were that affordable, there would be almost no homelessness anywhere in New York City.

We Should Consider Building An Interurban Trolley System

I recently joined a Facebook group of transportation buffs called "New York's Railroads, Subways & Trolleys, Past & Present" (85,000 members). The site's profile photo of trolleys crossing the Brooklyn Bridge brought to mind E. L. Doctorow's historical novel, Ragtime (Random House, 1975).

There's a scene in which a character travels from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to, I think, Springfield, Massachusetts, by transferring from one trolley line to another. That's one of the most memorable scenes in the book. It would be wonderful if a trolley system like that existed today. Such a system, an interurban one, would help reduce traffic jams and air pollution from automobile emissions.

Discovering A New Literary Term

While browsing the New Fiction section of the public library on 124th Street in Harlem, I came upon a novel called Tenderness by Alison MacLeod (Bloomsbury, 2021). According to the flap jacket copy, it is the story of D.H. Lawrence and the writing of his 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. (I must confess, I've never read the Lawrence novel, but Tenderness may change that.)

On the back of the book were advance praise blurbs, one of which was from novelist David Leavitt who referred to Tenderness as being part of a literary form called "uchronia."

I'd never seen that word before and since I couldn't find it in any of my dictionaries, I consulted the Internet. Wikipedia defined "uchronia" as "a hypothetical or fictional time period of our world, in contrast to altogether-fictional lands or worlds....Some, however, use uchronia to refer to an alternate history."

Two novels said to fit the alternate history description are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

Truman Capote And The Secrets Of The Affluent

One book that should be optioned for a motion picture, if it hasn't already, is The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte Press, 2016). This page-turner, which gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of events, is a fictionalized account of Truman Capote's befriending and betrayal of five wealthy Upper East Side women-- he called them his swans-- including Barbara "Babe" Paley, the wife of William Paley, the founder of the CBS broadcast network, and the swan with whom Capote had the closest relationship.

Capote wrote  a short story called " La Cote Basque, 1965" that was published in 1975 in Esquire magazine. The story revealed the secrets of the aforementioned women. These secrets were told to him with the belief that he would keep them confidential. When he didn't, they felt hurt and betrayed and as a result they shut him out of their lives. Capote never recovered from this ostracism.

It's too bad the late Philip Seymour Hoffman isn't around to reprise his portrayal of Capote in a possible film adaptation of The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

Note: The New York Times ran a story by Joseph Berger with the headline, "Cote Basque, A Society Temple, Is Closing" (September 18, 2003) that described the restaurant as "the high-society temple of classic French cuisine [located in Manhattan] that became the setting of a catty and thinly veiled excerpt from an unfinished novel by Truman Capote...."

Farewell To Novelist E. L. Doctorow

RIP E.L. Doctorow, the author of Ragtime, World's Fair, and other historical fiction. He died, according to the New York Times Book Review, on July 21, 2015 at age 84.