Critics' choices for Christmas
Gonzalez, David
David Gonzalez David Gonzalez writes the "About New York" column for the New York Times. 0few months ago I found myself engaged in that tentative pas de deux that occurs whenever the subject of...
...Later, as a reporter and a columnist, I would retrace many of those same trips, this time intent on ferreting out the stories of everyday life in this most misunderstood of places...
...emotional "what if...
...I want to see the bombed-out Bronx," replied the expatriate artist, who was in town from Paris for a few weeks of in-terviews and assignments...
...With understated and tender passages, Hijuelos's rendition of New York is dead on in its portrayal of neighborhood life, especially when it comes to the day-to-day dealings with Ives's Latino friends on Clare-mont Avenue...
...We spent an hour chatting with dozens of senior citizens in an elderly center, as he excitedly snapped away at everything from a knot of leather-faced pool players to eager old ladies playing bingo...
...So, there I was, full of suspicion, as William Klein, the fabled photographer and filmmaker, asked me to take him to the Bronx...
...manages to portray a metropolis where religious devotion and even enlightenment are all around us...
...Ives's journey and his urge to forgive raise enough questions to shake the current popular beliefs about capital punishment as the only answer to murder...
...Only the question...
...0few months ago I found myself engaged in that tentative pas de deux that occurs whenever the subject of the Bronx comes up...
...Hijuelos calls himself "a fan" of those people who manage, one way or the other, to hold onto their faith despite the cynicism of the world where the streets are full of danger and disbelief...
...foes' Christmas (Harper Perennial, $23, 248 pp...
...We walked through the streets, where teen-agers struck poses and mugged for him...
...There is no great revelation, only the ordinary assurance that he is meeting a man who is trying hard to stumble forward despite his past...
...Oscar Hijuelos's Mr...
...In the 1950s, publisher after publisher rejected a proposed book of his photos of New York which they deemed to be too raw, kinetic, and dark...
...The tale is one man's search for meaning after his son, a would-be seminarian, is shot dead in front of a church one Christmas season...
...Ives' Christmas answers that question with an equally emotional "what if...
...Luckily, the French had no such qualms and gladly printed the book...
...In his self-effacing way, Hijuelos says he has no answers, yet his book offers a challenge to those who would dismiss the idea of forgiveness as just a fairy tale...
...Is it dangerous...
...If Klein's book is about a city on the cusp of a new and turbulent area, Hijue-los's novel is about one man's life in the city that finally emerged from the clash of cultures and wills...
...Klein's streetscapes are bustling with reflections and angular edges, jampacked with people, ads, and mood...
...How would you feel, I once heard an eager city councilman ask an audience, if your wife or daughter was raped and murdered...
...This was not what he had expected...
...The borough that is New York's only connection to the mainland is the place of my birth, a place I first explored as a child tagging along with my father on weekend errands to pay the bills on our installment plan furniture...
...The power of Hijuelos's writing reaches its full dimension when Ives ventures upstate to meet the man, since reformed and released from prison, who shot his son dead so many years before...
...A similar intimacy informs another book that partly takes place at the same time Klein was wandering the city with his camera...
...He is just as accurate on the everyday acts of prayer and faith that sustain us, as in his depiction of the Muslim restaurant-owner kneeling in prayer or Jewish students streaming out of the seminary...
...I bit my lip and skipped lecturing him on the history of the borough's recent upswing that was brought about in no small part by organized congregations and other religious groups...
...What do you want to see...
...One section is devoted to images of kids with toy guns...
...Instead, I took him to Mott Haven, where we visited with a group of recovering drug addicts who have carved out a safe place for themselves...
...they point their pretend weapons in every imaginable direction and offer an ominous hint at the violence that the real thing in young hands would bring a few decades later...
...offering a sense of vindication to Klein and a sense of our past to the rest of us...
...Serendipitous moments leap from the page, like the sight of a grinning youth poking his head into the solemn line of marchers at a Saint Patrick's Day parade or a group of men in Little Italy gleefully hoisting a midget onto their shoulders...
...Politicians who want to talk tough about crime like to raise all sorts of "what if" scenarios to push our buttons about the death penalty...
...This year the volume was reprinted in the United States as New York 1954-55 (Dewi Lewis, $75, 256 pp...
...But the real magic here is how Klein was able to get up close, in even the most seemingly impersonal situations, to capture moments of serene introspection in the midst of urban entropy...
...He says that, since he wrote the book, he has often been approached by people who have lost children to violence and are searching for comfort or perhaps answers...
...Ives is trying, too...
...Wouldn't you want to avenge that death...
...The photos, large and grainy in starkly contrasting black and white, are start-ingly modern in their vision...
...Then again, Klein should have had some empathy with the residents of a maligned borough...
...I asked, more than a bit worried about what would follow...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
