Feet of Clay

...not a passage would tell them what it is like to feel anything but the cold weariness Tim Marchman is a lifelong resident of Brooklyn and a regular contributor to the New York Sun...

...And why is it being described...

...Every step, from his first to these...

...Occasionally Whitehead delivers a good line or two in The Colossus of New York: "He has that wish again: that every step he ever took left a neon footprint...

...This is not encouraging, especially for a writer in whom great hopes are invested...

...Colson Whitehead is a writer of sufficient talent and ambition to write well about the streets of Gotham, if only he can find a way to make himself a Columbus of the near-at-hand...

...That way he could catch up with himself, track himself through city and years...

...If there were not Manhattan, there could not be this Brooklyn look...

...This is Whitehead's second book since The Intuitionist, which was successful commercially as well as artistically and clearly marked him as a writer not only of achievement and considerable promise, but one concerned with character and story...

...The book was messy and uncontained, but it was wonderful in parts, and there are worse kinds of books for promising young novelists to write than overam-bitious ones...

...That book was not about a writer but an elevator inspector, not about a man but a woman, and the place was not New York, but a city...

...This sounds nice enough...

...The sense of dislocation, of the city as a place that grows less knowable the longer one stays in it, was perhaps the best-realized element of Whitehead's wonderful first novel, The Intuitionist...

...The best of them gave up long ago...

...But what is it describing...

...The Intuitionist was as good as it was because Whitehead was able to embody alienation in experiences unlike his own...

...James Agee was not a New Yorker by birth, and he saw things with the unfa-miliarity that may be necessary for grasping truths about the city...

...His second novel, the 2001 John Henry Days, was a failure, however, and for much the same reason that The Colossus of New York is a failure: because its author chose rhetoric and preciosity over narrative...

...Not enough, if The Colossus of New York is any guide, which is a shame...

...for truly to appreciate what one escapes, it must be not only distant but near at hand...

...of a man who's lived in one place his whole life and is too overwhelmed to say anything about it...

...In regressing from the imagined experience of a person unlike himself to that of a person noticeably resembling him, Whitehead is tracing a path toward his own personality rather than toward the world...

...It is certainly moody, especially the last line...

...But these are rare...

...BY TIM MARCHMAN Colson Whitehead begins his new collection of essays on New York, "I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else"—and the entire book sustains both the false humility and the civic narcissism implicit in that line...

...The effect White-head is trying to achieve was actually caught by James Agee at the beginning of "Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes," his 1939 essay about Brooklyn: "Watching them in the trolleys, or along the inexhaustible reduplications of the streets of their small tradings and their sleep, one comes to notice, even in the most urgently poor, a curious quality in the eyes and at the corners of the mouths, relative to what is seen on Manhattan Island: a kind of drugged softness or narcotic relaxation...

...Still, readers were willing to allow Whitehead some credit...

...Here, for example, is Manhattan in the rain: "From block to block the people display an assortment of strides, every station between a walk and a run...

...Only: all escapes are relative, and bestow their own peculiar forms of bondage...

...Both the great solidity of the city and the specificity of each passing stranger dissolve in Whitehead's hands, and all that remains is a mass of people compressed into pointless abstraction...

...In John Henry Days, Whitehead unsuccessfully attempted to link the empty life of a hack freelancer living in Brooklyn to the myth of John Henry...

...Each of the essays in The Colossus of New York is centered on a small part of the city—Coney Island, say, or Broadway, or the downtown F train at rush hour—and composed of fleeting impressions and imputed beliefs...

...Not a passage in The Colossus of New York would allow someone who had never been to New York to envision it...

...Each has a personal strategy of how best to move in this...

...Whitehead believes that New Yorkers in the rain are inherently interesting, merely because New York is the place where they're getting rained on...

...Unfortunately, he's wrong...

...In that 1999 book, vaguely situated in a place that was not quite New York, he made literature of a pulp notion of the unreal city...

...And yet, evocative descriptions such as those found in The Intuitionist, unallied either to narrative or a specific idea, prove far too insubstantial to form what White-head needs to make a nonfiction account like The Colossus of New York an interesting read...

...The Colossus of New York makes John Henry Days seem more troublesome...

...What do they know of New York, who only New Yorkers know...

...There is something contemptuous about it...