![]() ![]() My mother always told me that to be a girl one must be especially clever.īefore landing at JFK, I had three Bloody Marys and an extra piece of cake that fell apart in my mouth. It’s enough to make you go put on your best outfit and do your hair and makeup just so…even if all you do afterwards is sit down to read this scintillating excerpt.Īn excerpt from Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados There’s a visceral pleasure to gliding through New York with Isa and Gala - the beautiful and chaotic residue of living, the city’s bruises flatteringly lit, a love song that doesn’t shy away from what’s unlovable either. Granados is deeply, incisively immersed in the rhythms and forms of a night out in the city - the enjambment of one location against another as you make your way from drink to drink, the fragile, ephemeral assonance between people you encounter along the way - each one bearing a resemblance to previous nights out, but each one deliriously particular in its own way. Reading Marlowe Granados’ Happy Hour feels like eating a shimmering, intoxicating slice of the best summer of your life, a sort of Proustian cookie that transports you back not to your childhood but to the time when you looked best in cut-off shorts and felt like your heart was made of rubber. Who’s to say which model of the world has more to say about desire, freedom, and the Meaning of Life? Why is “getting somewhere” so important in novels when most of life is spent just getting by? In the Nightlife Novel, actions lead to actions and consequences to consequences, and you leave your baggage in the living room of a friend who lives a couple blocks away, but when you go to pick it up, they’re passed out and not picking up the phone so you buy a new toothbrush at the corner store and brush your teeth with a half-cup of seltzer. In the default Daytime Novel, actions lead to consequences and characters reckon earnestly with their baggage. ![]() ![]() How did we ever get the idea that seeing every single detail was a good thing? Anyone who’s eaten dumplings under the eternally three AM-scrutiny of harsh, buzzing fluorescents knows that it’s better in the flattering half-light of the bar, staring into the face of a pretty-much-stranger, the shape half imagined and outlined in traces of neon. The standard narrative gaze tends to be big on illumination, shining a stark, flattening light on whatever it touches, rendering backstory and setting as blandly, embarrassingly visible as pores on the nose of a girl leaning too close to the bathroom mirror. Is there such a thing in literature as “The Nightlife Novel”? If not, they should coin it. New York Is an Endless Feast and I Am Never Full ![]()
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