Lennon, Brian. "Alligators in the Sewers." Review of City in Love by Alex Shakar. American Book Review 18.3 (March-April 1997): 26.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Alligators in the Sewers
Brian Lennon

In the year 1 B.C., New York City is a peculiar place. A subway engineer tows a piece of the sun behind his train every night, buffering the city's power stations. A Queens schoolgirl battles "sentors" (half motorcycle, half man) on the playground of P.S. 96 in Flushing. A tattooed, pierced waitress, fleeing an amorous tie-wearing millionaire, transmogrifies into a traffic light. These are The New York Metamorphoses, a 20th century reappropriation of Ovid, and Alex Shakar's Gotham-smogged retailing of the ancient myths is not just pleasantly unponderous. Taking after its source, it is at once polyphonic, subtle, and in its own whimsical way, deep.

Shakar has taken such icons of myth as Icarus, Pygmalion, and Morpheus and dressed them, somehow plausibly, in modern urban garb. Typically, these are ordinary slouchy mortals---a student, an artist, an actor---until, in a manner evocative of a superhero's "waking," they bang into a defining and often literally transforming experience. Indeed, this is a remarkable feat of borrowing from the high and low ends of folklore---Greek myth and our comic books---and it is accomplished with a likable blend of reverence and apostasy.

Shakar is a New Yorker's New Yorker. If you are or have ever been young in New York, you can probably identify with the protagonist of "On Morpheus, Relating to Orpheus... ":

...Morpheus suddenly perceived the whole city to be filled with actors, trailing one another endlessly, each one imagining himself the sole heir to a dream impressed upon them all by some inhuman force. He looked up at the jumble of walls and windows and saw the city as a monstrous trap, to which they were all irresistibly drawn, coming by the thousands to pile their aspirations one atop the other, resulting in something unprecedentedly grotesque. The city, he saw, was a massive by-product of untold thousands of impossible dreams.

Morpheus tried drinking, at night...

For the initiate, there is also the delight of witness to much more minor metamorphoses: "Doubling House," a pun on the name of a West Seventy Ninth Street bar where, in the words of Chang, a character drinking there, "you go... to be doubling your vision"; the "Babybar" ("in place of booths, a row of cribs jutted from the far wall"); New York's own primordial myth of the alligators in the sewers, and more. And throughout, there is expert transliteration of the stimulus-shield shibboleths of city life:

Carl sat on the curb, watching a rivulet of trash-filled water flow in the gutter under the creased bridges of his pantlegs; match books, bottlecaps, butts and bits of cellophane and paper careening by, a lilliputian parody of the traffic of the street.

Shakar's work is unencumbered by the narcissism latent in the naïf or faux naïf and overt in the urban warrior. This is why one might say that despite its being very much a New York fiction, City in Love will appeal to city mice and country mice alike. The pitch of experience is offered without strenuous pretense, and while one isn't spoon-fed anything, here, there is nothing clubby or exclusive about Shakar's fictive New York. A familiarity with the psychotropic effects of LSD and Ecstasy will greatly enhance your enjoyment of "A Change of Heart," the real stunner in this book; but this gnosis is by no means crucial, and in the story you will find out that it's like, anyway, without having to endure the reptilian pedantry of a William S. Burroughs or the goony McInerney brio.

This is not to say that every story in City in Love is an unqualified success. But Shakar's debut work is characterized by elegance and creative honesty, and in a quadrant of current work in fiction (the "experimental" zone) sometimes known best for smirking cleverness, he lends nothing but dignity to such alchemy.

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