There are eight million naked cities in this naked city - they dispute and disagree. Whitehead begins by discussing how every New Yorker devises a personal version of the city: ''You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it. The texture is like the flick of a radio dial across the band, if all the stations had achieved a mysterious unity of subject. Sometimes the author is speaking, and sometimes it is someone overheard in a crowd or the sound of someone else's interior monologue or some anonymous emanation from the domain of received ideas. The identity of the narrator shifts almost sentence to sentence. The book is a tour de force of voice, restlessly hopscotching from first to second to third person, from observation to speculation to reminiscence to indirect citation, in a staccato rhythm that effectively mimes the noise of the city. In 13 chapters, he ticks off the principal loci of that experience, from the Port Authority and Coney Island to ''Rain'' and ''Morning,'' and he moves through each one as if he were passing a Geiger counter over every inch. Now Colson Whitehead, the engaging and ambitious author of ''The Intuitionist'' and ''John Henry Days,'' has made his own X-ray of the city, a book that seeks to get under the skin of the urban experience without resorting to anecdotes or mere data. White in 1949 with ''Here Is New York,'' his brilliantly terse encapsulation of the city as viewed from the perspective of a stifling Midtown hotel room in the depths of summer. But the subject is so large that maybe the minimal approach is most effective: the simple-seeming but densely layered subjective evocation, nearly free of proper nouns, in a volume slim enough for poetry. ![]() Perennially, attempts have taken the form of symbol-laden short stories, collections of local-color vignettes and sprawling cast-of-thousands epics. For more than a century, like some complicated and unusually savvy butterfly, New York City has regularly dared writers to try and pin it down.
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