Streets and avenues evoke blood vessels, which is why urban planners love to speak about vitality and, by extension, why it’s assumed that anything written with the city as its backdrop is possessed of that same vitality. Here’s one: they remain a source of fascination even as their novelty wears away because they contain multitudes. It can be wearying: Joan Didion famously called it ‘an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself’.Ĭities are a harbour for easy metaphors. Everybody has an idea about what New York is, and everybody who lives in New York wants to buy into this mythology. It is the flagship cultural project in America’s search for meaning. New York is a city treacled with representation. Few cities, however, are as absorbed by their own mythology as New York. It is a truism that some cities are more culturally intriguing than others, which is why influencers and other personalities are always talking about ‘getting into’ Lagos or Berlin. The precept that cities make for interesting writing material doesn’t hold true for all of them-there may be a New York novel, or a Johannesburg novel, but nobody is clamouring for the great Durban novel or a set of conjurations about Portsmouth-but it has nonetheless given license to much city-centred writing over the years. They may seem that way, because they are capacious, admitting many meanings, but to insist on seeing what exceeds us as evasive is simply to take the measure of our own insufficiency. Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, reissued fourteen years after its first publication, endures in the quality of its writing and its heated restlessness, writes Wamuwi Mbao.Ĭities are not elusive spaces, no matter what the panjandrums of urbanness may tell you.

The colossus of new york