Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now
By Patrick McGrath, Bloomsbury, 2005

The city in Patrick McGrath’s new collection of short stories is not the New York we think we know. There’s very little of the resilience, the we-can-handle-anything bravado that characterizes New Yorkers’ contemporary self-image. The New York of these stories is, as the title claims, a ghost town, both in the usual sense - a town deserted and downtrodden, after an enemy invasion, a cholera epidemic, a terrorist attack or any of a number of other tragedies that befall the city over the course of the tales - but also in the sense that it is a city haunted by the specters of those residents who have struggled and, in many cases, succumbed to the harshness visited upon the city because of its stature.

The collection consists of only three stories spanning the city’s history from the late eighteenth century to the fall of 2001. Each story features a complex frame, with the bulk of the plot being related by a narrator removed in time from the principal events. Herein lies the notion of haunting: these narrators are preoccupied, obsessed, entirely driven by things done elsewhere, sometimes long ago, by someone else. The ghosts of New Yorkers past return, occasionally literally, to remind the living of a plethora of failings - failings of the characters and failings of the city itself.

The first story, “The Year of the Gibbet,” is told from the point of view of an old man who, in 1832, is on the verge of death thanks to a cholera epidemic that has swept the city. The sick man recalls how, 50 years earlier, during the Revolutionary War, the city had been invaded by the British army and held under an occupation led by a sadistic British officer. After the death of the then-young narrator’s father at Valley Forge, his mother became an insurgent, working covertly to relay information between the American army in New Jersey and the revolutionaries in the city. When the woman’s activity was suspected, the boy’s inability to concoct a cover story led to her arrest and execution, and thus to an overwhelming guilt that weighs upon him for the next half-century.

The second, longest and best story, “Julius,” is again constructed from a narrator’s recollection as he considers his family history. His great-uncle, Julius, had been an odd boy who disappointed his robber baron father by having no aptitude for running the family business. The boy’s sophisticated sister, Charlotte, in the absence of paternal guidance, became her brother’s patron, encouraging the boy to develop his artistic talents by becoming a painter. In the course of his studies, Julius fell in love with an artist’s model, Annie Kelly, a poor Irish girl who was, of course, far beneath his station. In the meantime, Charlotte had married Max Rinder, an opportunistic, ruthless businessman who was concerned only with gaining control of the family fortune; it was to the amoral Rinder that Julius’ father turned when he felt the need to extract Julius from his relationship with the Irish girl.

In this centerpiece story, McGrath is able to set up his characters as broadly emblematic representations of New York’s diverse faces: here is Julius as the eccentric artist unable to fend for himself; there is Rinder as the soulless manipulator, willing to do anything to succeed; here is Charlotte, the ineffectual sophisticate; there is Annie Kelly, the inhabitant of the underclass ground beneath the wheels of all those who tower over her. McGrath lays out the entire social history of the city in this single story, in a straightforward narrative that marches inexorably along.

The final story is the weakest of the lot. “Ground Zero” is narrated by a therapist, “a childless woman who never married.” She tells of a client, a reticent man with relationship problems who has become involved with a prostitute. The man thinks he loves the prostitute, but the therapist thinks the relationship is simply a delusion. The prostitute herself is haunted by the ghost of a lover who perished in the World Trade Center, and the therapist gradually comes to see the woman as an evil force who is set upon the destruction of her client. Set amid the nightmarish aftermath of 9/11, as armies of workers sifted through the rubble and lower Manhattan was still a deserted disaster area, the story becomes increasingly frantic as the therapist becomes irrationally obsessed with the idea of saving her client from the clutches of the prostitute. All of this is handled deftly by McGrath, but the twists and convolutions of the story are often too broad to be satisfying.

There is little need for more stories about New York. Even before 2001, an inordinate proportion of American stories were about this single city that represents a small percentage of the country’s population; after 9/11, almost every American story has been about New York. But here, McGrath defies expectations and gives us a New York that we’re not used to seeing: not the flawed but indestructible de facto capital of America and the world, but a tragic place that has seen, because it is so great, more than its share of misery. It’s not exactly an uplifting portrait, but at least it’s an original one.

Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.