Waste & redemption
Bookslut on Maeve Brennan‘s The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker.
The streets that ran through Brennan’s various neighborhoods were less comforting but no less interesting. She isolated moods: a hot day when there was “nothing to breathe except heavy displeasure” or a weekend afternoon when the city was “amiable and groggy – no complaints that I could hear.” She also collected characters that ran the gamut from a brown-suited businessman happily greeting his son to a drunken woman singing and bashing the roofs of passing taxis with an umbrella to a trio of futuristic prostitutes. Even the streets themselves were characters: Park Avenue wore “such an air of vast indifference to humanity,” while Sixth Avenue was “a perfect place for snow, and snow should always be falling there, tons and tons and tons of snow.”