From Edith Wharton to Jennifer Egan, the city has inspired countless stories, all of them sharing one major character – the metropolis itself

In novels, a great city is a setting. But it’s also a character in itself, a huge compound being, that the individuals living in it react to, live in the shadow of, as if it were another actor in the story – a giant that somebody has smuggled into the cast list. New York has such a powerful mythic presence that it has generated whole genres and subgenres. There’s the story of the immigrant, arriving from the Old World and taking New York as the very archetype of the New World’s newness. There’s the story of the rube from Oklahoma or Texas, for whom on the contrary the city scarcely seems American at all. There’s the story in which the city stands for money, quicksilver and dangerous, a solvent of all possible desires. There’s the story of the New York childhood or the New York romance, often intensely nostalgic, in which the city’s pleasurable surfaces mould around the characters – a metropolitan cocoon.



There’s a whole, glittering kaleidoscope of New York fiction already in existence, which makes you hesitate before trying to add to it, especially if you’re an outsider. But I wanted, in my novel Golden Hill, to wind back deliberately to a time that scarcely features in Manhattan’s present iconography, when the giant was a baby. In 1746, when it is set, New York was a small town on the southernmost tip of Manhattan island. Its 7,000 people were English and Dutch merchants and west African slaves; it was xenophobic and aggressively pious; it was loyalist in its politics and provincial in its culture; and everybody knew everybody else’s business.

That’s the opposite, to an almost perverse degree, of what Manhattan would later become. And yet I mean the tiny unfamiliar city I’ve written to be insistently haunted by the giant to come – because despite all the differences, Golden Hill is still a story about an immigrant, and money, and a romance, and the clash between the values of the backwoods and the big city.

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In a city with as many moods as New York, and as many ethnic histories running in parallel, fiction is essential transportation. There are no original 18th-century novels written in the city, so far as I know – that’s why I had to write my own – but once NY fiction gets going with Washington Irving, sparks and flutters with Herman Melville, and then expands into the confident literature of a metropolis, there are endless choices. These are only my best 10. Your Manhattan may vary. No, will vary.

1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Technically, a Long Island novel; but it’s the city in its bubble-economy euphoria that has been the scene for Jay Gatsby’s innocently criminal invention of himself, and it’s the city that turns out to control Gatsby’s fate. Fitzgerald’s is the classical statement of New York’s romance when seen from afar. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921)

There are other fictional ways into the rule-governed world of 19th-century Manhattan high society. But Wharton’s story of the prim socialite Newland Archer’s belated discovery of love with the separated, scandalous, Europeanised Ellen Olenska, just as he becomes irrevocably engaged to someone else, is wittier, sharper and more effervescent than anything you’ll find in Henry James.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)

Jewish New York in the 30s and 40s, at the moment when local-born geeks in glasses and escapees from Hitler’s Europe were inventing the superhero. It is chronicled by Chabon in exquisite prose attuned to both the art deco magic and the nightmarishness of a city where swastika-adorned zeppelins moored to the top of the Empire State Building.

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4. Guys and Dolls and Other Stories by Damon Runyon (2005)

OK, this isn’t a novel, because Runyon, who died in 1946, never wrote one. But his Broadway stories, handily collected in this Penguin Modern Classic, are a gorgeous, indispensable parade of tough guys and molls from midtown. All of them talk their heads off in a patented Runyonese that, like Wodehouse’s language for the world of Bertie Wooster, is only half-anchored in the real world, and justifies itself as pure verbal performance. “If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Talking their heads off ...a still from Guys and Dolls, based on the stories of Damon Runyon. Photograph: Gjon Mili/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

5. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956)

Humiliated, desperate, marooned in a retirement hotel on the Upper West Side with his imperviously wealthy father, middle-aged Tommy Wilhelm struggles his way through a sweltering summer day of failed hustles. He reaches a vision of the city as a universal gathering “of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future”.

6. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (2013)

There’s a large constituency that swears by Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale as the defining NY novel of the fantastic, but I’d nominate this as better Manhattan magic, with its lovely turn-of-the-20th-century immigrant encounter between a woman of clay and a man of fire. Two mythologies meet on the Lower East Side, and catch the Fifth Avenue El together.

7. The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (2006)

A comedy of manners set among New York’s wealthy uptown, this is also a state-of-the-nation story, heavily shadowed by the impact of 9/11. The portraits of struggling millennials are sharply-etched and contemporary, but there’s Tolstoy hiding behind this story of innocence and ambition, and a proportionate seriousness.



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8. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (2003)

The 70s and 80s’ racial crisis in the city, explored not via a shriekfest in the mould of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but through a brilliantly wise and painful bildungsroman about a graffiti-centred friendship between a black kid and a white kid in Brooklyn.

9. Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (1993)

Criminally neglected, when it ought to be as celebrated as Lord of the Flies or A Clockwork Orange, this is the city’s moment of maximum danger and decay, projected forward as a brilliant dystopia, and then strained through a schoolgirl diary. When civilisation falls, her pampered parents founder. Twelve-year-old Lola adapts and thrives.

10. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

Time’s dilapidations and revenges on a group of friends in the Manhattan music business, as mimicked in a set of virtuoso fictions that themselves weave backwards and forwards and sideways in time, finally alighting in a climate-changed New York of the near future.