Why We Came to the City: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly Jansma's compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city: opportunity, stress, beauty, as well as the allure of the über rich juxtaposed against the impoverished. The cast includes Irene Richmond, an artist supporting her craft by working at a hip art gallery; George Murphy, an astronomer whose life research may be imploding; his college girlfriend and soon to be wife, Sara Sherman, an editor for a paper; William Cho, working in investments, living with his mother, and harboring a crush on Irene; and Jacob Blaumann, the quintessential graduate not living up to his potentialâx80x94having made his mark as a poet, but working as an orderly at a mental health facility in the suburbs and having an affair with his boss. Underneath the interactions between the characters lurks an examination of relationships and the ways friendship is tested when one in their midst is beset by a rare form of cancer. Steering clear of the maudlin, the author gives searing portrayals of both challenging cancer treatment and how true friends rise to the occasion when necessary. Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) pens a tightly-written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple. (Feb.)\n Praise for Why We Came to the City “A tremendous accomplishment: anxa0elegantxa0and deeply moving meditation on friendship and mortality, bothxa0fearless and finely wrought.xa0I believe this book will stay with me for a very long time.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven “Stunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can’t quite bring yourself to leave. It’s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.” —Michael Schaub, NPR “A brilliant stylist, Kristopher Jansma draws readers into an intricate web of lives in the big city in his astonishing new work. He writes with power and passion . . . and inhabits his characters, thinking what they think and feeling what they feel so compellingly that he pulls the reader into the story and won’t let go. . . . A wonderful, unforgettable novel.” — Miami Herald “Jansma’s novel is a love letter to Manhattan, the letter so many of us who moved here in our 20s have written. . . . Like the rest of us, his characters learn that things don’t always work out the way we plan, but if we stick with our city, our city delivers.” —Helen Ellis, The New York Times Book Review “Enticing . . . Much like a modern Great Gatsby , this book is awash in the feeling of the city.” —Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle “Fans of Bret Easton Ellis’s stream-of-consciousness narrativesxa0will enjoy Jasma’s paean to New York City.” — In Style “Joyful and tragic, Jansma’s book will appeal to readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life .” — Men’s Journal “As the characters navigate the complexities of an untimely and unexpected tragedy . . . Jansma artfully counters the heaviness of these themes with a delightful, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, narrative. Dialogues are smart, absurd, and addictive; and the author’s insights border on the philosophically expansive and profound.” —Santa Cruz Sentinel "Like A Little Life and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. , Jansma's Why We Came to the City shows us, with beauty and insight, what it's like to be young and smart in this time, and in this place. It's xa0a major achievement." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life “Why did we come to the city, anyway?xa0And why on earth would we ever leave?xa0In Jansma's able hands, these are and are not metaphors. We came because we are more ourselves as part of a collective.xa0We came to learn our limits.xa0We came so that we might know when to leave.xa0This is a lively, addictive party of a book, and you're invited." —Elisa Albert, author of After Birth “Fantastic. This beautiful, boisterous novel is a paean to New York, to the hubris of youthful optimism, and, especially, to the powerful magnet of friendship. It’s full of as much heartache and humor as the city itself. And like the city, this story will break you apart in a dozen ways, only to teach you, tenderly, how to put yourself back together. I wanted it never to end, but when I read the last page, I loved it even more. Jansma is a star.” —Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange “Kristopher Jansma’s dazzling Why We Came to the City is at once a tribute and a breakup letter to New York, timeless as the elegant architectural details that jut ornately from older buildings, yet timely as a phone freighted with an urgent missive. The constellation of relationships he charts feels so vivid and visceral that we not only see it but find ourselves caught, swaying in its gravitational tugs and tilts. In page after page abounding with wit, candor, and compassion, Jansma reveals the indelible nature of our connections and commitments to one another, along with their gossamer fragility.” —Tim Horvath, author of Understories “Lively and elegant . . .xa0poised to make Jansma a name you know.” —Meredith Turits “A deeply emotional ode to friendship . . . Jansma’s narrative shines.” — Kirkus Reviews “Jansma’s compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city. . . . A tightly written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple.” — Publishers Weekly “This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love. . . . Gets at the heart of what it’s like to be young and alive in the big city.” —Library Journal Kristopher Jansma is the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards , winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, he is now an assistant professor of English and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz and a graduate lecturer in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He has written for the New York Times, Salon, The Believer, The Millions, Slice, BOMB, and Electric Literature . He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Living Vicariously Irene Richmond ran down the narrow foyer, helping guests get out of their coats, which were dusted with flakes of snow that had been coming down heavily all day and still drifted lightly onto the hotel balcony. Coats that cost more than she earned in a month and that were works of art themselves. Hoods lined with fox fur imported from Finland. A quilted sateen coat filled with goose down and patterned in the latest Japanese style of concentric circles. A long vest made of rabbit. Mongolian lamb’s wool. Irene got a thrill from just holding them, but it was always short- lived. By the time the guests had finished warning her not to crease the collars or wrinkle the hems, there was someone else making an even more fashionable entrance. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 During rare pauses, she checked her phone for messages from George and Sara. Nothing. And nothing from Jacob either. Twisting in front of the hallway mirror, she reseated the bobby pins that kept her blond hair up off her shoulders. She liked the way her neck looked in the golden light by the door. An elegant extension of her one bared shoulder. She hoped it wasn’t too much. Abeba had said only to look nice, but Irene had sensed an implication that she not look nicer than the guests. Juliette then added that it was important to look hip, which Irene took to mean young, vital, and strange. Therefore: cerulean leggings, crochet sweater dress, peacock feather necklace, and a braided skinny-belt. Irene hoped these projected the artistic, professional image specified. Every job had its uniform. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 She checked her eye shadow, which made her irises look a shade darker, almost black instead of blue. She rubbed at a spot beneath her left eye that had been there for a month now but had only recently begun to feel sore. Buzz went the door, and she was off to collect a giraffe-print bolero from the next artist or heiress to stagger in on midnight- black stilettos. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 The K Gallery’s annual holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria was always an impressive affair. All year Irene and her friends looked forward to this night, the second Friday in December. Not that they didn’t go out other nights, not that living in the city wasn’t sometimes glamorous, but never anything compared to this. There were seventy-eight people on the exclusive guest list, and renowned chef Marc Herradura was catering. Honest-to-God movie stars attended. Last year they’d seen that guy from The Office , and the year before that, Cyndi Lauper! This was that other New York: always around them but never visible. For this one night it elonged to them too. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Even with the first big storm of winter going on outside and flights canceled at JFK and LaGuardia (only Newark soldiered on), they had nearly full attendance. All day the gallery’s owners, Juliette and Abeba, had been commanding Irene from one end of Manhattan to the other. They’d thrust her into snow-capped cars in Chelsea with a wrought-iron baboon skeleton (a steal at just $300,000) whose shrieking head had extended dangerously out the window into traffic. Wearing a pair of Abeba’s oversize duck boots, Irene had sloshed across the posh lobby of the Lexington Avenue hotel, aching under the weight of a moldy yam encased in bile-green polypropylene (starting at just half a million). xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Five years ago, when she’d first begun working at the gallery, Irene had gotten a thrill simply from being near such valuable art, but by this point she was considering telling the driver to take her and the oversize photograph of Trisha Birch’s genitals (one million flat) to the George Washington Bridge so she could hurl it out into the Hudson. Or maybe she would just keep going. On and on, out of the city. With the money this one photo was worth, Irene could paint all day and all night for another twenty years. Or start her own gallery. Or institute a progressive artists’ colony where young dreamers could take up their own work. She could help them avoid the eighteen- hour days, the perpetual temper tantrums, the name-dropping, the ego trips, the talentless and tormented. Except that, of course, outside New York City, the Trisha Birch photographs were more likely to get her arrested for indecency than for theft. Maybe in L.A., she thought. Maybe in London. Maybe on Mars, or Neptune. Juliette and Abeba were not terrible bosses, but they had all the fussiness of artists without the brilliance. They had an eye for slick marketing and could start a trend like nobody’s business. But the higher the K Gallery climbed in the Chelsea scene, the more Juliette and Abeba drank sickening amounts of Campari and spoke of selling everything and setting sail for the Marquesas like Gauguin. Rule one of living in the city, Irene had learned—as soon as you got there, you had to begin threatening to leave. She was theoretically putting money aside for a trip to France from which she privately imagined she’d never return, though it seemed like the same $350 or so kept entering and exiting her savings account; meanwhile the trip got more expensive and the exchange rate got worse and the gallery took up more time. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Still, it was, as they said, a living, and far from a bad one. Even when she’d had to examine Teacup Yorkie feces to see which should be threaded alongside diamonds on a necklace for the Bryant Park show. Even cataloging seventeen years of Percy Bryson’s toenail clippings. But she had legit benefits and enough money to pay for a cramped studio apartment on East Fourth Street, where she could paint at night without disturbing a roommate. Plus she wasn’t starving. If not trips to France, her paychecks covered a vintage dress or two and movie tickets and bar tabs and green tea smoothies. Buzz! At last it was them: George Murphy and Sara Sherman. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 George wore a wide smile and a black pinstripe suit. Was it new? It was. Sara had gotten it for him last week at the Macy’s pre-Christmas sale, to wear to his postdoc interviews. Irene kissed his cheek and inspected his penny-coppery hair; it needed cutting. Irene could never resist the urge to ruffle his head lightly, for luck. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “We made it!” George announced. His cornflower-blue eyes met the room over Irene’s shoulder and then fixed on her. When he spoke to her, or to anyone, they never drifted an inch. His three favorite words were, “Did you know—” and after saying them, he had a way of lowering his voice as he told you something terrific about some distant galaxy he was researching out at the North Shore Observatory, as if Andromeda B were a restaurant you might want to check out sometime. He seemed to want nothing more than for others to find him handy to have around. Swiftly, he could explain to you: the mechanics of an elevator, the science behind a hailstorm, or the electric spark between your fingers and the fringe of your dress. A good Catholic boy from Columbus, someone had raised him right; George Murphy was attentive in a city of the attention- deficient, and for this he was always looked after. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “No one’s ever on time to this thing,” Irene said. “Here, give me your coat.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 But George was already hanging it up by himself. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara slid in for a kiss from Irene. “Some big accident on the LIE,” she explained. Irene told her she looked stunning, and Sara said she must be mental; she’d come straight from the gym and was sure that she must reek , but of course she did not. Her long purple dress was discreetly sequined. Raven-haired and slender-jawed, Sara forever made Irene itch to break out her charcoals and sketch dark, elegant lines. No matter that she was technically not of the artsy crowd at this party—inside an hour, half the people there would believe Sara was the one throwing it. She’d glide from one conversation to the next, sometimes drawing one or two along with her until no one was a stranger to her, or to anyone, anymore. “Did you know” were also Sara’s three favorite words, followed not by a fact but by a person. She always knew someone you knew: a girl in your prom limo, your YMCA summer camp counselor, the barista at the coffee shop you frequent, a man you met at that bar in Chiang Mai, the boy whose hand you held on a third- grade field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Some people never forgot a face; Sara never forgot a connection. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 George played with his skinny knit tie in the hall mirror. “ Six-car pileup. I’ve done this commute every day for five years, and I’ve never seen a crash that bad.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Irene watched as the mirror’s golden, thorny frame transformed George into a portrait: Man in Crooked Necktie . She wished she could tear the Claude Lozarette off the farther wall, melt the pigments off the canvas, and use them to paint George right there on the mirror’s surface—why not?—but the moment passed. The knot was fixed; he’d stepped away. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Sorry. I had to change in a Starbucks bathroom that smelled like dead aardvarks and—” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara interrupted. “Oh, speaking of— this is for you.” She dug an oil- stained brown bag from her bottomless purse. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Irene peeled back the paper to reveal a single, smushed vanilla cupcake. Little rainbow sprinkles formed a lopsided swirl, winking up like stars. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “They made us buy something. Can you believe it?” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 In fact, Irene could not believe it. First, Sara was a rotten liar, and second, everyone knew Starbucks was one place you could use the bathroom without paying for something; it might as well be rule two of city living. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 George winked at Irene as she helped slip off Sara’s coat. “Someone was afraid you didn’t eat today,” he murmured. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara pretended to object, but Irene kissed her cheek again. “Well, did you?” Sara inquired, and before an answer was given, she reached up to poke the faint spot beneath Irene’s eye. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Irene snapped her head to one side. “I had some grapes.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 She already regretted telling Sara about last week’s CT scan, which meant she’d just keep worrying and eventually she’d ask about yesterday’s follow- up appointment. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Jacob here yet?” George asked, absently trying to take Sara’s coat so he could hang it. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Irene yanked it back. “Not yet. But he’s always late.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “But we’re late.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “He’s always later.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Then, as Irene moved to close the door, she saw someone approaching—a young Korean man who was shyly inspecting the wall. It took two seconds to see that he didn’t belong there. Distantly, she remembered him from somewhere. He wore a sharp, gray Armani suit and held, in one hand, a bottle of Bollinger Blanc. Who brings champagne to a catered party? Irene wondered as she tried to remember which gallery he worked for. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see Sara give the boy a bear hug. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “William Cho ? What are you doing here? Irene, did you know William? He was in Art History II with McClellan. You sat in on that one.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Irene didn’t hesitate to grip his wet, gloved hand in welcome. He was very thin, with cheekbones that she was sure she’d have remembered if he’d had them back in college. People don’t just go around getting cheekbones , she told herself. Or coal-black eyes like that either. She liked the girlish line of his upper lip; he bit it nervously whenever he looked at her. Normally she wasn’t very interested in shyness, but something about him was making her blush. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara turned. “George, you remember William.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 They shook hands politely. “Sure! William Cho, right? We met at that newspaper party with Lisa Schmidt. Sara took over as features editor after Lisa went to Madagascar with that guy with the Rhodes . . . honey, what was his name?” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara knew it (Henry Fordham, Jr.), and also that the girl’s name had been Lisa Schlick, but from the look on William’s face, Irene guessed he didn’t know either of them. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Hang on!” George said, “Before we get caught up, let me grab us all something from the bar.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 It was understood that Irene had to wait until the guests had finished arriving, but Sara said anything involving St. Germain would be terrific. It was only then that William thrust forward the bottle of champagne that he’d been cradling like a football. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 George seized it with grateful hands. “ Damn. This is nice stuff, William.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “I stole it,” William abruptly announced. xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Like, you boosted it?” George asked. “Don’t tell me you boosted this.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Sara laughed. “Boosted? What are you, a thirties gangster?” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 George winked at her while William clarified. “Yeah. I mean—no. I didn’t rob a liquor store or anything. But it’s been under the coatrack in my boss’s office since last Christmas.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Turning the bottle over, George peeled a shiny gift tag off the bottom. “ ‘To Lenny. From the Berg-Geldorf Family!’ Well thank you, Berg-Geldorfs! I’ll see if the guy can put this on ice.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 He clapped William on the back. Then, while Irene and Sara turned their attention to William, he slipped into the main room with every appearance of happiness. Read more