![]() ![]() If the reader is constantly aware of the machinery at work, grinding away to put the "period" in this period piece, Old New York really does have strong appeal, and in this novel it is often palpable. ![]() The lives she has imagined are others', not her own, and she has researched New York in the post-Civil War period with care. She writes reasonably well, though in a rather self-consciously jaunty fashion, and much to her credit she has resisted all the temptations of the autobiographical, coming-of-age first novel. Metropolis is the first novel by Gaffney, an editor for the Paris Review who appears, judging by the blurbs with which the novel is festooned, to be well-connected in literary circles. Everything is viewed through an agreeably sepia haze, and at any moment one expects to hear the tinkle of a Scott Joplin rag. Barnum, Evelyn Nesbit, Teddy Roosevelt), its celebrated structures and places (the Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, Fifth Avenue) and its romantic (or so it seems in hindsight) underworld. Like the former's Ragtime and the latter's The Alienist, her Metropolis is set in the distant, oddly magical world of Old New York, with its larger-than-life figures (P.T. $24.95Elizabeth Gaffney seems to have read E.L. ![]()
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