Most people are high on A Gentlemen in Moscow, a book I thought was fine, but hard to relate to and care about—I now understand the hype around this author a bit more. Everything about this was compelling to me. At a couple key moments our narrator speaks about Autumn in New York, and why it feels so inviting.

This book feels like it could well be some strange alchemical process that analyzed that song and it’s fundamental components were put into plot beats and voice and character. Katey’s voice is steeped in nostalgia but her lens is untainted by rose coloured glasses. Somehow, whether in love of slighted, or both, it remains removed and non-judgmental. Having sorted the sordid affairs long ago and now, understanding them well enough, can move about the exhibit in a linear fashion, forming a narrative, but still have the remoteness of a tour guide.

It’s funny how many stories use a conceit like this: the old person with long ages lived naturally throw one particular year in sharp relief. If one confused fiction with life, or read too much perhaps, you might expect to hit a specific age and close your eyes one day and remember some teenage year with eidetic precision. At the cost, presumably, of so many other functions of memory. I probably find stories like this so compelling because my own memory doesn’t function at all like this.

Whatever the drug that is this book is, I’m certainly happy to have taken the trip. I don’t think there was a single dragging moment and Katey could talk about anything at all and I’d be happy. That’s a monumental feat of craftwork as it. But the notion most people have of New York City is both invoked and peeled back to reveal a bit of a wolffish underbelly, when you expected, somehow, an altogether different animal. Sure I knew it was hard to make it there. But it feels like instead, to these characters, all the city does is contrived circumstances in which all their secrets, of which everyone turns on, are exposed for what they are. Rich and poor alike. To the city they’re nothing but a turnstile.

In the way that all the best fiction seems to be, this book is about everything all at once; certainly the city and the times and The War. It’d be easy to say it’s focus is on classism, with Katey transgressing early on into the NYC socialite scene, the act itself being the thing to expose everyone and everything to come. But there is far more about the human condition to be found that this simple cause and effect.