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Jane Jacobs book contains not only the high density of urban life, but the art of fiction

In 1974, Donald Barthelme story, "I bought a small town," the narrator decides one day to the purchase of Galveston, Texas, where some houses break, shoots 6,000 dogs and reorganizing what remains in the form of a gigantic puzzle of the Mona Lisa only visible from the air. As with most jobs Barthelme, the premise seems so absurd that you can not stop shaking until a metaphor falls and here we can assume that, in the words of novelist Donald Antrim, "I bought a small town" is a "take on the role that the writer wrote a story -. playing God, in a way "But for the first time Barthelme Greenwich Village, where he lived most of the rest of his life in the winter of 1962, as local activists were closely despotic failed attempt by the city planner Robert Moses to run 10 lanes wide road through the center of Washington Square Park. For decades, Moses really play God with New York, and for anyone who has lived in his kingdom, "I bought a small town," which was first published in The New Yorker, might not seem so absurd after all. local activists were led by Jane Jacobs, another great writer in Greenwich Village. His most famous work, Death and Life of Great American Cities

, now 50. From a rigorous manual and controversial urban planning that reached a wide audience, probably because it's a rare joy to read a book on cities written by someone who really seems to enjoy making it pleasant, like Lewis Mumford, one of the opponents Jacobs, wrote at the time: "This is a new type of" expert ", very refreshing in the current planning circles, where the spirits too fascinated by the computers with limited care to ask the type questions that computers can meet the content and results of gross negligence or human rights. This woman had used his power for the eyes, and even more admirable, his heart. "Today, planners discuss" what is really meant, "as if the book was a sacred codex ambiguous, but most recipes are clear and relevant Jacobs. And when she laughs, for example," government incentives extraordinary financial [who] were necessary to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility, and vulgarity ", immediately think of a dozen recent cases in which words hit so hard. Very often, however, I plan

life and death

not a book about cities, but as a book about books. One of the two sections of my novel Boxer, Beetle

, which contains a character based on a young Robert Moses, is a quote from Jacobs: "We used to believe maps and reality are necessarily related, or if not, we can do by altering reality. "My historical interpretation of the history of Barthelme not, of course, eliminate the most obvious symbol, and Antrim is to invent stories can sometimes feel like urban planning. What is the reason why

life and death

will be happy to anyone with an interest in the art of fiction.

Jacobs, who died in 2006, never published fiction, but it certainly has a sensitivity of a novelist of human relationships. She holds in life and death , for example, that one of the paradoxical benefits of urban life is confidentiality. Unlike the suburbs, a dense neighborhood has many convenient places to stop and chat, which can be on friendly terms with dozens of people who live or work near your home without feeling any obligation to invite all between them in tea. "In this system, it is possible in a suburb of the city street to meet all kinds of people, without unwanted entanglements, without boredom, the need for excuses, explanations, fear of offending anyone, respecting embarrassment impositions or commitments and all the paraphernalia of these obligations can accompany less limited relationships. "If these things had really been lost in New York, never Seinfeld , but the point is still valid. How many professional planners have examined the daily life with so carefully that you have thought to take all nanophysics of social difficulty in the account My favorite part in the whole book is the story of Jacobs is a day in the life of your local newsstand. "An ordinary winter morning last, Mr. Jaffe, whose official name is Bernie and his wife, whose official name is the business of Ann under the supervision of young children crossing at the corner on the way to PS 41 Bernie, as he always does because he sees the need, provided an umbrella for a client and a dollar to another ... the information on the range of rents in the neighborhood of a applicant apartment, heard a story of internal difficulties and offering peace, he said rioters who could not enter unless they behaved and then define (and obtained) the conduct of advice ... a mother who came for a birthday not to put the ship model kit, another child goes to the same birthday party, she gave him ... "

The Chronicles lasts more than half a page, too long to quote in full, and we get a sense of fun here that Jacobs would probably have been writing fiction. It reads like Dickens - in the heat and omniscient accuracy of the prose, and in the direction of a city crammed into a tent. And the character of Bernie, appears to be almost supernatural, mild, like many characters in Dickens. (In any modern novel would have to beat Ann with the umbrella.) Finally, it is like Dickens in the magnitude of the disparity between the urban experience Jacobs and ours is so great that it would be easier to believe that it was written from 1861 to 1961. When I lived in Bethnal Green, I felt a tender for the assessment unjudgmental 24 hours, store near my house, but then I was about to borrow or moan from my ex-girlfriend. As Sharon Zulkin says in his recent book

Naked City , "Jacobs romantic social conditions that were already becoming obsolete by the time she wrote about them."

But this does not detract from the usefulness of Bernie when reconsidered as a writing lesson. "The social structure of the life of the pavement depends in part on what can be called self-appointed public figures," writes Jacobs. It is - of course - the term "character" here in the literary sense, but for our needs might be. Almost all the writers who have learned to use "public figures" of secondary characters that may appear plausible virtually everywhere in the book, which has good reason to make appearances, and thus can help to unite all the curly fibers narrative a bit disorganized.

could include Ulysses