Coming of Age in Book Country
2011; Emerson College; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/plo.2011.0117
ISSN2162-0903
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoI knew I was back in New York when I saw children walking to school with books open in their hands. I'd lived away for fifteen years. Now down the streets of Brooklyn they drifted, novels spread wide between their palms, the actual world comprising a mere running margin of asphalt and high-heeled shoes and honking cars. The massive knapsacks sagging off their backs seemed a wise precaution against the danger of the children floating right off into the realms of imagination that lured them down the street transfixed, one foot set absently in front of the next. I'd been the same way not long ago. Growing up in the Bronx, I read myself to P.S. 24 in the morning and read myself home each afternoon. My best friends were fanatical readers Emily, a science wizard who used wads of pink Kleenex for bookmarks, and Stacy, who, despite our apartment life, penned guides on the best way to lay out an herb garden and how to ride horses in proper English style, ramrod straight, a moss-velvet riding helmet on ones head. She read me her work leaning against the cyclone fence in the J.H.S. 141 schoolyard near the kids slamming handballs. It seemed perfectly natural to us that our parents owned novels set in our own city The Chosen; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Where Are You Going? Out. What Are You Doing ? Nothing; and a bevy of Mafia tales. Even then we sensed that the city was always being reinvented and pulped. The streets were jackhammered constantly; we looked for squares of fresh cement in which to finger our names. New York was book country because it was half real and half imagined, as were we ourselves. Hadn't a storybook boy spent the night at the Metropolitan Museum? Didn't my brother tell me about a young man in a novel who worried about the ducks in Central Parkwhere did they go in the winter? After that, I worried about them too. Every book was a book of spells, and we longed to transform ourselves. My friends and I were like James Gatz, yearning to climb up
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