Normal People Don’t Live Like This + Ten Walks/Two Talks

Normal People Don’t Live Like This By Dylan Landis. Persea, $15 paperback.

Ten Walks/Two Talks By Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch. Ugly Duckling Presse, $14 paperback.

This is a review of two books that at first glance—i.e., before I read them—seemed to have nothing in common. Now that I have read them, it turns out that my initial reaction was pretty close to the mark. But Normal People Don’t Live Like This and Ten Walks/Two Talks share at least two common traits: They are both set in New York City, and they are both fantastic.

Dylan Landis’s New York is the Upper West Side of the 1970s. Her collection of linked stories opens with a 13-year-old girl in Central Park with one of her father’s friends, expressing some uncertainly as to whether or not she is being raped. But there’s nothing uncertain about Landis’s prose. “Her hair sounds crunchy between his teeth, like sand.… She wonders if sex is like math, like if you make a man want to eat your hair or go too far, does it follow that you balance the equation by letting him?” Landis’s characters and the rich, rough worlds they inhabit are rendered with bracing precision and devastating grace. I can’t think of the last time I read a debut collection so powerfully alive.

Equally alive, but operating on a whole other energy spectrum, Ten Walks/Two Talks is a cheery ramble around the Manhattan of today. In the “walks” sections, Andy Fitch takes a cue from Basho’s travel diaries and wanders around Harlem and Lower Manhattan. He delights in minutiae the rest of us have long since learned to do the blinders-on hustle past (“An onion stood against a scooter wheel beside the entrance steps to Salaam Bombay”). The “talks,” meanwhile, are conversations between Fitch and Jon Cotner that offer reflections on poetry, Central Park and the Whole Foods at Union Square. A deceptively simple book, it demands little but offers much. They invite us to experience our city with fresh pleasure and renewed awe.

Even after taking into account the two books’ different time frames, it’s difficult to believe that these two books are set on the same planet, much less in the same town. But of course, those hard dissonances and dizzying contradictions are part of why we live here in the first place.—Justin Taylor

Cotner and Fitch read Mar 16 at Unnameable Books.

Buy Normal People Don’t Live Like This on Amazon.com | Buy it on BN.com

Buy Ten Walks/Two Talks on Amazon.com

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