Whitman, Mapplethorpe and Edmund White star in Megan Bradbury’s beautifully written debut about what defines America’s most famous city
The American writer Lydia Davis has compared her mini-stories to buildings, because like skyscrapers they are surrounded by an imposing blank space.
It’s a pretty analogy that didn’t mean much to me until I read Everyone Is Watching. Megan Bradbury’s debut novel also develops from blocks of text surrounded by white space. Her chapters are short, her paragraphs all of similar length and her sentence structures as repetitive as a course of bricks; sometimes three or four in a row start with the same word. The effect is enervating at first – it feels like an early reader for intellectuals. Yet gradually these blocks of text build to something more complex. The layering of experience, the repeated allusions to light, mirrors and shifting perspectives, do indeed call to mind the shimmering high rises among which her novel is set. Her subject is New York and her material the stories of four famous New Yorkers: photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, writers Walt Whitman and Edmund White, and city planner Robert Moses.
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