A Novel Place for Novelists

Like many New Yorkers, I love to discover hidden things about my adopted home. I’ve lived here for more years than I care to share and I’m still, like a detectorist swinging her metal wand over the fens and bogs of Essex, thrilled to find factual and semi-factual treasures. Did you know that New York City planners did not add alleys to the streets when they were designing the grid, arguably because they were distracted by a more prestigious project, the Erie Canal, and that this has had devastating consequences on the city a century later vis a vis garbage and its removal? Also, did you know rats like eating dog poop better than eating prey? I learned all this by reading an enlightening article in the New York Times devoted to this very subject.

One of the first fascinating things I learned about New York (arguably more fascinating even than rats feasting on feces) is that if you stand with your face buried in a corner of one side of the vaulted passageway in Grand Central and someone else stands in the corner diagonal to you and then one of you whispers into the wall, the other can hear you as if they were standing right next to you. The mysteries of audiodynamics and of Gustavino tile.

Also in Grand Central, the light bulbs in the chandeliers screw the opposite way of typical ones, because back when light bulbs were precious commodities, people tried to snatch the ones in Grand Central, only to discover they were threaded the wrong way round for their lamps, thus putting a stop to the steal, as Trump might say. I have no idea how the thieves reached the chandeliers to pluck the useless bulbs, which are 40 feet off the ground. Even one of those other New York City fixtures, the bodega grabbers used to fetch rolls of toilet paper stacked on overhead shelves, would be of no use in this case.

The Center for Fiction

The latest thing I discovered about New York, thanks to my friend Catherine, is a place in Brooklyn called the Center for Fiction. It’s right across from the Barclay’s Center, where the Nets play and where my music snob son refuses to hear live concerts. On the ground floor are a delightful bookstore (sleeker and more modern than the cozy jumble of Three Lives & Company but just as inviting) and a café.

The bookstore sells swag, because how can you not these days, including t-shirts that read simply: Fiction. I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be an endorsement of the literary form or if the shirt was being marketed to loud and proud serial liars. Fiction writers are all serial liars in any case.

For $200 a year, you get access to the private space upstairs, which includes a lending library and various rooms, lounge areas and outdoor space where people can read and write fiction (I suppose they could pay bills—it’s not like a member of the fiction gestapo checks or if they did, what they might do about it, and since fact and fiction are so blurred, something Elizabeth McCracken explores in The Hero of This Book: A Novel, who really cares?)

The work areas have long wood tables with chairs on either side and the large lounge area is set up with square velvet armchairs and low chunky tables and a long aqua chaise longue with creamy bolsters set against the window. That’s where I sprawled when Catherine took me as her guest on a recent rainy day and where I read from cover to cover August Blue by Deborah Levy while she edited short stories by members of her fiction workshop.

Surrounding me were busts and framed portraits of various writers on the tables and walls, and from the ceiling, George Nelson-like light fixtures hung amid the bright recessed ones. I could glimpse, too, nooks filled with books, all shiny in their plastic library covers. My only quibble was the wallpaper: words from novels written in fountain pen cursive. This seemed a little Barnes and Noble to my eye, but I was enjoying the space for free so can’t really complain about this misstep.

The Center for Fiction, Brooklyn

It's Like a Library

There are other spots meant to be like this in New York, of course. Public libraries, for one, but they are often cramped and dingy and tend to attract people aggressively exhibiting dubious hygiene. (How lovely the Carnegie library in Oakland, Pennsylvania, that I frequented as a child seems in comparison, despite the swelter caused by the radiators beneath the window seats, where I would curl up to read one of Andrew Lang’s rainbow fairy books.)

A nearby branch of the New York Public Library is housed in what was once a women’s detention center. It was designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central Park, and it was ridiculed by members of the community for its striped pattern of red-and-white bricks they claimed resembled a fatty slab of bacon (more fun NYC facts!).

There’s a pointy clock tower and a tight spiral staircase that takes you up to the stacks; it was recently renovated (with wallpaper featuring words from novels written in fountain pen cursive, of course). But there’s never any room there and things are even bleaker at the other nearby branch, the Hudson Park. To get a nice spot to read and write in New York you apparently need to pay for the privilege, which you can do at the upper crusty New York Society Library or the somewhat more bohemian Writers Room (where my husband is a member).

Sort of

Places like these, as opposed to public libraries, are filled with writers or people who wish they were. There are a lot of the latter. More than the former, in fact. Myself included. It’s so much easier to call yourself a writer and glom onto the prestige that comes with the title than to actually be a writer or at least one who is any good at all. Everyone thinks they can write something people actually want to read, other than what’s really no more interesting to anyone than your personal to-do list is, but not very many people can manage it. Again, I am proving the theory as I type. This goes for interior designers as well, the only difference being that one posts on Medium and the other posts on Pinterest.

But back to the Fiction Center. August Blue, set in Greece and Paris and Sardinia, was a cure for the chill rain that spattered the windowpanes and the wind that blew our umbrellas convex to concave as Catherine and I tried to walk from the Atlantic terminal. The book blew me, concave to convex, into a fever dream of purloined trilby hats and doppelgangers and sprigs of jasmine and set me down gently somewhere far from all my current troubles. Yes, I could have read August Blue on my Kindle in my bedroom but this made me feel like the act of reading was not just a diversion but a reason to devote a whole building to the endeavor and thus a reason to live besides. Well worth the free admission and even the $200 I would spend to return one day.