![]() ![]() ![]() Many avail themselves of flophouses, whorehouses and opium dens.Įchoing Dickens but lacking the full bite of his ironism and wit, Gaffney has also made this novel something of a social critique-lauding emergent ideas in public sanitation, prefiguring feminist thought, criticizing spectator society through impresario P.T. Gaffney's metropolis is slightly more gritty and streetbound than the city drawn by Busch and Doctorow, and her novel focuses largely on the tension between the gang life and grifting and the toilsome straight life open to the Irish and German immigrants who people it, plus the free American blacks and the Chinese who mixed in the dense, fetid, globalized ghetto. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery." ![]() "O my Manhattan!" Doctorow goofs on Whitman, going on to cite "xcess in everything-pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Doctorow in "The Waterworks" used the postwar period and the time of Boss Tweed to write quasi-thrillers set in Lower Manhattan, and sometimes struck similar themes. Gaffney is not the first modern novelist to look here for a subject: Frederick Busch in "The Night Inspector" and E.L. ![]()
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