I saw a license plate yesterday that said 'I Miss New York,' so I smashed their window and stole their radio. Sorry, couldn't resist beginning with a one-liner aimed at the city famous for one-liners.
Colin Harrison’s 2017 novel You Belong to Me captures the vibrant, pulsating, dynamic, electrifying surge of the city of New York. Sure, the story features riveting dramas of men and women from all walks of life, super rich to dirt poor, an entire rainbow of nationalities and ethnicities, but through it all we feel the throbbing of the Big Apple aka Gotham aka Fun City aka the City that Never Sleeps.
As with the author’s previous novels, You Belong to Me is a keen study in sociology. Here's a snippet from a three page reflection on the current state of the union: "The United States, meanwhile, was steadily fracturing into two populations: those few who had enough money and those many who didn’t. Vast sections of the country were economically dead, its inhabitants hypnotized by the Internet, zombied by pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs, and Christian-identity babble, the family structure destroyed by successive decades of divorce, job loss, and domestic violence.”
Jennifer is one of the poor who has traveled to Manhattan to escape the economically dead small city of Reading, Pennsylvania where she never knew her father and her mother became an oxycontin zombie.
Alas, one of thousands of young ladies wishing to make it in the big city. Although Jennifer lacks money and connections, refinement and polish, culture and college, lacks talent of any sort (zero ability to paint, write, dance, act or model), Jennifer comes to New York City a few months shy of age twenty with one incredible advantage – she's not only stunningly beautiful but is a certain kind of perfect American girl, instantly recognizable, bringing to mind Daryl Hannah or Gwyneth Paltrow.
After a few years trading mostly on her looks - catering, girlfriend for lonely, generous Brit, hot real estate agent, Jennifer meets Ahmed, a tall, elegant, brilliant Harvard Law School educated international financial wiz from an Iranian-American family who happens to be incredibly wealthy with the prospect of amassing even greater wealth. However, with his name, his country of origin, the color of his skin and the texture of his hair, there is one thing Ahmed desperately needs to be completely assimilated – an exceptionally attractive all-American girl for a wife. Ahmed pursues Jennifer; Ahmed marries Jennifer, Ahmed has his trophy. And as far as Ahmed is concerned, Jennifer is his, completely his. Thus the novel's title.
The inclusion of Ahmed in the story lets Colin Harrison gracefully segue to observations about the increasing influence of other races and ethnic groups, especially Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners, and most especially by all those bright foreign students churned out by the Ivy League who decide to stay in the United States. I would even go so far as to suggest You Belong to Me could be used as supplemental reading in a college course in urban sociology.
Well, at least Jennifer is allowed to be friends with the guy who also lives on the same floor in her swank Upper West Side apartment building - Paul Reeves, a fifty-year-old twice divorced immigration lawyer. Paul’s passion is maps, his specialty valuable maps of New York City made in the early years, as far back as the mid-1600s. Paul frequents the auctions for rich buyers at Christie’s when maps are the feature items up for sale.
1843 map of Manhattan
The opening chapter of the novel takes place at one such auction at Christie's, where Jennifer, now married to Ahmed who is off in Europe on business, joins Paul as he is about to bid on a map he has had his eye on for years.
Then the unexpected happens: a large young man, well over six feet, dressed in soldier gear appears in the room. Jennifer recognizes him and immediately leaves her seat. He wraps his arms around Jennifer and looks out defiantly for anybody in the room, especially Paul, to interfere. The next moment, the two, Jennifer and the big man, leave together.
As we learn quickly, this hawkish looking soldier, muscular, blonde, sun-beaten, is Billy Wilkerson, recently discharged from the army follow tours in Afghanistan, Somalia and Africa. Billy Wilkerson drove his red truck up from his family's ranch in Texas to New York City to find Jennifer. He and Jennifer go back. The plot quickly thickens. And how.
You Belong to Me is a sizzling. fast-paced crime thriller making more sharp turns than a taxi cab racing from Grand Central Station to Brooklyn. Much of the time we follow Paul Reeves but the focus shifts to a number of other big action players: Ahmed's Influential Uncle in Los Angeles, Ahmed's relative Amir in Hong Kong, Paul's entrepreneurial, yoga practicing girlfriend Rachel, NYC muscle men from Lebanon, Iran, Mexico, a NYC detective, map restoration experts, and, of course, Ahmed, Jennifer, and Billy.
Another neat feature is each of the 52 chapters notes the location for the ensuing action - for example: East Eighty-Second Street and Madison Avenue, Manhattan; North Vine Avenue, Palm Springs, California; Fitness Ultimatum, Queens Boulevard, Queens, New York; Plaza Hotel, Central Park South, Manhattan. In this way, it's as if we are following a map (ah, maps!) as we track the ever accelerating action chapter to chapter.
A major theme to keep in mind: wisdom versus emotions and impulse. Are the younger men and women listening and learning from the older men? (Sorry, the only older woman in the novel is Jennifer's mother, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from wisdom), Can such hard won wisdom be passed on or must people make their own mistakes and learn the hard way?
How much knowledge and insight and richness of perspective is gained with an appreciation of history and geography through maps? What are we to make of Paul's obsession with maps? Curiously, Colin Harrison, also a man obsessed with his map collection, could put much of his own first-hand experience with maps to use in this novel. My sense is Colin and Paul share a good bit in common beyond maps since Colin wrote his novel when in his 50s, the same age range as Paul.
A first-rate read. Highly recommended!
New York City novelist Colin Harrison, born 1960
Paul Reeves in the same room with a much loved map: "Magnificent, the Ratzer. A map used by George Washington to defend the new republic in a time when American was more an idea than anything else and the island of Manhattan a town of a mere twelve thousand souls living in shingled and clapboard wood houses, with the occasional old farmhouse." - Colin Harrison, You Belong to Me
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