Alfred Kazin (1915–1998)

I didn't exactly enjoy "A Walker in the City" but I'm glad that it exists. If nothing else, it effectively preserves the author's memories of growing up in the poor Jewish section of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the twenties and thirties, and that's not nothing. Kazin writes both vividly and sentimentally, if not particularly economically, and the book might be called, in a narrow way, a success. Readers interested in the works of say, Mailer, Roth and Bellow might find something of interest here, although it should be noted that Kazin seems to have grown up significantly poorer than most of their characters -- middle-class Jews lived about a neighborhood away from his family. Kazin's a bit unlike them in temperament, too, resembling -- as another reviewer has noted -- nobody so much as the shy, sensitive narrator of Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep." This, and the highly constricted artistic elitism that Kazin grows into as a teenager may not endear him to every reader. Nor will his penchant for nostalgia, which seems to have formed early -- many of these walks around New York were made while looking for the vanished, grimy, gas-lit New York of an earlier era. In truth, "A Walker in the City" works best as a collection of lovely images and sentences. There's a bit of Joycean rapture here, but little narrative push. Still, I hardly minded, even though the book put me to sleep on more than one occasion. Certain audiences, though, may really like this one more than I did.… (mer)