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Why We Came to the City, by Kristopher Jansma
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“Stunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can’t quite bring yourself to leave. It’s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.”�—NPR
December, 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends at the heart of this richly absorbing novel remain as inseparable as ever: editor and social butterfly Sara Sherman, her troubled astronomer boyfriend George Murphy, loudmouth poet Jacob Blaumann, classics major turned investment banker William Cho, and Irene Richmond, an enchanting artist with an inscrutable past.
Amid cheerful revelry and free-flowing champagne, the friends toast themselves and the new year ahead—a year that holds many surprises in store. They must navigate ever-shifting relationships with the city and with one another, determined to push onward in pursuit of their precarious dreams. And when a devastating blow brings their momentum to a halt, the group is forced to reexamine their aspirations and chart new paths through unexpected losses.
Kristopher Jansma’s award-winning debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, was praised for its� “wry humor” and “charmingly unreliable narrator” in The New Yorker and hailed as “F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson” by The Village Voice. In Why We Came to the City, Jansma offers an unforgettable exploration of friendships forged in the fires of ambition, passion, hope, and love. This glittering story of a generation coming of age is a sweeping, poignant triumph.
- Sales Rank: #104568 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-16
- Released on: 2016-02-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.31" h x 1.35" w x 6.25" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Jansma's compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city: opportunity, stress, beauty, as well as the allure of the über rich juxtaposed against the impoverished. The cast includes Irene Richmond, an artist supporting her craft by working at a hip art gallery; George Murphy, an astronomer whose life research may be imploding; his college girlfriend and soon to be wife, Sara Sherman, an editor for a paper; William Cho, working in investments, living with his mother, and harboring a crush on Irene; and Jacob Blaumann, the quintessential graduate not living up to his potential�€”having made his mark as a poet, but working as an orderly at a mental health facility in the suburbs and having an affair with his boss. Underneath the interactions between the characters lurks an examination of relationships and the ways friendship is tested when one in their midst is beset by a rare form of cancer. Steering clear of the maudlin, the author gives searing portrayals of both challenging cancer treatment and how true friends rise to the occasion when necessary. Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) pens a tightly-written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple. (Feb.)\n
Review
Praise for�Why We Came to the City
“A tremendous accomplishment: an�elegant�and deeply moving meditation on friendship and mortality, both�fearless and finely wrought.�I believe this book will stay with me for a very long time.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of�Station Eleven
“Stunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can’t quite bring yourself to leave. It’s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR
“A brilliant stylist, Kristopher Jansma draws readers into an intricate web of lives in the big city in his astonishing new work. He writes with power and passion . . . and inhabits his characters, thinking what they think and feeling what they feel so compellingly that he pulls the reader into the story and won’t let go. . . . A wonderful, unforgettable novel.”
—Miami Herald
“Jansma’s novel is a love letter to Manhattan, the letter so many of us who moved here in our 20s have written. . . . Like the rest of us, his characters learn that things don’t always work out the way we plan, but if we stick with our city, our city delivers.”
—Helen Ellis,�The New York Times Book Review
“Enticing . . . Much like a modern Great Gatsby, this book is awash in the feeling of the city.”
—Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
“Fans of Bret Easton Ellis’s stream-of-consciousness narratives�will enjoy Jasma’s paean to New York City.”
—In Style
“Joyful and tragic, Jansma’s book will appeal to readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara’s�A Little Life.”
—Men’s Journal
“As the characters navigate the complexities of an untimely and unexpected tragedy . . . Jansma artfully counters the heaviness of these themes with a delightful, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, narrative. Dialogues are smart, absurd, and addictive; and the author’s insights border on the philosophically expansive and profound.”
—Santa Cruz Sentinel
"Like A Little Life and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Jansma's Why We Came to the City�shows us, with beauty and insight, what it's like to be young and smart in this time, and in this place. It's �a major achievement."
—Darin Strauss, author of�Half a Life
“Why did we come to the city, anyway?�And why on earth would we ever leave?�In Jansma's able hands, these are and are not metaphors. We came because we are more ourselves as part of a collective.�We came to learn our limits.�We came so that we might know when to leave.�This is a lively, addictive party of a book, and you're invited."
—Elisa Albert, author of�After Birth
“Fantastic. This beautiful, boisterous novel is a paean to New York, to the hubris of youthful optimism, and, especially, to the powerful magnet of friendship. It’s full of as much heartache and humor as the city itself. And like the city, this story will break you apart in a dozen ways, only to teach you, tenderly, how to put yourself back together. I wanted it never to end, but when I read the last page, I loved it even more. Jansma is a star.”
—Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange
“Kristopher Jansma’s dazzling Why We Came to the City is at once a tribute and a breakup letter to New York, timeless as the elegant architectural details that jut ornately from older buildings, yet timely as a phone freighted with an urgent missive. The constellation of relationships he charts feels so vivid and visceral that we not only see it but find ourselves caught, swaying in its gravitational tugs and tilts. In page after page abounding with wit, candor, and compassion, Jansma reveals the indelible nature of our connections and commitments to one another, along with their gossamer fragility.”
—Tim Horvath, author of Understories
“Lively and elegant . . .�poised to make Jansma a name you know.”
—Meredith Turits
“A deeply emotional ode to friendship . . . Jansma’s narrative shines.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Jansma’s compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city. . . . A tightly written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love. . . . Gets at the heart of what it’s like to be young and alive in the big city.”
—Library Journal
About the Author
Kristopher Jansma is the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, he is now an assistant professor of English and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz and a graduate lecturer in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He has written for the New York Times, Salon, The Believer, The Millions, Slice, BOMB, and Electric Literature. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Playful and poignant
By Bookreporter
Anyone who read and enjoyed Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, which was chock-full of literary allusions, will undoubtedly be simultaneously delighted and devastated by his new book’s opening meditation, which pays homage to Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, particularly its famous passage that opens with “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY kicks off with this sentence that turns Thoreau’s intentions on their head: “We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn from what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.”
The real significance and emotional weight of this passage and the sentences that follow become apparent only much later in the novel. Right from the beginning, however, the reader can both appreciate Jansma’s literary playfulness and recognize that this lively creativity goes hand-in-hand with a sort of elegiac mood, a narrative tone that might still be youthful but is nevertheless accompanied by the heft of hard truths learned at an early age.
From this opening reflection, Jansma turns to a more realistic and concrete scene: an art fundraiser in a Waldorf-Astoria penthouse that’s being attended by Irene (an aspiring artist and an assistant at the sponsoring gallery) and three of her college pals. Jacob is a frustrated artist, an award-winning poet who hasn’t written much of anything since college. Their friends George (an astronomy researcher) and Sara (an editor for an online magazine) are also doing their best to muddle through imperfect jobs and rapidly dwindling expectations of what their 20s might hold for them. To everyone’s surprise, this tight-knit group is joined by William Cho, a college classmate of theirs who knows pretty much everything there is to know about them but whom they barely remember.
Over the course of that memorable evening, Irene and William fall in love, George and Sara get engaged, and Jacob (as usual) passes out naked on the sofa. And over the next several months, their relationships with each other and with themselves evolve and in some cases deteriorate, in one instance tragically so. Jacob’s observation during that opening scene that “he was steadily feeling less and less like a child left home alone without the grown-ups and more like they were the grown-ups” becomes vividly true.
WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY is set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, a period that left many young city-dwellers questioning their place in the urban landscape, especially as post-college frivolity was abruptly exchanged for something far less carefree. The events that transpire in Jansma’s novel may be extreme in many ways, but they also dramatically portray the realities that face many people in the post-college years, from coming to terms with their friends settling down to confronting a loved one’s death for the first time. More generally, the book perfectly captures the amorphous disappointment that many promising young people must deal with as they approach their late 20s (or, gasp, even 30!) and realize that they’re probably never going to be the wunderkind their parents and teachers might have imagined them to be.
Tied up in all this, as that opening chapter and the novel’s title suggests, is the characters’ rich and complicated relationship with the city, specifically New York, whose beloved landscape becomes increasingly foreign to them even as they still call it home.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Story Was Over For Me At Halfway Mark
By Sarah's Book Shelves
This novel came highly recommended by a few bloggers and the premise appealed to me since I lived in New York City in my twenties/early thirties around the time the book was set (2008). Halfway through the story, I was fairly confident it would be a solid 4 star read. I liked the theme of young adults without real problems being suddenly dealt a blow of serious consequence and Jansma nailed the subtle details of NYC life for someone in their twenties (i.e. how people don’t know their friends’ addresses…just their cross streets, the appearance of their apartment buildings, and their unit numbers). Though the story reminded me a bit of The Interestings (yay!), I missed Wolitzer’s distinctive style that made The Interestings a winner despite its meandering nature.
Sadly, Why We Came to the City was essentially over for me at the halfway mark, as I didn’t understand the purpose of the entire second half. A section focusing on a friendship Jacob made at his job as a psychiatric hospital orderly seemed irrelevant to the story and two other prominent characters virtually disappeared from the narrative. That being said, I think I’m in the minority on this one, so I encourage you to check out some other reviews if you’re considering picking it up!
Check out my blog, Sarah's Book Shelves, for more reviews.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful and Intricate, Why We Came to the City Shines
By The Book Wheel
I picked up Kristopher Jansma’s latest novel for two reasons: it’s getting rave reviews from readers I trust and he’s a�#30Authors contributor.�It’s hard to say which convinced me to pick it up sooner rather than later but I’m so glad that I did. Why We Came to the City is a stunning novel about a tightly knit group of friends, their relationships with each other, and how they�cope in the aftermath of a tragedy that changes them all. It’s been compared to�The Interestings�by Meg Wolitzer but I disagree – this book is far better in that the writing style is more beautiful and the characters more real.
What’s unique about this novel is that everything comes in pairs; poetry and prose, before and after, the universe and�the self, young and�old, big and�small, success and failure. This�ability to write about both sides of the same coin on a variety of subjects demonstrates�that Jansma knows�what it means to grow up in a time when everything is equally hopeful and frightening. There were times when I would look up from my book and think, “Wow. He gets me.”�Perhaps Katie�at�Doing Dewey�said it best in her review, when she wrote, “The writing in this book was so beautiful. It spoke to me, resonated with me, made me want to read it out loud to savor every sentence. I loved the cadence of the sentences and I loved how so many of them expressed things I couldn’t put into words, but that perfectly described things I’ve felt before.”
Part of what makes the writing so beautiful is�Jansma’s blending of poetry and prose, which allows the story to ebb and flow.�At its core,�this is a character-driven novel but there are passages so beautifully written and rich in their descriptions that it was easy to forget where I was. I could see, touch, and feel everything Jansma was describing, even if I had never experienced it before. Jansma’s�ability to shine�a light on the intricacies of friendship and inner struggles we all face at some point in our lives is uncanny, leaving me reevaluating my own friendships and inner struggles.
What really stood out, though, was the philosophical component. Jansma expertly sneaks�in a lot of philosophical discussions that left me pondering them for days. From the vastness of the universe to the bigness of our selves, Why We Came to the City explores how each of us, no matter how small and inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things, matter.�One passage, in particular, that�stayed with me is, “If the gods actually know our fates and still try to meddle and wage their wars in us, then there must be some purpose in our�choosing�one of the many paths to that end. Man must have free will, or else why would the gods themselves bother?”
By the time I finished the book, I felt as if I had been submerged and needed to come up for air. I was so ensconced in the story, both its ups and downs, that I was reluctant to see it end. It’s hard to put into words how beautiful this book is and my writing about it certainly pales in comparison to Jansma’s own writing but I highly recommend you experience it for yourself.�
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