Manhatten
By Sarah Rosenthal
Small Press Distribution, 2009
Reviewed by Emily Hendren
In the mixed-genre novel Manhatten, Sarah Rosenthal introduces her reader to the streets
of New York and more than thirty years of memories with family, friends, and foes
alike. Her narrator retraces days of youth, intellectualism, and love with moments akin
to the whimsy of a dairy-writing teen and the poise of a poetry-savoring woman. The
descriptions, structural conventions, and poems laced between chapters of prose all lend
themselves to the arcing search for identity in one of the most identified cities in the
world.
The descriptions of the characters and interactions between people and places ground
the book and offer layers to the time-traveling narrator herself. In spite of sometimes
losing her reader in the pinball-like game of keeping track of every new character and
scenario, Rosenthal describes her many names and faces well. A description of a friend,
Charlotte—“She was like a painting of a woman by a man who really liked women”—
demonstrates Rosenthal’s ability to capture that which surrounds her with a quickness
and accurate choice of words. Charlotte may only take root in a few chapters, but the
reader has a firm grasp of what she is like and how she is perceived by the narrator
through Rosenthal’s simple and clear vocabulary.
Rosenthal describes another character as “Liberty is Lisa is Mary is Jesus,” drawing
parallels between the woman, Lisa, and a heart-center of New York City, the Statue
of Liberty, as well as the religious figures, Mary and Jesus. This notion of ‘one thing
is another’ establishes itself firmly throughout the text and gathers momentum as the
narrator questions her identity and recreates her self-image again and again.
Through the journey of coming of age and growing into the many labels of her life
(Jewish, artist, woman, other), the narrator establishes a sense of self based on what
she witnesses around her. She compares herself with others, bringing awareness to her
similarities and differences, comparing and grading herself against family and friends.
The fifteen poems throughout the book, as well as several chapters that read more like
prose poems than prose, help establish theme and function well as bookends to the
surrounding chapters. Several of the poems reference glass or water, words that work
nicely as metaphorical reflective agents and substances of fluidity. Along with offering
nice visual and structural breaks to the book, the poems provide diverse and lyrical
support to the surrounding chapters through abstract imagery and playful language.
Rosenthal leaves much up to the reader in her poetry, but she often reigns in the abstract
with structured, simple lines such as “yes i will meet the physicist” and “the river water
will resemble river water.”
What begins as a stream-of-consciousness story of characters and memories gathers
itself into something that feels less by-accident by the end of the book. The characters
and memories are just as they were a hundred pages earlier, but they have become
more "people and places" and less "characters and spotty memories." Rosenthal suggests
that identity is perhaps not what we make of it, but what we experience; the active search
for identity might in fact be futile because it is the people and places we experience,
often by accident, and the stories we share that comprise our identities. Though at times
shoulder-shrug-inducing in topic and dizzying from story layered upon story, Manhatten
suggests that one purpose of life and the establishment of identity stems from the sharing
and telling of stories—the very heartbeat of Manhattan itself.
© Emily Hendren, 2011