Gotham

(by Nick Earls)

Having recently read the second book (Venice) in this series of five linked novellas, I wanted to go back and read this one, which is the first. While Venice was set in Australia, this one features an Australian abroad: our narrator, Jeff, is in New York partly for work and partly for other reasons, as we learn as the story progresses. He’s a 40-year-old music journalist interviewing a 19-year-old rapper named Na$ti Boi with a hot debut album; the novella mostly unfolds over the course of Jeff’s night with Na$ti Boi and his cousin/manager, Smokey. Jeff meets them at Bloomingdale’s, where Na$ti is having an after-hours personal-shopping experience, and things move on from there: we see passersby snapping pictures of Na$ti walking to his chauffeured van; we see Na$ti making Jeff and Smokey wait because he wants to stop for sex and drugs (never mind that Smokey’s wife is literally in labor and Smokey would rather be at the hospital with her); we see Na$ti dining on beef Wellington possibly less because he likes it (though I dunno, I think he does) than because, as Jeff puts it, he’s “concerned with sounding like an aristocrat, someone who has lived and Wellingtoned anywhere a person should.”

At one point in the evening, somewhere on the chauffeured van ride, Na$ti says “I’m all about family now,” which is an echo of something Smokey said earlier about how he’s a family man. Jeff wonders what Na$ti means exactly, what family he has other than his cousin/manager, why he would say that after having just bragged about the “Ivy League porn star” he’s banging, but also concludes that “he means it. In the interview, it’s a car-crash non sequitur, but for him it was the next direct unfiltered thought.” Meanwhile, Jeff and Smokey have been talking about their own families—Jeff’s wife and their four-year-old daughter are in the city with him, and Smokey, who has a four-year-old son of his own, offers a playground recommendation. (Which Jeff, it turns out, remembers: the end of the book takes place partly at that very playground, the next morning, bringing the focus to Jeff and his role as a family man, too.)

Having heard my husband (who’s worked as a freelance arts and culture writer) talk about interviewing musicians—how it feels when it’s going well, how it feels when it’s not—I particularly appreciated the parts of this book where Jeff talks about that. I like how he talks about having a shape in mind for the piece he’s working on but having to be flexible, and how he talks about how “it doesn’t do to arrive with too many preconceptions,” and how “some things are certain in interviews, but not many,” which is a lead-in to this great set of sentences: “Chris Isaak will always charm a female interviewer over forty. Chris Martin will charm anyone and make you want to like Coldplay more than you do. Bob Dylan will treat at least one of your questions as if it’s been delivered in an alien tongue, or as if he’s just that moment determined he’s suffered his last fool.”