You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers. Consider our youth examined through the cynical lens of the present day: was twee indie rock culture something imposed from the top down, a means of getting the American populace to retreat into a fantasy of prolonged childhood and look away from the scandal of the Patriot Act, the Global War On Terror, a Great Recession from which we have not yet recovered?
Garden State, 2004. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, also 2004. Zooey Deschanel marrying Ben Gibbard — they woke up in the morning and did their bangs together. Even back then, of course, I thought I was too cool for all this. Only, of course, to do what everyone else did and move to Brooklyn in search of my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Only to succumb, like any good adult, to eventual disillusionment and skepticism. All of my friends have either invested too much into their dreams and have found themselves locked out of a hostile economy, or have invested too much into their careers and have lost all sight of their prior dreams. No matter which path you chose to take, both were doomed to a kind of failure.
So why did we buy into this dream to begin with? Who sold it to us, and why? This promise of culture, the adventure of life in a city that was gentrified enough to be safe but not so much that it had become homogeneous and alienating. Was it all a trap to lure idealistic suburban youths into indentured urban servitude? I ride the subway feeling, inexplicably, as if I am wearing the humiliating uniform of a fast food employee. Was I tricked? Is it all a big scam? I understand how internet commentators, younger or older than myself, might think so. But it can’t be; it was real, I was there. In high school a friend and I walked six miles to the mall in the middle of winter to see The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004 once again). Who told us to do that? I didn’t even know who Wes Anderson was. What was going on in 2004? It was something in the air — that’s the only way I can think to describe it.
Contemporary documents of this era are difficult to come by. Maybe the nostalgia cycle hasn’t quite caught up; maybe everyone is still sick of the saturation of craft beer and Edison bulbs. Maybe people are too wary of the sleazy Vice magazine, American Apparel side of the ’00s. This is all understandable. But I would like to offer a different theory: maybe it’s just too difficult to represent it properly. Maybe it’s too difficult to separate mythology from reality, the caricature that the era developed into from what it really was — what it really felt like to be living in it, taking part in it, seduced by the atmospheric dream that gave it its reality.
The biggest problem with books or films that try to capture the recent past is the way they insist on their era; the distinctions between then and now being so slight at times that mediocre artists feel the need to signpost their settings at every opportunity. But the new novel New Paltz, New Paltz is, from beginning to end, all about subtlety. The book’s humor is dry as it comes, stopping just short of eliciting an actual verbal response from the reader. The narrator writes of an intern, “You could tell she was ambitious by the way she ignored some people and listened to others.” Of his small liberal arts college: “I met at least two women whose families owned helicopters.” A pitch-perfect description of a middle-aged Polish woman’s apartment: “There was at once too much furniture and yet arranged in such a way that no ordinary configuration of people could have used it.” “Can you help me with Internet?” the neighbor asks him. About a third of the way through this slim novel, this is when I asked myself: where are we? Wait a minute — when are we? An era, evidently, when people used to capitalize the word “Internet.”
Mike Powell’s New York is a fascinating blend of fact and fiction. The Ashin Museum of Art, where the narrator encounters Balthus’s “The Mountain,” certainly does not exist. Maybe it is a simple name-swap for the Met, where the actual painting resides. But wait: this fictional museum is supposed to be somewhere in Midtown. And the Met bears no physical resemblance to this fictional counterpart, “a little limestone building with a copper dome on top.” The narrator appears to live in Greenpoint; he talks about living under the highway and having Polish neighbors, and gives an accurate description of McGolrick Park without calling it by that (or any) name. He runs an errand to Wizard Electronics, which is (or was) a real store, except here it appears on Box Street instead of Manhattan Avenue. Elsewhere, a cab drops him off on Vance Avenue, which is supposed to be near his apartment. But there is no Vance Avenue in Greenpoint, or anywhere else in the city.
Where are we? It is the New York City of the past, but not in terms of the chronology you might find in a documentary. The documentarian tries to fool you into pretending that it’s possible to regain time which has been lost by presenting the facts as they occurred; the novelist, acknowledging the finality of this loss, must attempt new and strange experiments to conjure a convincing illusion of the past. This is the novelistic past, evocative of a time which can only ever be evoked, never actually experienced again. Everything is just a little off — an act of intentional misremembering to simulate the unclear parameters of actual memory. The narrator, speaking of Balthus’ painting, writes that the rock formations “aren’t in the order Balthus painted them, nor are they spaced so closely together. In other words, everything in the painting exists, but there’s nowhere else in the world you can see them in the way Balthus had.” We are in the past, but how far back have we gone?
Powell, working subtly, stops just short of parodying his era. He takes us to Habana, a Midtown bar “staffed exclusively by heavy-set Hispanic women in tartan schoolgirl uniforms.” I’m not sure if this place existed or not, but it feels like it could have. There’s hipster bingo hosted in “a former bag factory” and sponsored by an up-and-coming brand of craft cider. But none of this is played for laughs. No one is being mocked as a fossil or a fashion victim from the safe vantage of the present day; the narrator sweats over his bingo board, his feet grow heavy as he approaches the podium, the heat from “hundreds of light bulbs spelling out BINGO” washes over him. In the next chapter, he rents a movie from a vending machine outside of a supermarket. It “wasn’t as bad as I’d hoped it would be,” he reports. And then he proceeds to give a three-to-four page treatment of the plot of this fictional movie: what appears at first to be a formulaic chick flick about a woman torn between a carpenter and a Wall Street trader but then turns out to be something much more nuanced and sophisticated. He went looking for cheap irony and found a genuine aesthetic experience instead, much in the same way that the hipster culture of the ’00s used irony as a means, however clumsy and hackneyed, to reach for something real and authentic. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, but as the scene played, I felt like I was being submerged in a memory: not something from the external world peering in but something from deep inside me projecting out.” Reading New Paltz, New Paltz, I was submerged in a memory — hazy, indistinct, the kind of memory that you don’t go searching for, that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. When I was living in Greenpoint, spending my leisure hours reading on the benches of McGolrick Park, the life depicted in this book was the type of life I imagined others in the neighborhood were actually living. An illusion of an illusion, because no one actually lived like this. An illusion of an illusion of an illusion: this is the type of book that I imagined was being written in the apartments all around and above me. But of course it couldn’t have been written, not back then — not enough time had passed to transmute it into the stuff of memory.
The narrator is archetypally millennial. He dotes on his cat, he is kind to children and strangers, wandering without irony through the irony-drenched trappings of the era, wide-eyed and mutedly enthusiastic, without any ambition other than to experience the quirks, both naturally occurring and artificially induced, of the world around him. He even finds his Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the character of Lucy, a college dropout from New Paltz interviewing for apprenticeships in the city. “Tell me a story,” she asks him at a party, and like a good Millennial he does exactly that — a Miranda July-worthy anecdote equal parts scatological and sentimental. He takes her on a date to the Ashin Museum of Art and they look at his favorite Balthus painting; he does things like put two ears of corn behind his head and say “I’m Pocahontas”; they have sex at his apartment; after Lucy leaves for New Paltz he goes to the same bar he went to with her and picks up another woman, but the sex is not as good. In the wrong hands, this would be the worst novel ever written, but like the fictional movie treatment, it transcends its sub-sub-genre and becomes something much more compelling. Something much more convincing, though it is a portrait of a world that has never existed. The terrible version of this novel would be a sterile and fruitless attempt to depict the world as it actually (or “actually”) was; the artifice deployed by Powell immerses us instead in the world as it is remembered (or perhaps misremembered). This is the magic of art, which Powell harnesses to the magic of memory, as if the two processes operate through the same inner channels.
The novel, which meanders more or less plotlessly through short and charming chapters, reaches its crescendo when the narrator decides to board a bus to New Paltz and drop in on Lucy unannounced. She opens the door wearing “bright red terrycloth shorts.” Reading this, my heart rate picked up; against my will, I started to skim to the ends of sentences. Is she wearing American Apparel shorts? Remember: up until now Powell has not told us when this book takes place. But I’d been doing my own detective work, and I felt like someone who has correctly guessed the murderer before the author has revealed him to us. Two pages later, he lays it out in black and white: “New Paltz, 2006, behind the walls of a white clapboard house where outside I heard crickets sawing their legs in cricket song and felt flooded with the numb contentment of home.”
I don’t know if this slow reveal was Powell’s intention. This might be the entirely wrong way to read this book. But even if so, it takes a lot of skill to write a 120-page book that allows for such rich misreading.
Everything about his visit to the house at the end is so perfectly right. Board games, rolled cigarettes, vinyl records, hardcore show fliers on the wall. Bus stations and lost love. Do kids take buses anymore? I don’t know, but I took plenty in my day. New Paltz, New Paltz is not a period piece that either glorifies or rejects the clichés of its era. It is a constructive embrace of these same clichés. A vindication, at least for me: that was how it really was, this is how it would actually happen. The “something” that was in the air — this is the only way to experience it again.
Nicholas Clemente is a writer living in New York City. His second novel is coming in 2026.
I read this review and immediately wanted to read the book. Thanks.
Thanks for expressing so well the dream of memory and my own preoccupations. I’m reminded also of why I loved In Search of Lost Time and Dream of Red Mansions. An illusion of an illusion of an illusion.