Lasting City: The Anatomy of Nostalgia

In this virtuosic meta-memoir, author McCourt (Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Queer Street) careens along the course of his life while exposing the voluble convolutions of his troubled Irish-Catholic family and documenting several long-lost New Yorks. Raised in Queens in a religious family—albeit one with liberal leanings—McCourt didn’t so much wrestle with his identity as he did embrace the subterranean antics needed to be a sexually active gay adolescent in the 1950s. His explorations took him to the cruising spots of his time—from the Ramble in Central Park to the West Side piers—while he also indulged his interests in musical theater and high culture. The book opens with the death of McCourt’s mother, but the structure is anything but linear. Rather, it develops, or drifts, through a series of motifs that include reconstructed key events, fantasy sequences, and imagined interlocutors such as an Indian cabbie and a fellow named Moriarity. McCourt spends as much time reminiscing about family dynamics as he does about his sexual adventuring, in an age when such adventures could leave you beaten, imprisoned, or dead; but the allure of this book is McCourt’s dynamic prose and high-brow erudition that has gone the way of the dodo. McCourt has preserved on paper the intellectual climate that helped to make New York City the edgy capital of the 20th Century. (Oct.)