Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan, Poets/Politics [2008–2012]

Canadian novelist Scott (The Obituary) delivers an idiosyncratic and affecting memoir of her experiences as an expatriate living in New York City during the Obama administration. Her lyrical, sometimes stream of consciousness prose carries readers through a fragmented look at a wide range of topics, including the conversations about political and economic inequities she was having with her writer peers, living through Hurricane Sandy, the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton during her first presidential campaign, and, in an epilogue, the election of Donald Trump. Scott is adept at using staccato sentences to create immediacy, as in her description of Hurricane Sandy: “Buses. Subway trains. Screeching to halt under bridge. Ere flooding entering tunnels. Tree branches, trunks. Torquing toward ground in sudden blast. Taxi pulling up to refuge on highest Brooklyn slope.” In a manifesto placed halfway through the book, Scott explains that her style employs “purposefully indeterminate, meandering sentences” to “[spark] thinking in multiple, contrapuntal directions.” She also takes a “polyvocal” approach by placing the (attributed) words of others beside and among her own. It requires some getting used to, but, in the end, the swirl of language invigorates more often than it frustrates. For readers willing to take the plunge, this is worth it. (Oct.)