Synopses & Reviews
In his epic novel
The Empire City hailed by the
New York Times as "a witty, exasperating, thoughtful, fantastic hymn to New York City and to the destructiveness of modern life" Goodman dissects urban society with iconoclastic exuberance. His flamboyant, poetic narrative follows the exploits of a born rebel alter-ego, slyly named Horatio Alger, as he pursues an eclectic education on mean streets, constantly "spoiling for a fight":
Somewhere there is the enemy. What strength and weapons will he have
to meet him with?...First, there is the simple sling and shot that hits the
booby in the brow. Second, there is the eloquent trumpet that makes the
walls fall down. And third, the arrows of desire...
A bohemian roman à clef which Goodman worked on for decades and originally published serially "as separate fictions" in the Forties and Fifties,
The Empire City brilliantly revivifies a chaotic time in our intellectual and political history. As critic Harold Rosenberg points out, the novelist here converts "events that happened to the author and his friends in New York City during the Depression, the war and the postwar years...into parables of their successive ideas and cults....
The Empire City could have been subtitled The Memoirs of an Ideologist. Not only is his hero a street urchin, the novel itself is, among other things, a tract on behalf of urchinism. Unlike naïve conceptualists and joiners, Goodman takes in ideas in order to get rid of them....The Knower, with his Reichean pantomime of eroticism, suffering, fury, defiance, supplies a reverse kind of farce in
The Empire City."
Review
"Breathless and drunk on modernity, childish, bawdy, and at times inscrutably theoretical, social critic Paul Goodman's epic lurches through three decades of war-addled New York....The book works as a psychological thumbprint...to assemble symbol next to symbol, as in dreams, the images only meaning something in the feeling they leave with you when you wake up." The Village Voice
Synopsis
This is the thirty year epic story of Horatio, an idealist who struggles to take his place in a conformist society and still retain his personal identity.
Synopsis
The thirty year epic story of Horatio, an idealist who struggles to take his place in a conformist society and still retain his personal identity.
"If we conformed to the mad society, we became mad," Paul Goodman writes in Empire City, "but if we did not conform to the only society that there is, we became mad." That theme prevades much of this novel that the Review of Contemporary Fiction, among others, praised as "a remarkable achievement."
This comic-picaresque epic is about the coming-of-age of Horatio, a sane man in an absurd world. Our endearingly optimistic hero resists his compulsory mis-education, does battle with the System, and scours post-World War II Manhattan for an elective family of fellow-thinkers and, more important, fellow-feelers. It's a big book, but Horatio's is a big world, and his question the biggest a man can ask: "How does one live the right life?"
As Goodman once said, "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests--community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics--but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist."
About the Author
Paul Goodman (1911-1972), social scientist, novelist, poet, psychiatrist, educator, philosopher of the New Left, author of such notable critiques of conformist conditioning as Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Mis-education, dedicated his considerable creative energies to diagnosing and finding remedies for midcentury American societys manifold ills.