The history of a city in 880 pages

It only sat on my shelf for about two years, but I FINALLY FINISHED IT, GUYS. I finally read Edward Rutherfurd's 880 page epic, New York: The Novel.

It starts in 1664 with a Dutch merchant named Dirk van Dyck who has settled in New Amsterdam with his family. He meets an Englishman from Boston named Tom Merchant, and the two join forces to create a shipping company that brings power and wealth to these two men in the expanding New World. The next 350 years of history involve the interwoven stories of these two families, as New Amsterdam transforms into the modern, powerful city it is today: New York City.

A chunkster can be so satisfying because you can get completely sucked in to the characters, which is particularly easy when you know you're going to follow these people and their lives and their families for decades and centuries to come. New York put the characters we've followed, the ones we now know, into historical settings we also know, which had the affect of putting us, the reader, there...in the middle of it all...and viewing history from a first-hand perspective. In this regard, New York was a five-star novel, but that doesn't mean it is without its faults.

The story opens with the van Dycks, the Masters, and their slaves, and we follow their lives and families from the mid-17th century through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and then...for some lineages, it just stops. The novel becomes the story of the WASPy Master family. And for the next 200 years, we follow the Masters through the Gilded Age, the Depression, the Wall Street boom...and all we read about is MONEY. While Rutherfurd took care to color every time period with relevant characters (like German and Irish immigrants in the 1800s, Italian immigrants at the turn of the century, 20th-century Jewish communities in Brooklyn) none of these other characters ever felt as fully integrated into the story. Yes, they played a role, and their descendants sometimes did as well, but Rutherfurd just kept the novel so incredibly focused on the upper-class Masters, that I was left wondering what happened to the slaves and the natives, and what these immigrants really went through, because I didn't get their full history.

What I'm trying to say in all of that is...I don't want to hear obnoxious rich people whining about not being rich enough, so by the end, I didn't care a flip about the Masters.

All of this aside, I thought it was a fabulous novel that inevitably made me want to hear more on all these people I met throughout its 880 pages. My favorite part was actually the beginning, when Manhattan was forests and farmland because this is just such a foreign concept to me, currently living in the concrete jungle day in and day out. I love when Rutherfurd intertwined historical figures and events with his fictional characters, because I can read about Lincoln's pre-Presidency speech at Cooper Union in 1860 and say, "I KNOW WHERE THAT IS."

I think Rutherfurd's point to this novel is that this city is fluid, ever shifting and ever changing, but with an energy that fuels its people and makes things happen and defines its very existence. New Yorkers have New York in their blood, and just as the people define their city, a city defines its people as well. Call it an ego or call it pride, but I guarantee there is no place that sentiment is felt stronger than in New York.


For those of you interested in New York City history, browse the Welikia Project to uncover the city's original ecology.