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A New York Childhood
Ecco
November 2013
On Sale: November 5, 2013
272 pages
ISBN: 0062241338
EAN: 9780062241337
Kindle: B00BATKY92
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's
Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes
perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak
Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly
moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York
Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary
works that carve out new territory at the intersection of
poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a
story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused
with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing
humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening
silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly
safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger
imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With
the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off
alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a
life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt
finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth:
The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing
him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which
he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life
and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York
of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these
streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great
detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and
the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public
Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that
nourished the city with water before it nourished it with
books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's
imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize
loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from
me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy
detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world
for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the
writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of
his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of
all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a
meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy
Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem,
displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.
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