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The Language of the Night: N.K. Jemisin Sings the City - Again! [1]

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Date: 2022-11-28

The highly anticipated sequel to "The City We Became"

If you liked N.K. Jemisin’s fabulous The City We Became, you’ll be delighted to find out that the story picks right up again in The World We Make. There were serious loose threads hanging at the end of The City We Became, of course, among them the fate of Brooklyn’s brownstones, Manny and the Primary’s relationship, and the big honking supernatural city hanging over Staten Island. The Primary now has a name, Neek (NYC — who else would he be?) and a home, thanks to Manny’s surprising resources and his slowly revealed backstory. The group has cohered but is over-matched: the Better New York Foundation and R’lyeh, aka the Woman in White, are fronts for TMW (Total Multiverse Warfare, I think — look, I spent the whole day writing history and if I can’t find it within 30 seconds, I’m winging it), and they’re coming, not just for the newly-self-aware New York, but for all the sentient cities.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The metaphysics, as you no doubt remember from The City We Became, turn on the concept of the multiverse, that every time a person makes a decision to do A instead of B, there’s a universe in which option B was the pick, and that universe spins off from that decision: an infinite number of universes, each one spawned by each random decision made by each random human. The powers behind Better New York and R’yleh’s over-pixelated avatar find all this choice disorderly, distasteful, and the best way to manage the complexity is to pick a side and kill off all the competition.

Better New York hates diversity. It hates poverty, and immigrants, and tolerance, and…. you can see where this is going, right? As Neek explains it:

Periodically, R’lyeh sends forth a hollow, tooth-aching, atonal song that echoes across the whole city. The song’s a problem; listen to it for more than a few minutes and you start thinking Mexicans and birth control are what’s really wrong with the world, and maybe a nice mass shooting would solve both problems. (p. 2)

So far, New York has been managing the problem organically — by turning up the volume on the city’s music, or “thanks to so much of New York being so damn New York, we okay.”

But, ah but. Things are about to change. Partly because, as Neek explains, “A living city blends the will of its citizens with the impressions of outsiders, as filtered through legends and media” (p. 10), and Fox News and its spinoffs have been busy. Neek is assaulted by an attack on the metaphysical plane:

What’s hitting me now is a sudden ramp-up of outsider hate like nothing I’ve ever felt before. All these voices from Iowa and Alabama and England and Nigeria echo not our legend but its opposite — all the shit that people think about New York which not only isn’t true, but contradicts what is. Those concepts jam into my mind like shrapnel: crackheads vomiting on every corner, children being kept in Omelasian basements by cannibal pedophiles, sneering intellectuals in kippahs and wild-eyed billionaires in turbans scheming to take over the world, seedy public bathrooms that will turn you trans even though we barely have public bathrooms in the first place. The reality of New York is being assailed by a thousand other New Yorks that don’t exist … but a bunch of people suddenly want them to. And, oh God, I can feel their belief actually dragging at me, trying to pull me away from who I actually am. (pp. 10-11)

The book is fantasy, but one of fantasy’s great flexes is the ability to discuss real-world issues without the real-word baggage. This time, however, the real world is a twelve-course meal, and Jemisin gives us the whole menu: ICE agents pretending to be police and trying to bully their way into Padmi’s home, Proud Boy gangs harassment, H-1B visa abuse, corrupt cops, and a “Make New York Great Again” mayoral candidate who’s suspiciously similar to a certain public figure who shall remain beneath notice. The only things missing are drag queen story hours, CRT attacks, and obnoxious boat parades. Jemisin doesn’t give the city COVID, either, but we don’t miss it.

We almost missed the whole book, though. In the Acknowledgments, she writes that this book was “rough.” (Always read the intros and acknowledgments, folks!)

The New York I wrote about in the first book of this series no longer exists…. I had to change one of my initial planned plots for this book — a monstrous president waging war on his own hometown — because Trump got there first. The Great Cities trilogy that I’d initially planned became a duology because I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality… (p. 355).

In fact, Jemisin admits that she almost bailed after the first book, because current events overtook her theme. Truncating two books into one, despite that her effort in writing it under adversity is heroic, causes certain problems. The book doesn’t have the room to develop that it really needs. The gradual alliance of other cities, as well as their participation, gets short shrift. I personally wished for more engagement with the older cities on the same order that Manny and Istanbul, the city of cats. Aislyn’s disaffection with R’lyeh and her gradual realization that she’s losing everything that makes Staten Island unique should have formed the basis of a stronger character pivot, especially since it’s Aislyn’s learned fear of difference that has kept her racist and cowed. And the climactic engagement between the multiverse and its enemies falls short. [Side note: Jemisin’s writing of racism is a harsh mirror held up to white readers. My criticisms of this book notwithstanding, it’s well worth reading, not just for the social consciousness, but because Jemisin is a master storyteller.]

The gap between what the book is and what it could be is most apparent, I think, in the courtroom showdown between Brooklyn and Better New York over her illegally repossessed home. As you remember, the two brownstones her family owns were repossessed in a fraudulent scheme and sold to Better New York as part of its gentrification/Starbucksification scheme for the city. Eminent domain and all its first cousin incarnations, all justified in the name of the public good, is a real and fraught issue, and the arguments for and against could make for mesmerizing drama. But because the planned two volumes became one, Jemisin had to take short cuts. In the court room, the attorney for BNY starts to make a reasoned case about the ends justifying the means, provided the ends benefit the public sufficiently. Rather than letting that thread play out, even as the judge is halfway convinced of its merit, the Woman in White grows impatient and takes over, puppeting the lawyer:

“Well, you know all the basics. The property’s ours. We took it because we could, and because you people genuinely don’t seem to care if some of your most loyal and productive citizens get run out of town. If not for the injunction we would’ve sold it already, and invested the money in something else that would help destroy New York.” Then he — though this isn’t Vance anymore — seems to remember that he’s supposed to have an argument. “Charitably! City destruction can often be charitable, I’ve found. It’s like mercy-killing millions of people at a time. We will do incredible good for the infinite lives of the multiverse when we wipe this particular branch of it out of existence. Now, are we done here?” (p. 235)

This overreach prompts a surge of New Yorkness from the judge to counteract the Woman in White’s assault and, just like that, the case is over. Brooklyn wins her house back. New York triumphs over Lovecraft again.

An opportunity missed; the emotional wallop of injustice deflated, minimized in the service of moving the story along.

I didn’t even realize this the first time through, because The World We Make is great fun to read, and it engages with, not only the problems of poverty, violence, and intolerance, but also the brash goodness of the city that you’ll never hear about in the diners of Pennsylvania. In fact, it wasn’t until I idly picked up The Obelisk Gate, the second volume of The Broken Earth series, again that it hit me what was missing: the space to ponder, the subtlety of argument, the room for the book to breathe.

Still, even though I feel a little let down by The World We Make, it’s only because N.K. Jemisin is such a superlatively excellent writer and creator of worlds. So it’s not as towering an achievement as her other works — it’s still a good, entertaining, and often thoughtful book.

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