Book review: A literary artifact to be celebrated

In 2006, Dr Nicholas Bartha committed suicide by blowing up his 62nd St townhouse in Manhattan.

He chose that option rather than sell the property as part of a divorce settlement with his ex-wife. 

One of those spectacularly grim New York stories that capture the headlines for a few days before fading from view.

Not so fast. Gay Talese, inveterate chronicler of the city and all who sail in her for more than half a century, revisited the tale in his 2023 memoir-cum-curio Bartleby and Me. 

There, he performed a typically forensic deep dive into the troubled Romanian physician and everybody else who had ever owned that plot of land or lived in the building.

Only Talese, with his eye for detail and knack for relentless digging, could trace a line from the dissolution of a 21st-century marriage and the husband’s descent into self-destructive madness all the way back to Hugh Gaine.

A Belfast-born printer and newspaper proprietor who carved out a very prosperous life for himself in 18th century America, this colourful character from the Revolutionary War once owned the very sliver of New York where Bartha’s dream home turned into a nightmare. 

Talese somehow weaves his and so many other lives into the compelling history of a single house.

‘Dr Bartha’s Brownstone’ is one of 14 tales, each more exquisitely written than the last, collected in the anthology, A Town Without Time: Gay Talese’s New York.

Not the first edition of his greatest hits. Maybe the last? He is 93 years old now. 

Among many delights, this compilation features ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’, his legendary pursuit of an interview with the singer — first published in Esquire magazine in 1966, still considered by many to be the finest example of magazine writing ever.

Of course, Talese is a throwback to a different age. 

Long-form journalism funded by and published by glossy mags used to be the ne plus ultra of the industry, something every writer with ambition aspired to one day be doing.

Aside from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, it’s more or less a way of working consigned to history now, a relic of a bygone, infinitely more glamorous era. 

To run your finger along the body of work snapshotted here is to appreciate offering somebody the opportunity to drill deep into a subject that produced pieces that stand the test of time. A ludicrous thought in our clickbait world.

It matters too that Talese had an uncanny knack for mining gold where others wouldn’t even be bothered to break ground. 

Witness his telling of the story of the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island through the prism of those involved at every level of the mammoth undertaking. A feat of imagination, excavation (literally), and reportage.

“A great bridge is a poetic construction of enduring beauty and utility,” wrote Talese in a sentence that also accurately describes the journalism he produced.

Aside from the inclusion of a rare dud about the feline population of New York, an oddity that could surely only appeal to cat lovers, his publishers have done the world a great service in anthologising his work here. Again.

Here is a cultural and literary artefact that will be mulled over by future generations.

“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” wrote Talese. Not by him. Ever.