New York Is an Endless Feast and I Am Never Full, An excerpt from "Happy Hour"

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Fiction, Excerpt

Sep 8, 2021
Recommended Reading Issue No 486
New York Is an Endless Feast and I Am Never Full
An excerpt from "Happy Hour" by Marlowe Granados
Written by Marlowe Granados
Recommended by Alexandra Kleeman

Introduction by Alexandra Kleeman

Is there such a thing in literature as “The Nightlife Novel”? If not, they should coin it. The standard narrative gaze tends to be big on illumination, shining a stark, flattening light on whatever it touches, rendering backstory and setting as blandly, embarrassingly visible as pores on the nose of a girl leaning too close to the bathroom mirror. How did we ever get the idea that seeing every single detail was a good thing? Anyone who’s eaten dumplings under the eternally three AM-scrutiny of harsh, buzzing fluorescents knows that it’s better in the flattering half-light of the bar, staring into the face of a pretty-much-stranger, the shape half imagined and outlined in traces of neon.

In the default Daytime Novel, actions lead to consequences and characters reckon earnestly with their baggage. In the Nightlife Novel, actions lead to actions and consequences to consequences, and you leave your baggage in the living room of a friend who lives a couple blocks away, but when you go to pick it up, they’re passed out and not picking up the phone so you buy a new toothbrush at the corner store and brush your teeth with a half-cup of seltzer. And that’s that. Who’s to say which model of the world has more to say about desire, freedom, and the Meaning of Life? Why is “getting somewhere” so important in novels when most of life is spent just getting by?