'Why We Came to the City' Dreamy and Divided

Nowadays, stories about (multiple of 10)-somethings in New York City form a cliché unto themselves. The title of Kristopher Jansma’s second novel, “Why We Came to the City,” reminds us that such stories were not always tropes, and works to unearth the countless rich textures beneath the city’s seemingly well-worn surfaces. Jansma directly confronts the title’s question in three freewheeling prose poems, which serve as preface (“Why We Came to the City”), halfway point (“Why We Left the City”), and prologue (“The City That Is”) for the story itself. “We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died,” he begins the book. This swirling, almost mythological image of a collective “us” proves to be enticing. The novel itself, however, never quite succeeds in creating characters as enthralling as the promise of them.

“We” comprises five college classmates—artist Irene Richmond, poet/psychiatric ward worker Jacob Blaumann, astronomist George Murphy, editor Sara Sherman, and analyst William Cho (all aspiring, uncertain, overworked)—who reunite at a glitzy Manhattan party in December 2008 as the economy plummets. A few days later, Irene is diagnosed with bone cancer. Presented in two parts, the novel first narrates Irene’s battle with the disease, then recounts her friends’ struggles with the aftermath.

Irene’s immediately looming illness thrusts the reader in the middle of an ostensibly fully developed, complex set of friendships. “Surely,” thinks Irene, “Sara would let them take out both her eyes to save one of [mine]. Jacob and George would carry [me] to and from chemo appointments on their backs if [I] asked.” The first half of the novel, unfortunately, fails to convince us of this. It struggles with its expository juggling act, and any cynical reader could pigeonhole the characters: Irene, the mysterious, manic-pixie “doe-eyed” artist; William, the shy, insecure Korean boy in finance, whom Jansma goes so far as to have Irene repeatedly call “girlish"; Jacob, the broke, melodramatic, irreverent, homosexual poet; and Sara, the manically-scheduled office-queen socialite. George—a Midwestern Catholic “cornflower-blue”-eyed astronomist on the verge of an official alcohol problem—has, perhaps, the most depth out of them all. But we never see enough of the characters beyond their immediate and overwhelming trial by cancer. William especially feels like an inconsistently characterized plot device: one day so nervous he almost completely butchers a date with Irene; the next, bold enough to introduce her to his parents and walk into her apartment uninvited.

The language of Jansma’s third-person omniscient narration contributes to the transparent, stretched-too-thin feeling of the exposition. Since Jansma chooses not to describe any of the friend group’s formative college memories, he must do it through forcibly interjected snippets of verbal and mental flashbacks. During these interludes, the third-person omniscient voice does not vary much in showing the internal monologue of each character, perhaps taxed by simultaneously developing five of them. The prose itself often feels stilted: It intersperses lyrical, original images with more hackneyed expressions and colloquial Millennialisms (“Sara had been through three hundred hoops to make sure they have permission…”) and retains the occasional superfluous adjective or adverb—as if, like the narrative, the language were a bit overeager yet overworked.

The switch to close-third perspective in Part II gives Jansma the opportunity to develop both characters and language. The novel’s most redeeming characterization emerges here in the form of a revitalized, trope-shattering Jacob. Driven by the conviction that he “owed it to Irene” to live reasonably, Jacob begins to resolve his relationships with his lover, friends, career, and poetry. The book’s most tender and realistically three-dimensional friendship—which is saying something, since this is a book about friendship—occurs between Jacob and a gifted psychiatric ward patient for whom he serves as a poetry mentor. Jacob’s story is sometimes sentimental, but never saccharine.

Jansma loses this momentum after the Jacob section. Even given the possibilities close-third perspective opens up, William, Sara, and George do not fare so well. William remains defined by Irene: The entirety of his stint in Part II is a scavenger hunt in Irene’s past that Jansma frames, in an overt and awkward Homerian device, as a quest to discover and “return to” the real Irene. While embarking upon this journey entails a certain resolve, William never grows beyond it and regresses into relative shapelessness of character. Sara and George’s brand-new marriage becomes strained, in one of the novel’s most egregiously heavy-handed gestures, by George’s habit of drunkenly falling asleep with Irene’s urn in his arms. With this remaining cast, unlike with Jacob, Jansma falls back on the improperly established foundation of their deep attachment to Irene. Consequently, the events feel more like a mechanical execution of plot than a genuine sequence of events.

When the book ends, it’s not completely clear how and why we end up there. There is Irene’s loss, but Irene remains hazily defined, unknowable. There is the promise of that stunning first line, the haphazardness, desires, and failure of which is not always evoked in the tales of Jansma’s characters. It is clear, however, that watching Irene die breaks and reshapes each character. If the author does not manage in the scope of these relationships to truly answer the question of why we came to the city, he at least generates a genuine sympathy for the protagonists—these people who, constrained as they may sometimes be, are so poignantly and understandably lost in the city.