Book Note:
Flâneuse
16 April 2018

Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (the lengthy subtitle will just have to wait) came highly recommended, and I don’t think that I’ll be sorry to have read it, but

It’s hard going. Here are three instances.

One. 

A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention, the flâneur understands the city as few of its inhabitants do, for he has memorised it with his feet. [Emphasis supplied] (3)

This is not only unlikely — for those with no money and plenty of cares who depend on the streets for their livelihood almost certainly know them better — but gross. Feet? Are we talking flip flops? Flâneurs wear shoes, the sturdy soles of which just may, I’ll concede, have learned a thing or two. But the feet of a flâneur never leave the bedroom. 

Two.

These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both; a feeling I could never have had home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense. (6)

This is one of the many silly stories that young people tell themselves about New York in order to justify the high price of excitement. The whole city is not only inflected by but a rubble heap of the past, with legions of perfectly unremarkable buildings that were built between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Second Word War. There are still plenty of these dull old things even in Midtown and Wall Street; more provincial neighborhoods such as my own Yorkville, are characterized by them — along with equally uninspiring white-brick apartment buildings, dating from the Fifties and Sixties, such as the one in which I’ve lived for more than half my life. It is a tremendous effort just to keep up with the now of New York City; no one wants to think about the future. 

Three. 

“It is crucial for the flâneur to be functionally invisible,” writes Luc Sante, defending his own gendering of the flâneur as male and not female. (13)

This afternoon, a checkout clerk at Fairway asked me if I was buying any lemons for making lemonade — picking up a conversation from last summer, since when I don’t recall having seen her. She may have been making  a droll comment on my attire; rashly, I had run my errand across the street in shorts, only to find the weather much more bitterly cold than it had seemed on the balcony. Definitely not lemonade weather! But she knew who I was, because I am never invisible. Perhaps this is something that has made me sympathetic to women without my knowing it. I am always noticed, whether or not I care to be, and this has been going on since I was thirteen. 

In short, my experience as a human being keeps running up against Elkin’s language. From these few early pages, I’ve learned that I can’t read Flâneuse at bedtime; it makes me too argumentative. 

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