---
title: "The Colossus of New York"
type: Book
date: 2022-09-20
rating: 2
author: "Colson Whitehead"
genre:
year: 2003
status: Finished
tags:
image: the-colossus-of-new-york.jpg
colorSortKey: [0, 22, 0]
---


I learned of this book from [a beautiful quote from my friend Kunal](https://twitter.com/KunalTandon/status/1568957262433058820) and am generally a sucker for at least the _idea_ of city-focused essay collections (Horizontal Vertigo, Cool Gray City of Love) so I was delighted to find a copy easily available on Libby.

That beautiful quote is perhaps a useful metonymy for the book as a whole; indeed, all this book _has_ is mellifluous one-or-two-liners about #CityLife. It feels something like a novella-length graduation speech; high on gravitas and quoteability, low on depth and legitimate insight. It was fun to read a few pages; it was _exhausting_ and colorless to read beyond that.

What was _particularly_ painful for me was how Whitehead's attempts at universality (no names! no specific narrations! a surfeit of second-person!) undermined his attempt to paint New York as anything more specific than "big urban life." The section about Central Park could serve as a section about Golden Gate Park; the section about the subway could have taken place in Paris.

This felt like a book for people who want to daydream about life in the big city; I wanted a book that contained truth, not truisms.