Eight Novels That Truly Capture City Life
Only some of these titles tell happy stories, but they are all reminders of what is possible in metropolises.
Millions of people feel the irresistible draw of big cities—the opportunities for art, culture, and business; the excitement that pulses through daily life—and many novelists likewise choose to set their stories in these rich cityscapes. The rewards of city living, though, can be dubious. E. B. White wrote that New York will bestow on its residents “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” You can indeed feel utterly alone in a city in a way you can’t in a suburb or a small town, because the city so easily goes about its business and forgets all about you. But urban life also forces us into contact with other people, another complicated gift. The trick—for fictional characters as much as for real residents—is to figure out how you fit into that giant, dense human puzzle.
The eight novels below are all about people trying to find their place in bustling cities—Lagos, Chicago, Paris. They form relationships and wreck them; they join the party and grow tired of the party; they struggle to stay afloat and even to stay alive. The locations themselves, each with a distinct flavor, are more than just settings; they are forces, shaping the characters’ choices and rushing them along toward the novels’ end. Only some of these books tell happy stories, but they are all reminders of what is possible in these metropolises and why so many people keep coming back for more—and they might make even the steeliest city dweller feel just a little less alone.
NW, by Zadie Smith
Smith is from northwest London, which is the setting for her breakout first novel, White Teeth. In her fourth book, NW, published 12 years later, she returns to her old stomping grounds. The book tracks four friends, all trying to gain distance—geographical and metaphysical—from the housing project where they grew up. The friends’ paths diverge and converge, in a gritty urban landscape evoked by Smith’s fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration: “Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock.” Meanwhile, the overlapping stories reveal the way that identity markers (race, class, gender) interact with our desires as we try to build our adult lives. Smith once said that, as a child, she thought her neighborhood, Willesden, was the center of London and that Oxford Street was the suburbs. This feeling—that one corner of a city can be both the center of the world and a world unto itself—is made real in NW, as much as London is made real by a writer who knows the place deep in her bones.
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton’s first major novel, from 1905, is the classic tale of a doomed striver in Gilded Age New York. Lily Bart has neither solid family connections nor money, but she has beauty, and she is determined to use it to climb the social ladder. What she doesn’t count on is the cruelty of others. Nasty rumors and Lily’s declining financial fortunes conspire to push her further and further out of the center of high society, until she is clinging to the edge. Reading Lily’s story is a bit like watching someone swim against the tide: You know things aren’t going to go well, but you can’t stop rooting for her. Wharton paints a colorful and biting portrait of the moneyed classes of old New York, trapped in a “great gilt cage,” with their inflexible rules of decorum and fixed social strata. You may find yourself thinking gratefully about how much things have changed for modern-day New Yorkers—and a bit forlornly about how much they’ve stayed the same.
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
Set in 1950s Saigon, The Quiet American tells the story of a tortured love triangle unfolding amidst the last days of French colonial rule in Vietnam. Written just before the beginning of the Vietnam War, it anticipates the coming conflict by positioning its two leading men as symbols of different styles of foreign engagement in Asia. The British journalist Thomas Fowler simply wants to enjoy life in Saigon—drinking tea, smoking opium, and living in sin with his lover, Phuong, whom he met at a club where she was a dancer. His frenemy, the American operative Alden Pyle, is determined to vanquish both communism and colonialism—and win Phuong’s love—by any means necessary. Greene’s noirish and atmospheric descriptions of the mid-century capital are indelible: “The dice rattled on the tables where the French were playing Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un and the girls in white silk trousers bicycled home down the rue Catinat,” he writes, conjuring a city, and a country, that would never be the same again.
Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami
You could pick up almost any Murakami novel and find people trying and failing to connect, instead retreating into their own mind or plunging into some surreal alternate reality, the product of the author’s magical-realist imagination. But his novel Dance Dance Dance, published in English in 1994, is the one that most perfectly captures the particular waltz of intimacy and isolation that marks city life. The novel is set mostly in two Japanese cities, Tokyo and Sapporo, and the nameless main character moves through both in a kind of dream, longing for various women who have touched his life and then disappeared. Our man embarks on some tenuous friendships and gets caught up in a Tokyo murder investigation that briefly turns the story into a Raymond Chandler–esque thriller. But his ultimate salvation from loneliness lies in an encounter with an otherworldly being on a darkened floor of a modern Sapporo megahotel, the last place in any city you’d expect to make a deep connection. Murakami reminds us that you never know where the urban dance will lead you.
Native Son, by Richard Wright
When this novel was published, in 1940, it shocked readers with its rawness and honesty, and it became an instant literary classic. Bigger Thomas is a Black man living on the bleak, poverty-stricken South Side of Chicago. When he gains access to a richer, whiter Chicago by way of a live-in job in the mansion of a real-estate magnate, his world expands and simultaneously becomes filled with menace. One wrong move leads to the next in a fatalistic chain of events. Bigger’s harrowing story is a bit like Lily Bart’s downward spiral in The House of Mirth, but in this case, it becomes a stinging indictment of American racism. Although James Baldwin famously criticized Wright’s novel for relying on stereotypes, he also acknowledged its power, writing, “No American negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.” This may be the darkest of these city novels, depicting an untamed, Depression-era Chicago rife with division, violence, and hypocrisy. Bigger is punished, Wright suggests, because he dares to challenge his city’s implicit rules about where he belongs.
The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy
Dundy’s semi-autobiographical first novel was published in 1958, when she was married to the theater critic Kenneth Tynan and reminiscing about the year she had spent in Paris as a single woman trying to make it as an actress. The book made a huge splash at first and then went in and out of print for years, until New York Review Books reissued the cult classic in 2007, introducing a new generation to the witty, knowing Sally Jay Gorce and her early-1950s Parisian romp. Sally frequents cafés and hotel bars, gets into outrageous scrapes with French film stars, and loves and leaves a series of men. “Oh God, there’ve been so many people since I came to Paris,” the 21-year-old Sally muses. “I’m so tired.” Bohemian Paris provides the perfect canvas for Sally’s self-invention, far from the more restrictive mores of postwar America. The enchantment of Paris for young travelers, however, is timeless: “Everything seemed to fall into place,” says Sally, wide-eyed on the Champs-Élysées. “Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.”
The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood
Like The Dud Avocado, The Berlin Stories was inspired by the author’s brief stint in a wild and glamorous European city, but the place is Berlin, and the time is the early 1930s. Nazism is on the rise, and all of the denizens of the Jazz Age city—the cabaret singers and prostitutes, the Communists and aristocrats, the Jews who have only a dawning understanding of what’s happening—are trying to determine their roles in this shifting scene. The Berlin Stories comprises two short novels, the second of which, Goodbye to Berlin, was adapted into the musical Cabaret. The nightclub singer Sally Bowles, the star of the musical, is only one of a panoply of colorful personalities who fill the world of the novel, many of them thinly veiled versions of people who crossed the author’s path. The line between fiction and memoir is often thin in Isherwood’s writing, but that’s what gives this book its special insight: He had a front-row seat to life in Berlin in this dark historical moment, and he reveals it to us on a human scale.
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
One of the pleasures of Adichie’s 2013 novel is seeing American cities through the eyes of Ifemelu, her Nigerian-expat heroine. “Philadelphia had the musty scent of history,” we are told on the first page. “New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage.” The city that’s really the beating heart of her story, though, is Lagos, where Ifemelu is from and where she returns before the novel is out. When she first arrives after her long sojourn abroad, she can’t tell whether she or the city has changed: “When had shopkeepers become so rude? Had buildings in Lagos always had this patina of decay?” Americanah is many things—an ironic commentary on race in America, a send-up of academia, an exploration of identity in the African diaspora—but it is, at its core, a love story. Ifemelu’s memories of her youth in Lagos are inextricably bound up with those of her first love, Obinze. The longer she stays, the more the buried charms of both the city and the man come to light, and the more both feel like home.
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