Gay Talese (High Notes; Bartleby and Me), a pioneer of literary journalism, loves people, and one cohort in particular. A Town Without Time: Gay Talese's New York contains 15 pieces published between 1957 and 2023, a significant chunk in Esquire, all scrupulously reported studies of his fellow New Yorkers, both newbie and homegrown. That even the oldest essays retain their authority and dazzle is remarkable given the seismic changes through which the author has written and lived.
In this collection, Talese's subjects include the guys who built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; a New York Times obituary writer; entertainers Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, and Frank Sinatra; and Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno's conflicted son, who could be a model for Tony Soprano. Not that Talese's affection for his city's denizens is limited to humans: 1957's "Journey into the Cat Jungle" pays tribute to New York's "roving, independent, self-laundering" strays.
Alongside his fellow chroniclers of Gotham, Talese is less swaggering than Tom Wolfe, warmer than Joan Didion, and less side-taking than Nora Ephron. In 1989's "The Homeless Woman with Two Homes," Talese submits that being a young reporter in New York "prepared me to be astonished by virtually nothing," which, along with his ironclad sentences, explains his work's endurance: he's not taken in by fads or flimflammers. In his piece about the Bonanno family, Talese notes that "people tended to mind their own business in New York"; readers of A Town Without Time will appreciate that he has spent his career doing the opposite. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer