In The Boy Detective, Roger Rosenblatt transforms a winter night's walk through the streets of New York City into a wide-ranging excursion into the territory of memory that invites comparison to Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City. Following the tragedy-inspired memoirs Making Toast and Kayak Morning, this book allows Rosenblatt to showcase his capacious intellect and gift for wry humor.
Rosenblatt's childhood in an eight-room apartment just off Manhattan's Gramercy Park provides the rich lode of inspiration for the sometimes loosely connected musings that compose the book. In the 1940s and '50s, he embarked on "boyhood detecting prowls," fancying himself a junior Sherlock Holmes (with a dash of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and other literary detectives thrown in for good measure) as he tailed innocent citizens through his neighborhood. Repeatedly identifying an affinity between detective work and writing, Rosenblatt makes an intriguing case for a shared sympathy that links the professions: "Both see people for what they are," he writes, "judging privately, yet leaving cosmic judgment to others--perhaps the deepest sort of sympathy there is."
If he "had to choose one place to make my stand," Rosenblatt says, it would be "the midway point between poetry and prose," and his writing is firmly rooted in that ground. Reflecting on the elusive boundary separating dreams and memory or summoning up a rare tender moment shared with his emotionally distant physician father, he has a gift for sharp turns of phrase--as when he confesses he was "more book-storeish than bookish"--coupled with penetrating insights. Ranging across decades of New York history, Rosenblatt is a knowledgeable and generous tour guide, pointing out the Gramercy Park connections of Herman Melville, Edith Wharton and Humphrey Bogart (as well as E.B. White's Stuart Little), as well as locating the nearby site of the original Madison Square Garden. And though The Boy Detective doesn't come close to being an instructional manual on memoir writing, Rosenblatt still offers some useful, if unconventional, tips to aspiring memoirists.
Memoir, urban travelogue or summing up of a career grounded in the written word, Roger Rosenblatt's The Boy Detective is an elegant and wise journey through an incomparable city and a meaning-filled life. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: A walking tour of Roger Rosenblatt's childhood neighborhood inspires a rich collection of personal reflections--and an intriguing argument for linking the work of detectives and writers.