NOT OUR KIND, MUFFY

From a review of a novel set in Manhattan in this week's New York Times Book Review:

There are eight million stories in the naked city, but, in the realm of fiction, they all tend in one of two directions. There are Gotham novels -- billowing and romantic, built to chronicle luminous dreams and the deferment thereof. Then there are what we might call crosswalk novels. Slathered with local color -- shaped by it, for that matter -- these books nurse obsessions with the daily business of taxis and delis and how much to tip the coat-check girl. "The House of Mirth" is vintage Gotham. "Bright Lights, Big City" is narcotic Gotham. The epitome of crosswalk must be Calvin Trillin’s "Tepper Isn't Going Out," a novel about alternate-side parking.

Really? Those are the only two kinds of novels about the city of New York?

Er, what about Invisible Man? Or Call It Sleep?

Whoops -- sorry. Those and similar novels are about a New York that includes poor and ethnically marginalized people. That New York clearly doesn't exist for this reviewer, or at least novels about that New York don't exist for him.