Look ahead: September | October | November | Memoirs

OCTOBER

Yunqué Americans

With a story that mixes Puerto Rican and Irish, jazz and the symphony, Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s new novel is as American as the city itself.

I edit in the morning, and then at night I write hot,” says Edgardo Vega Yunqué, who claims he works on six or seven novels at once (“You don’t get your relatives mixed up, do you?”) but until now has published only two, along with a story collection. For the 67-year-old Brooklynite (via East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Puerto Rico), the latest—which Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishes this fall—is the big one, both literally and figuratively. Right down to the title. No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again has a kitchen-sink quality—which isn’t to its detriment—even after being edited down from 1,200 pages to a meager 658.

“I didn’t want to feel restricted by a straight line of narrative,” says Vega. “I wanted to go into the digressive mode of novel-writing. I used the idea of a symphony, but also of the mural. You see a lot of different faces; you jump around from one to the other and see the relationship between them.” The fleet-footed looseness of jazz improv and Nuyorican slam poetry pervades Vega’s style. The plot, meanwhile, is both simple (half-Irish, half–Puerto Rican Vidamía Farrell finds her long-lost father) and sprawling (wars are fought, musical movements die, racial conflicts erupt). “My life hasn’t been all that exciting, and maybe that’s why I write fiction,” says the writer, but he’s being a bit coy. “By the time I was 10 years old, before I left Puerto Rico, I had seen three people killed in front of me,” says Vega, who caught another eyeful after coming to New York at age 13 without a word of English. “Death has been a big part of my life.”

He found respite on the Upper West Side during the sixties and seventies, throwing parties, helping draft dodgers, and raising a family that includes stepdaughter Suzanne Vega. Perhaps there’s a parallel with Barry, Vidamía’s benevolent stepfather in his novel—though, says Vega, “Suzanne is a wonder child. Vidamía was just a bright kid.” In the nineties, he ran the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a vast Lower East Side visual- and performing-arts space. All of which makes him one of the city’s great supporting characters. Is he ready for more? “I don’t want much,” says Vega. “I live very frugally. I’m basically a schmuck. I don’t want to be a star; I just want the book to do well.” —Boris Kachka

• Details: No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again, by Edgardo Vega Yunqué, October (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), order on bn.com.

---

Prisoners of Sex
In a new novel, Tama Janowitz hasn’t freed her slaves.

Before Sex and the City, there was Slaves of New York, Tama Janowitz’s breakthrough 1986 novel that skewered the trendy downtown art scene while simultaneously romanticizing it. And now she’s focusing her penetrating eye on another New York denizen: the Married Woman.

Peyton Amberg is about a woman so disillusioned with married life that she travels around the world having increasingly desperate affairs in an effort to fill the void. Where did the idea come from?

Different things inspired me—Madame Bovary, the concept of marriage as the sole pursuit of so many women, the fairy tales, the “they lived happily ever after.” I was exploring the notion of romantic love as a necessary part of marriage—which in many cultures it isn’t. It seems like the emphasis today is on the sadness of breaking up. We’ve lost the idea that you were marrying because you were working together as a team.

In 1986, Slaves of New York made you a household name. The women in this book are also slaves of the city.

There’s so much emphasis on women being beautiful only if they’re 20 and the blonde ideal. I feel privileged to live in Brooklyn, where I don’t have to deal as much with the latest restaurant, the latest raw diet, the latest designer. I think there’s a sense of desperation, a kind of doom here in New York. People come here and they’re desperate to begin with, and that desperation is worked out in totally trivial ways.

It sounds like you’re not a fan.

I’m not negative about the city. For a writer, it’s divine! I just try to explore the world around me, and I can’t help but feel for the women I see.

And what are you a slave of?

I hate writing. But there are moments of supreme transcendence when I think, This is fantastic, because I’m not myself anymore. —Sara Cardace

• Details: Peyton Amberg, by Tama Janowitz, October 22 (St. Martin’s Press), order on bn.com.

---

The Best of the Rest of October
Colossus Of New York, Colson Whitehead
A love letter to the Big Apple, in thirteen parts. (Doubleday.)

The Night Country, Stewart O’nan
An intimate look at three souls revisiting their past lives from the grave. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee
One woman’s life, as told by a novelist who’s won too many awards to count. (Viking.)

The Funny Thing Is . . . , Ellen Degeneres
The lesbian icon tells all—jokes included. (Simon & Schuster.)

Love, Toni Morrison
The Nobel winner turns her pen on a wealthy hotel owner and the women who love him. (Knopf.)

Great Fortune: The Epic Of Rockefeller Center, Dan Okrent
Love it or hate it, it’s the heart of (some people’s) New York. (Viking.)

Everything And More: Cantor & Zeno & Math & Abstraction, David Foster Wallace
A work on infinity that’s often as comic, if thankfully less infinite, than Infinite Jest. (Norton.)

Smartest Guys In The Room: The Rise And Fall Of Enron, Bethany Mclean
Everything you ever wanted to know about the company that became a catchphrase for corruption. (Viking.)