A Review of The City We Became

The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin, 2020.

Minor spoilers below.

The City We Became is a lovely and infuriating book. I encourage everyone to read it, but be prepared to be puzzled, especially if you don’t know the city of New York.

In the novel, cities that reach some critical point of development become literally alive via “avatars”, humans who are cognitively reborn as living embodiments of the cities themselves. Why exactly this is so is not clarified, but it doesn’t matter because the novel focuses on the rather protracted “birth” of New York.

Some cities, like New York, are amalgams of other smaller cities. In New York’s case, there is so much “power” that no one person can contain it. Instead of just one avatar, then, New York has six avatars, one for each of the city’s five boroughs, plus one other, “primary” avatar that represents the city as a whole.

The birth process for New York involves each avatar’s self-discovery, and then some kind of combining together with the primary to form the city itself. This journey of discovery constitutes one of the two major plot lines of the novel.

The second major plot line involves the continued attempts by “the Enemy” to prevent the birth of New York — indeed, to corrupt the birthing itself to create a beachhead by which it can invade not only New York, but our entire universe. If the Enemy succeeds, our entire universe will be wiped out of existence.

So, no pressure.

The Enemy manifests as a woman typically dressed in white, and her principal weapons are organic-seeming, translucent white-ish tendrils that, once affixed to a person, seem to bring out the worst in them. Not in any psychopathic, mass-shooting way; rather, the tendrils seems to just encourage people to exhibit a bit more of their worst tendencies. Multiplied by the millions of people in a city, even such a small change can create feedback loops that undermine the entire community.

Sneaky.

The novel is written very well; the language is easy, informal, descriptive, yet fulsome in the imagery it conjures. The main characters are rich and likeable — even when they’re doing unlikeable things — because you believe their motivations. The backgrounds are also vivid and detailed without losing the pace, which is itself varied in a very natural way. Dialogue is natural and fits the scene. I was especially appreciative to read, in the Acknowledgements, of the extent to which Jemisin went to research various cultures to represent them appropriately.

The reader is not talked down to; if you can’t figure out what’s going on, that’s because none of the characters can figure it out either. And when you feel the penny drop, you can tell the characters felt it too. This helps the reader feel that they’re right there with the characters. This is a novel you don’t just read, but that you experience.

What I found especially appealing is the juxtaposition of the oh-so-very-real descriptions of people, places, and events of New York, with the surreal descriptions of the other place, the universe(s) (a metaverse?) in which space and time aren’t measured the same way, and where whole cities are as much single organisms as are human bodies in our universe.

Nonetheless, I found the novel infuriating because of two problems that, to me at least, felt like huge distractions — like the schmuck who opens a bag of chips during a movie.

Problem #1: Not enough is known about the Enemy.

This is a huge sticking point for me personally. It is assumed by the protagonists that the Enemy is “bad” because (a) they’ve been told that it’s bad by the avatars of São Paulo and Hong Kong, who show up to help, and (b) because it obviously wants to destroy New York. The Enemy’s rationale for wanting to prevent New York’s birth is that every time a city is born, apparently billions of other universes collapse. The Enemy is willing to destroy our universe to save a billion others.

Quite frankly, I found the fear and anger experienced by the New York avatars towards the Enemy to be largely unevidenced. Granted, the Enemy is a sanctimonious prick of the first order, but personality defects do not an enemy make.

So we have an antagonist who is white, and whose advanced and apparently overwhelming weapons are all white-ish, versus a small group of inexperienced and, as far as I can tell, definitely all non-white humans. Can it really be that simple as an analogy to colonization?

The way I read it, there remains the possibility that the Enemy represents a truly higher form of existence than what New York and humans have; that the Enemy is as evolutionarily superior to us as we are to insects. Are we justified to complain about being crushed underfoot by such a superior being when we completely ignore the insects we step on as we stroll down a sidewalk?

Considering that virtually the entire novel follows New York’s avatars in meticulous detail, I found the lack of symmetric detailing of the Enemy to be jarring. Ultimately, I have to wonder: Is the Enemy right?

Problem #2: Jingoism about New York.

Granted, the avatars — being literal manifestations of the city’s boroughs themselves — can be forgiven for exhibiting a certain bombastic jingoism about New York.

I’ve been to New York. And Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, Paris,…. Quite frankly, I didn’t see anything in New York that distinguished it from those other cities. That is to say, every big city is different from every other; and that’s what makes them the same. I’ve spent decades in Toronto and Rome. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see what makes New York so special.

Sure, some people just fit in some cities, and other people don’t. I can see Jemisin cares deeply for New York, and that’s great. I can’t help but wonder, though, if the novel wouldn’t have benefitted for a fuller explanation of how it is that one city is born and another isn’t.

And no clear criteria are given in the novel, regarding the conditions under which a city is “born”, or how individuals are selected to become its avatars. The Enemy did explain a bit of context — the multiverse and all that — to the avatars; a few sentences that at least hinted at some kind of causality for city births would have gone so very far to just make everything fit together so much better.

I offer no explanation for these problems — indeed, they might all just be a result of differences between my worldview and that of the author, in which case they’re not problems at all. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that a slightly more fulsome explanation of the whole avatar and universes thing would have helped ground the novel better.

The City We Became is apparently the start of a new series by the author. If that’s so, then I definitely want to read the next novel in the series.

And I hope you will too.