The Square Table

Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler

Reviewed by Dina Di Maio

I read reviews of David Schickler’s book, Kissing in Manhattan, how it’s funny and dark and about New York and the loneliness in New York and the search for someone. I read that he had published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope, which I hadn’t known when I picked up the book. Oddly enough, I didn’t pick up the book because I knew about its author or because it had "national bestseller" written on top. No, I picked it up because of the title and a memory of a kiss on a street near Union Square.

The story revolves around characters who are interconnected, their connection being an apartment called the Preemption and their search for love, acceptance, oneness with another human being. After reading the first story, "Checkers and Donna," about a woman set up on a blind date with a real jerk, I thought I wouldn’t like this book. The second story, "Jacob’s Bath," about a husband and wife who share an unusual bathing ritual, seems somewhat out of place. Other characters include James Branch, who meets a mysterious stranger who gives him opals to give a woman he will meet in the future; Patrick Rigg, whose brother died an unusual death now, to find happiness, ties naked women up; and Douglas Kerchek, a lonely teacher who gets an unusual proposal from a student. The common thread among these characters and others in the book is a loneliness, a search for someone to complete their lives or give their lives meaning.

Besides this search for love, I see New York and its underbelly, as another theme in this book. If you’ve lived in New York, the scenes and characters in Schickler’s book echo real life with a twist. A word that’s used in the book and that Schickler uses in an interview is "absurd." To me, that sums up the book. It’s an absurd take on life, relationships, and New York City. Reading about Rigg’s parties and the miscellaneous people invited conjures memories of various New York parties with various people hearing various blah, blah, blah stories. As Joan Didion wrote, "I had already met them, always." No doubt there is a dark undercurrent in this book with a surreal twist. It’s a subconscious mind’s construction of New York.

I read that Schickler got an MFA in writing at Columbia (the other creative writing program in NYC). I read that Schickler loved New York but didn’t have money and had to leave. A common story. Something I went through and many of my friends did also. Just read the missed connections on craigslist new york and you’ll see another New York farewell. New York has a way of showing you the best of what you are capable of, the best that there is in the world, the true happiness that can exist, and in one fell swoop, it has the power to slap you, devalue you, debase you, de-whatever you. It spawns its own love-hate relationship with you. It makes you love it and it makes you hate it. I believe, like most of us who go there, that Schickler loved it, and I believe that after New York had its way with him, he hated it too. The darkness in the book is all too evident, especially in Rigg’s character. The love, the goodness, is there in James Branch. Perhaps Schickler’s alter ego? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but there is redemption, there is forgiveness, there is a reason for putting up with the love-hate relationship that one has with New York City in the last line of the book. In that last line, Branch explains what New York has been and is to him, it is a search for self and a search for validation, acceptance from another, it is love.