City Block by Waldo Frank

Too abstract for its own good

Waldo Frank was a New York novelist who also wrote nonfiction books on Latin America culture. Frank was also active in Communist causes and served as the first president of the League of American Writers, an organization of Communist authors. His politics, however, are not evident in his 1922 novel City Block. This book can only loosely be called a novel. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, it is really a collection of short stories only vaguely connected by the occasional reoccurrence of one character in another’s narrative. City Block is a descendant of urban realist literature like Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers or Ernest Poole’s The Harbor, but written in a more modernist style that calls to mind fiction of the Harlem Renaissance such as Jean Toomer’s novel Cane. The similarity to the latter is not coincidental as Frank and Toomer were friends, and Frank edited Cane, which was published in 1923.

The modernist era of early twentieth century literature was an age of experimentation that yielded its fair share of failed experiments, of which City Block is one. Frank’s writing is ostentatiously unconventional to the point of annoyance. While some of the stories are told in the first person and some in the third, all exhibit passages of stream of consciousness writing. The consciousnesses being streamed, however, all voice their thoughts in childlike five-word sentences of one-syllable each with a Mad Libs mania for choosing non-sequitur adjectives. In each chapter, Frank presents an unnecessary struggle just to discern what’s going on. In one story, for example, a wife is sick, maybe the husband is sick too, and there might be a third person living with them? Do they have a nurse in the house? Who knows. It is often difficult to tell to whom the pronouns are referring to, much less how many people are in a room or who’s speaking at any given time. Did this character die? Did those two have sex? I’m not sure, but the fact that I have to ask is a problem. I don’t see how any of this gratuitous obfuscation enhances the storytelling in any way. Another modernist conceit is the lack of a decent ending. It was fashionable to just curtail the narrative at an arbitrary point as if that could lend an air of profundity to an otherwise lackluster scene.

If this story is indicative of a New York city block, it is a deliberately depressing and hellish one indeed. In almost every story someone is dying. If there’s a marriage, it’s an unhappy one. Men visit the neighborhood prostitute or writhe in sexual frustration. There isn’t much crime on this block, but there’s a lot of mental illness. The public park is a rogues’ gallery of deformed hoboes, and “Time is a barren field with no horizon” (one of Frank’s many pithy hipster-gothic turns of phrase).

For the most part, the only indication that these stories take place in an urban setting is the book’s title. The characters seem to hardly ever leave their apartments, and New York is only mentioned twice that I can remember. This novel really doesn’t invoke much of a sense of place at all except for the final story about Italian immigrants. Unlike Winesburg, Ohio, you never really get the feeling that these plot threads take place in the same neighborhood. While reading City Block I couldn’t help thinking of some apartment-block novels that really employ urban neighborhoods and population density to full effect, such as Honoré de Balzac’s masterpiece Père Goriot (1835), Georges Perec’s amazing Life: A User’s Manual (1978), and Will Eisner’s excellent graphic novel Dropsie Avenue (1995), any of which would be a better investment of a reader’s time.
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