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68 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mythical New York, December 15, 1999
This review is from: Up in the Old Hotel (Paperback)
Joseph Mitchell may be the best writer ever to have worked on the 'New Yorker' staff (the other contenders would include Edmund Wilson and A. J. Liebling). Every story in this long book is worth reading, and re-reading; the later pieces, from 'The Bottom of the Harbour' and especially 'Joe Gould's Secret' are tours-de-force of reporting. Mitchell invests his characters with so much life that they take on almost mythical proportions, without ever sacrificing their humanity. Although Mitchell often chose to write about people on the margins of society -- a homeless beggar like Joe Gould, a bearded lady, the hard-drinking Hugh Flood -- he never did so in a patronising manner. He admires these people not because of their struggles or hard lives, but despite them: he sees them, and makes us see them, as fellow human beings, not social welfare cases. Mitchell freely admits that listening to Joe Gould was a strain, and that Gould could be, like people who own houses and property and know where their next meal is coming from, selfish and mean-spirited; far from making Gould unattractive, this serves to make him come alive - homeless people don't become plaster saints, and it's silly to pretend otherwise. A key component in these stories is Mitchell's own persona, which is much like his prose style: quiet, unassertive, but immensely attractive. It is a great pity that, for whatever reason, Mitchell fell silent for the last thirty years of his life; but any sadness can be assuaged by dipping back into 'Up in the Old Hotel', where Mitchell's brilliant handling of detail and character -- and his shapely way with the structure of a profile, always dovetailing to a perfect close -- can be sampled time and again.
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36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous, January 25, 1998
This review is from: Up in the Old Hotel (Paperback)
While strolling in Soho, a friend dragged me by the ear into a small bookshop, bought this book for me and told me I had to read it. This kind of situation seldom works out for the best -- so many people have pressed mediocre books into my hands over the years, and I have slogged through them out of guilt. This volume hooked me from the start -- I very nearly missed by plane back home that day, as I became so deeply engrossed in it. Mitchell somehow managed to hold on to a wide-eyed wonder and appreciation for all things human throughout his long life. To read this book is to understand that below the surface of things -- old abandoned hotels, the oysters on one's plate, the raving lunatic on the street corner -- is a complex, moving, eloquent, fascinating story, available to anyone who would invest the necessary time, effort and love to extract it. Few of us can summon the necessary energy, but Mitchell could. I can't think of anyone who would fail to be interested in these stories, but New Yorkers past and present should, in particular, find this book fascinating.
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50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
human comedy/mystery, October 6, 2000
This review is from: Up in the Old Hotel (Paperback)
One day, it would have to have been the very early 70's, we were in the car with my grandfather, driving through the Bowery, and he pointed out the window at one of the derelicts and casually mentioned : I went to school with him. School, in this case, was Harvard Law School, back when that still meant something. He said that the guy had fallen on hard times and had refused repeated offers of help, so we drove on and he went along his merry, though entirely demented, way. Had this occurred just a few years earlier, that bum might well have been Joe Gould, whom Joseph Mitchell immortalized in the pages of The New Yorker. Up in the Old Hotel is a collection of Mitchell's otherwise hard to find essays, in which he lovingly describes haunts like the Fulton Fish Market and McSorley's, one of the last bars in America to admit women, and profiles various fisherfolk and colorful denizens of New York City's nether regions, most famously, Joe Gould, the bohemian character with whom he is inevitably and eternally linked. Mitchell first wrote about Gould in 1942, in a piece called, Professor Sea Gull. Mitchell's great skill as a writer was to let his subjects seemingly speak for themselves, but to in fact render their words in compulsively readable fashion. This works particularly effectively with Joe Gould who was a fountain of words anyway. The story relates how Gould, a Harvard grad, subsists on practically no money (one of his tricks is to make a soup out of the ketchup in restaurants), his propensity for making a spectacle of himself as he starts flapping his arms and declaiming poetry in the "language" of sea gulls, and his life's work, the nine million word Oral History of Our Time. Within the pages of hundreds of composition books, of the kind we used to use in school, Gould claimed to be writing a history of the world in the form of the conversations of ordinary people as he heard them speaking every day ""What people say is history." It was this idea that beguiled Mitchell and his readers, made Gould into a minor celebrity, and ultimately formed a tragicomic link to Mitchell's own career. You see, Mitchell gradually came to suspect that Gould's magnum opus did not really exist. When, upon Gould's death, Mitchell went in search of the Oral History and could find only a few garbled fragments, he decided, with some qualms, to expose the hoax that he had such played a central role in propagating. The result was the elegaiac Joe Gould's Secret which was written in 1964 and proved to be the last piece Joseph Mitchell ever published. For the next thirty years he showed up at The New Yorker every day, went into his office and seemed to work, but never produced a word. He became legendary for his "writer's block," a staple figure in the many novels featuring a New Yorker like magazine, such as Bright Lights, Big City. Rumor had it that he was emulating his hero James Joyce and writing a Ulysses-type novel set in the New York he knew so well. But like Joe Gould, his masterwork does not appear to have been committed to paper. There are many fine essays in the book, but you really should, at least, read these two Joe Gould profiles. They stand as masterpieces of the journalist's art on their own, but when Mitchell's subsequent problems are taken into account and the eerie parallels become clear, these stories become transcendent and genuinely haunting. GRADE : A+
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