Greenwich's golden era
"It was like Paris in the twenties, with the difference that it was our city," critic Anatole Broyard wrote in "Kafka Was the Rage," his memoir of post-World War II Greenwich Village. "The Village was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair. We lived in the bars and on the benches of Washington Square. We shared the adventure of trying to be, starting to be, writers or painters."
These were also the days when the brilliant young sons -- and much more rarely, daughters -- of immigrants from the shtetl rolled up their sleeves and developed a brand of criticism both modern and vital. It was a tonic to the genteel tradition that held sway in the academy.
As the title of Alfred Kazin's 1995 recollection had it, "Writing Was Everything." Literature and ideas were akin to religion.
But that was a long time ago. "I always kind of cringe when I hear people talk about literary things as if they're separate from everyday life," said Rich, who's also interested in old movies and indie rock. "Some specialized, rarefied region of the mind or something."
Park, Gessen and Rich -- who as editors and novelists serve as gatekeepers and creators simultaneously -- show how the idea of the New York Intellectual has fragmented.
Rich, who wears blazers and has a mop of dark hair and delicate features that make him seem almost elfin, has the smooth manner of someone born into a tradition and trying not to take unfair advantage. (He's the Dalton-and-Yale-educated son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich.) He's the intellectual as gentleman: Rich spent a full five years writing his novel before telling anyone but his closest friends.
"I didn't want to be the guy at the party," he said from an airy TriBeCa cafe near his office, "where everyone was saying, 'When's Nat's novel coming out?' " He'd rather talk about his favorite obscure writers -- the cynical and obsessive but also compassionate Italo Svevo, the wildly comic Irishman Flann O'Brien -- or the hills of Italy, than discuss himself.
Park is the eldest of the three at 37 but also the one with the most contemporary sensibility: He's a fan of postmodern authors and what he calls "the outer edge of realism," especially slipstream -- fiction that blends literary ambition with genres like horror and fantasy. (He also writes a monthly science-fiction column, called Astral Weeks, for latimes.com.)
