A Hazard of New Fortunes

Although there's barely a narrator worth mentioning to get in the way with annoying moralizing platitudes, the complete lack of action on the part of what could be called the protagonist constantly makes you want to shake him up. Act! Do something! Anything! In that way the main character resembles the narrator a fair bit: both are continuously aloof while watching, always watching, what happens from afar.

Adam Gopnik's article "A Hazard of No Fortune" in the 2000 02 21 issue of the New Yorker put me on to this very enjoyable book, which he regards as a great American novel. "Instead of fussing about hunting whales or riding rafts or fighting wars...it contains something really epic: a guy in the magazine business looking for an apartment in Manhattan."

Basi March, who allegorizes the neutral or objective viewpoint of "plain good sense," lives in Boston with his wife and children, but is persuaded by a man named Fulkerton to move to New York City and start a new magazine, which is named "Every Other Week." March attempts and fails to mediate heated disputes between a millionaire capitalist and a socialist; in the meantime, riots break out across the city, which is beautifully and extensively rendered in this novel, over labor inequities.

A very good New York novel about the characters who emerge from the setting up of a literary and art fortnightly magazine sometime in the 1880's.