Even in a place like New York City, eternity lasts far too long
Pete Hamill shows in 'Forever' that there's nothing easy about burying the past, no matter how good your life has been so far.
On Monday I was featured in TechCrunch's roundup of book recommendations, which included me and eight other authors' favorite summer reads.
I chose Pete Hamill’s sweeping Manhattan epic, Forever (2003), one of my favorite novels and an inspiration for my own New York-based book, Life Between Moments (2022).
There is no one more qualified than Hamill — who spent time as the top editor for both the New York Daily News and New York Post, and authored twenty-odd books about New York before dying in August 2020 — to attempt an ode of this scale to the Big Apple.
Here’s how I described the book to TechCrunch reporter Anna Heim:
[A] brilliant novel about an immigrant from Ireland who arrives to New York in the 1700s, and is quickly granted immortality under one condition: He can never leave Manhattan.
It’s a beautiful, tragic story that’s effectively a history of Manhattan through one man’s eyes, and it’s similar to ‘Forrest Gump’ in that he’s always in the right place at the right time through historical events.
Indeed, this book is many things at once. It’s a story about the Irish immigrant experience, a history of an island, a son’s mythic quest to avenge his father, a fable steeped in spirituality, a winding portrait of American oppression and triumph.
Tying it all together is the idea implied in its title: Even eternity has its limitations. Protagonist Cormac O’Connor — who is born in Ireland in 1723 and remains spry into the 21st century — must act out the tragedy of a life that doesn’t end.
It's easy to assume that more time is always better, but the way the chapters unfold remind us this isn't quite the case. O'Connor buries everyone he ever meets, and he becomes more lonely and sad as the centuries roll over.
He outlasts friends and lovers, and even his resentments melt away. He rubs shoulders with historical figures like George Washington and Duke Ellington, while trying his hand at various careers as a publisher, reporter, construction worker, and more.
The upside of having a supernatural amount of time seems to be the volume of things you can do and learn. O'Connor starts as a humble son of a blacksmith trying to do right by his family name, but he, perhaps like anyone granted that many years, evolves into a Renaissance man without equal. He learns seven languages, including Yiddish and Yoruba, and he's a skilled enough pianist to casually riff on Mozart.
He gets older without aging, and his own many lifetimes blur together and ultimately lead him to conclude that his life has “no shape at all."
“There are no straight lines,” Hamill’s protagonist says. “There is only luck and chance.”
In a separate conversation, Hamill describes this shapelessness again:
The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.
The book has its meandering parts, where the weight of Hamill's historical knowledge drags on the plot. Sometimes he seems to have hit "fast-forward" on the tape, and readers miss decades with the turn of a page (the tumultuous 20th century seems to come and go within just a few paragraphs of the 600-page tome, and for all its historical grounding there is no mention of either of the two World Wars).
However, on balance the book can only be celebrated. It's a lofty, memorable work, delivering a sense of place that can make anyone for a moment feel like a native New Yorker.
The events and faces that populate the book end up taking a back seat to Manhattan itself, which reveals itself to be the true main character — as it should be in any honest account of the city.
Yes, Manhattan is the setting, but it's what furnishes motivations and challenges and opportunities for the other characters. It evolves and modernizes alongside O'Connor such that you can't be sure which is more important at any given point of the story, and the nonstop change that defines the island is the very same that speaks so universally to individuals.
Hamill has captured something special and memorable with Forever. The whole way through I felt like I were remembering events and people I already knew, rather than reading for the first time. To that point, it was Hamill who later called New York City the "capital of nostalgia" in his 2004 memoir Downtown.
Like the smog in midtown, underground jazz clubs of the Village, and the bustling streets that define New York, the book oozes style and nostalgia.
But the miracle that is Manhattan aside, Hamill's Forever reminds us that even in the best of places, eternity lasts far too long. Maybe, the longer a single life continues and all others fade to black, the more difficult it gets to pin down why one should to keep living.
"How strange it seems," O'Connor said, "with so much gone of life and love, to still live on."
