A single neighborhood can be a microcosm of a city at the breaking point, showing how disparate lives brush up against one another, exposing the fault lines of the present moment, how perhaps our starkest divide is between those who own property and those who can’t.
In my novel, Property, the residents of an uneasily gentrifying Toronto neighborhood cross paths over the course of a single day. Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, frets about her isolated son, locked in his room upstairs. Her fellow parent and unlikely friend Maddy, a failed actress, obsesses over her missed opportunities and her marriage. Next door, Ilya, a young construction worker grappling with the aftermath of a terrible industrial accident, listens to their conversations as he struggles with the flooding basement of a derelict house. An old woman watches the street through the gap in her curtains. A lonely man wanders. Children observe adults without the adults noticing. Along the network of interlocking streets, small tensions and seemingly inconsequential exchanges accumulate, until tragedy strikes—by evening, someone has died. The novel looks at the complex and contradictory life of cities, the thorniness of class and privilege, how neighborhoods shift: who gets priced out of the places they’ve made their lives in and how we struggle to understand the spaces we share.
This is a list of some of my favorite books that are situated in the local and the question of money, that ponder the apparently unsolvable problem of how to understand the lives that run close to our own, and how we fail to, even with the best intentions.
Howards End by E. M. Forster
This novel, published in 1910, remains the model (with a few significant reservations) for how to write about the collisions of opposites and the way that the well-meant interference of the haves on behalf of the have-nots can destroy a life. The Schlegel sisters, cultured and idealistic, tangle with the Wilcox family, who believe in money and the vigorous defense of convention. The families become directly and indirectly involved with Leonard Bast, an impoverished bank clerk who dreams of a wider life. Tragedy and comedy unfold from there, always returning to what it means to have a house and what our houses mean to us, including those of us for whom a house is a rented basement we might not afford to keep. I reread this book every few years, and my wife and I have only connect engraved on our wedding rings.
Wellwater by Karen Solie
This collection feels like proof that Solie is not only one of the finest living poets in North America, but also one of the finest in the world. Solie commands the telling detail, the small thing that breaks apart through close observation. The poet considers rats, pesticides, housing prices, the catastrophic increases in rent and the widening gaps in Toronto, where Solie and I both live. She tells what she sees, bluntly incredulous at her continued yet increasingly precarious life in a city where some people buy nine dollar loaves of artisanal bread while their neighbors can’t afford basic groceries, where if you don’t already own a house, you will never own one. Wellwater is a masterpiece for the present moment.
The Natural Hustle by Eva H. D.
In this collection, the poet walks the streets of Brooklyn, alone and with others, talking, arguing, looking closer, looking away. Relentlessly caustic, she plucks associations out of the air, the accidents and the darknesses of history compressed inside her brain and simultaneously present in the cacophony around her. The Natural Hustle is like walking along a frenetic and busy and interesting city street in the evening, in an unstable summer heat. Noticing the world coming at you in pieces, the juxtaposition of beauty and violence, the small saving grace of a place setting on a restaurant patio or a vivid shade or the way that personal history and the history of a place can collide in the mind so everything is linked, just for a moment. These poems notice the tension and catastrophic potential in every interaction, in a city in which obscene wealth sits uneasily alongside deep poverty.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
This book is explicitly a reworking of Howards End, with the Schlegel sisters represented by the interracial Belsey family, of impeccable and slightly smug left wing politics, who are thrown into confusion when the eldest son becomes a born-again Christian and falls under the spell of the Kipps family, conservative British-Trinidadians. The Belseys become involved with Carl, a working-class Black man, whom they treat as a symbol of social injustice. As in Howards End, the book chews on class and friendship across what seems (and sometimes is) unbridgeable distance, what a house means, and how our lives are shaped by property and place, even as we struggle in good faith with questions of goodness or justice. It is also a very funny book, both a riff on a beloved classic and an achievement all of its own.
The Incident Report by Martha Baillie
A lonely Toronto librarian, mulling over her childhood, her father, and the strangers she interacts with every day, fills out a series of numbered “incident reports,” which make up the novel. Behind her desk, she is at once on display and erased, observing the people who have come to the library for assistance, for company, and for shelter. This is a book about cities, about the people the city renders invisible, about libraries as a place of refuge even as other institutions fall apart. Each night, the librarian goes home to her small apartment, lost in the city. Each day, she tries to help as best she can, encountering people no one else will help. This is a quietly radical experimental novel about people who are in danger of displacement and disappearance. And it’s a love story too.
Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes
This book tells the story of an elderly widow in Toronto’s Chinatown/Kensington Market neighborhood. At a loss after the death of her husband, she drifts through the streets, collecting cans, watched by her neighbors, encountering friendliness, hostility, and sometimes incomprehension, as if she were already a ghost. A young and untrustworthy real estate agent hopes she will sell her house. An entitled white woman menaces her with a garden hose and treats her as less than human. She tries to get a job, but no one wants to hire an old woman. She moves through memories of her husband, of migration, of meals she’s cooked, of the house she’s lived in and now might not be able to keep. Christina Wong’s meticulously observed narration is amplified by exquisite pen and ink drawings by artist Daniel Innes, showing the streets the old woman walks, in the past and in the present. A portrait of a city in flux, a beloved neighborhood rendered unrecognizable by the real estate boom, and a life in danger of slipping away unseen.
The Lodgers by Holly Pester
This book convinced me that we are on the brink of a new literary form: the novel about precarious housing, and rent. A woman returns to her hometown to live in a dingy, impersonal sublet. She’s on all kinds of edges: in a state of suspension, thinking about the space she’s in that will never be hers, the rented room she’s just left behind in another place, now occupied by someone else, awaiting a reunion with her difficult mother, awaiting a visit from the landlord, awaiting the arrival of an unknown roommate. And she’s on the literal edge of falling off the map, as the lives of the renting class become more tenuous. This is a book about the impossibility of putting down roots when you never know how long you will be able to stay.