New York Madness

by Maxwell Bodenheim

Paperback

Published January 1, 2025

About the author

Maxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist. A literary figure in Chicago, he later went to New York where he became known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international notoriety during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a 1933 novel recently re-issued by a company called Tough Poets Press. Despite the name of the publisher, it’s a prose novel. The time and place settings caught my attention, as did the blurb suggesting the novel featured the underbelly of city life. I’m often interested in novels written in the 1920s and 30s, though I’ve never been able to work out why.

This the NYC of the speakeasy, of wiseguys, good time girls, and bent cops. So far so good for my taste, but as you will see from the rating, the novel didn’t really do it for me. It comprises four interlinked stories, all of which at some point feature two young women, Alicia McCulley and Mona Farrideau, who share an apartment. We are told in the opening pages that Alicia is in love with a Joe Rosenbaum, who runs a speakeasy. The two have an on-off relationship, partly down to the fact that Joe wants Alicia to give up work and live as a housewife whereas Alicia wants to keep working and make her own way in the world. Mona has the same outlook. In that sense both women are quite “modern”. Another aspect is that both have regular sexual encounters with a variety of men. Their lifestyle seemed to fit with the 1970s as much as the 1930s, but this book was written at the time it was set. Incidentally there’s no eroticism in the novel. Couples go to bed with one another but there are no detailed descriptions – in that it is more typical of its period.

There’s too much political propaganda in this book. The author was evidently a communist and there are frequent denunciations of capitalism. In the novel, communist = good guy, the police and capitalists = bad guys. When you open the book there are extracts from some of the contemporary reviews, one of which commented “It is obvious that the author had difficulty keeping his talents as a propagandist subjugated, but none the less he has succeeded”. I would agree with the first part of that sentence, a bit less with the second part. I would accept that the political stuff doesn’t actually overwhelm the novel, but it is intrusive.

My main issue though was that I didn’t really like the author’s writing style. I found the spoken dialogue a bit stilted, particularly between Alicia and Joe. There were occasional bits of writing that I liked, mainly where he was giving a description of NYC as a place. However, he was also partial to musing about the nature of human relationships, and for me many of these sections were a bit of a word salad:

“Undoubtedly, sex was the labyrinth between animal nudeness and ethereal music, a labyrinth in which any degree of careless or wistful honesty seemed to be almost impossible.”

That was actually one of the shorter and more intelligible examples. There were others that left me feeling a bit baffled. There’s also one long section where the author gives us a description of the strange entertainments and equally strange customers of an illegal nightclub. I think it was meant to be part of the “madness” of life in NYC that forms the book’s title, but to be honest I found it boring.

In the end, I finished the book without feeling any sort of emotional connection to Alicia, Joe and Mona or any of the other characters, so I can’t say as I enjoyed it much. Credit though to the publishers for taking a risk and bringing it back. Hopefully other readers will find it more worthwhile.

[Anna Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the story and the prose, it's very flowery and beautifully descriptive. I thought the story was interesting and I was really drawn to the characters. It's a 1933 publication though, so the descriptions are packed with pejorative terms.