Michael’s first book, BrotherHoods, was the story of Nico and Raoul, two Dominican brothers from Inwood. A close portrait of their lives and world, the book was a narrative of thwarted ambition, of failure. For Michael it was the consequence of one, too. All through his first year in America, as he’d written reports on parties, observational pieces about the Super Bowl, travel articles on the Hudson Valley painters, Michael had harboured aspirations of becoming a novelist. But fiction had continued to elude him. For reasons he never fathomed, regardless of how many hours he spent at his desk, or in how many cafés he made notes, his imagination kept falling short at the border of the invented. The prose of the writers he admired — Salter, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Atwood — remained unattainable to him. He could register their effect when he read them, he could see how their novels and stories worked, how their moving parts fitted together. But like the engineer skilled at dismantling a plane’s engine, and yet unable to make it fly, Michael found his own words remained stubbornly grounded on the page.
Michael had been convinced that New York would unlock the novel he’d failed to write in London. The Hudson gleaming magnesium of a morning; the taillight rivers on Lexington and Third; the city’s scale, at once intimate and grand. Manhattan already felt like a novel to him, as if all he’d have to do was take dictation from its streets. But he’d been wrong, which is why halfway through his second year of living in the city, in the wake of his failure with fiction, Michael started splicing the taste of it into his journalism instead.
He began on his own doorstep, telling the story of Ali, the Armenian deli owner on the corner of his block, from his early-morning washing of the sidewalk to his midnight serving of condoms and chewing gum to coked-up SoHo models. When this piece was taken by The Atlantic, the editor asked him for another. So Michael moved his attention across the street to Marilia, the black mother of six who’d volunteered at the school crossing every morning and evening for the last twenty years. Through Marilia he’d gained an introduction into the school itself, where he’d found his next subject in its harrowed headmaster, shadowing him as he juggled the timetable, staff shortages, gun detection, and the demands of downtown parents.
In researching these early stories, Michael found his Englishness opened doors for him. Not in institutions, but in people. There was, in all his subjects, an assumption of his integrity, drawn, he supposed, from associations with the BBC and films by Merchant Ivory. Combined with his natural manner — a calm patience laced with pressing curiosity — this cultural assumption allowed Michael to get close quickly. The people he interviewed trusted him, and in return he took their trust seriously, listening, recording, and taking notes as they talked; trying, as best as he could, to see the city through their eyes and feel it through their skin.
With every story he took on, from the Central Park millionaire to the street-sleeper in the Bronx, Michael’s technique was immersive. His initial approach was time: the willingness to spend it, to be there and observe at even the most mundane of events until, despite his height and his accent, people began to forget his presence. He took to cutting hundreds of strips of white card, slender enough to fit into the inside pocket of his jacket. These, he found, were less obtrusive than a notebook and somehow less threatening, too, as if what he wrote on them wasn’t being recorded but merely jotted down and would, like any other scrap of paper, not be around for long.
When, after months of such research, Michael felt he’d seen and heard enough — and it was always a feeling more than a knowing, a sense at the edges of his vision — he would leave his subjects’ lives as suddenly as he’d entered them. Taking their stories to his desk in his SoHo apartment, he’d immerse himself again, this time borrowing a novelistic style to disappear himself not just from his subjects’ lives, but also from the paragraphs he wrote about them. Even though he’d been there at their sides when the events he described happened — when the health inspector had seen a rat, when a kid attacked his maths teacher, when the millionaire’s dog was put down — in the finished published piece, Michael was never there. Just the characters remained, living their lives in third person through the hours of the city as if through the pages of a novel.
His style became the antithesis of Gonzo journalism, an eradication of the writer in the writing. A disappearing act of saturation that was informed by the immersive nature of his research, but unfettered, too, by direct experience. So although he hadn’t been with them, Michael still described Ali waking in bed, Marilia singing in the shower, or the way the millionaire picked up his coffee at a morning meeting in Brazil. Such moments, although unseen by Michael, were written from what he’d learnt about his subjects at other times, in other places, upon not just what he knew was true, but also what he knew to be true. And this is what he’d hoped to achieve in those early New York stories: to find a way of using the freedoms of descriptive fiction to make the real lives he wrote about even more real.
By the time Michael met Nico and Raoul he’d already begun looking for a subject through which to extend his writing from the pages of a magazine to the pages of a book. His desire to be an author hadn’t ebbed when he turned his back on a novel. With a clutch of respected pieces under his belt, and a cast of characters rendered through his immersive style, he was ready to try again.
It was a policeman who’d put Michael in touch with Nico and Raoul. They were chatting outside the subway entrance on Broadway and 201st, a couple of take-out coffees steaming in their hands. It was February and smudged banks of snow still bordered the street. A flat winter light fell upon the storefronts. Men and women commuted to work in padded coats, wearing gloves and hats made for the mountains.
Michael had travelled up to Inwood Hill Park that morning to see the site where Dutch traders first bought Manhattan, trading it from the Lenape Indians for a bag of trinkets worth twenty-four dollars. He’d only recently got to know the area north of Washington Heights, but its rawness had already got under his skin. The street theatre he’d discovered up there in the blocks off Inwood, Dyckman, and Broadway seemed more varied than that a hundred blocks south, more explicitly immigrant in its nature. Dominican men played dominoes outside O’Grady’s, The Gael Bar, The Old Brigade Pub, their walls still painted with shamrocks and IRA flags. Dark-windowed Yukons throbbed with Reggaeton at the stoplights. Puerto Rican drag queens drank cocktails in the salsa clubs, youths in thug nighties to their knees catcalling them from the corners. Farther off, in the park itself, rangy black kids surged between the hoops of basketball courts while Italian grandfathers watched Little League baseball, the hollow punts of a Mexican soccer game filtering up from the field below.
Up there, above 200th, as he’d wandered the streets, Michael had felt he was within touching distance of Manhattan’s original desire. That whatever had driven those Dutch traders could still be tasted in the air, and unlike farther south in the city, where origin had been diluted by money, the island’s history of immigrant fuel was still on display. Each community he saw up there — the Dominicans, the Mexicans, the Irish, the African — seemed like the rings of a tree to him, ethnic watermarks of the island’s growth and change.
Michael had got talking to the policeman at a coffee stand on the edge of the park. As they’d stirred in their sugars he’d asked him if he’d seen much change in the neighbourhood. The cop had laughed, shaking his head. “Oh, man,” he’d said. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Always changin’ up here.” They’d carried on talking as they’d strolled back towards his position at the subway entrance, Michael asking him if they got much trouble in the area. The cop had shrugged. “Some,” he’d said. “Mostly drugs, domestics.” Then, blowing on his coffee and stamping his feet, he’d told Michael about “a couple of punks,” two Dominican brothers who’d walked the length of Arden at four in the morning the night before, smashing the roadside window of every car. They’d left the street thick with alarm sirens, shirtless men shouting down at the sidewalks from tall apartment blocks swirling with car lights.