Never that strong on literary form, letting his talents for physical detail, characterization, and good talk carry him through, Howells turned this weakness into a virtue: This time he seemed willing to trust his stubborn resistance to the conventions of romantic fiction, as an experiment. While he had no shortage of European models for city novels (Balzac, Dickens, Perez Galdos, Dostoevsky), he had virtually no American precedents from which to draw. Besides, New York was a new kind of city, one without the history and social stratifications of a European metropolis.

 

Part one, the first six chapters, is the justly celebrated section on the Marches’ house hunting. Anyone who has ever searched for an apartment in New York cannot help smiling at how unchanged the dynamic is, how brilliantly Howells caught the status strivings and indignities and endless scaling downward of expectations to fit the market realities. It is a delicious tour de force, a novella of sorts embedded inside the larger novel, allowing the reader to make initial forays into the confusing city in protective company. The fact that the Marches were already known to many readers through Howells’ earlier novel Their Wedding Journey shows the author’s own need to rely on a familiar element when exploring material of such larger sweep and inclusiveness. Then, too, there would be striking opportunities for comparison: Recall how smugly the Marches had reacted to New York in the earlier book. Now, not only had New York changed—coming into its own by the 1880s to become the city we now know, with its population of millions, shopping emporia, traffic problems, nervous pulse, and the Brooklyn Bridge knitting it together—but the couple had changed too. The intensely sympathetic Basil is no longer the promising young poet who had gone into insurance almost as a lark, but the beaten-down paterfamilias who had squandered his talents in the wrong profession and now has one more chance to salvage his life. “He was not master of himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved”—could a better definition be made of the family man? Isabel March was still charming in her ability to commandeer the moral high ground, though, to her husband, she had begun “hardening into traits of middle age, which were very like those of less interesting elder women.”

As much as this first section is about house hunting, then, it is also a study of aging within a marriage, the old till-death-do-you-part kind of marriage, whose dynamic Howells saw as founded no longer on passion but on “forbearance.” Here are analyzed to perfection the tics of irritation and blame, the consignment of mutually dependent roles, the seesaw of moods (“his spirits began to rise and hers to sink”), and the function of forgiveness in any long-enduring union:

She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did, he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.... There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.

 

Alfred Kazin declared that “Howells was the first great domestic novelist of American life.” We have come a long way from the male isolates of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville; in the chatter or the silences between Isabel and Basil, we hear early rumblings of John Cheever’s and John Updike’s tragicomic, fretting couples.

Having given us our fill of this dyadic bond, Howells is ready to hurl us into other, competing centers of interest: subplots that involve the artists Alma Leighton and Angus Beaton; the millionaire Dryfoos and his transplanted provincial family adrift in New York; the “do-gooder” society girl, Margaret Vance; the old German radical, Lindau; Colonel Woodburn, a Southerner still defending slavery, and his more practical daughter, who falls in love with the publisher, Fulkerson; and of course, the thing that ties them all together, the new magazine, Every Other Week.

By 1890 the age of publicity had arrived, and New York was already established as the nation’s media capital. The enterprising, slippery Fulkerson embodies this religion of publicity, speaking a huckster’s lingo that might be early Madison Avenue (“the Won’t-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlightened man, woman, and child in this vast city”). It is Fulkerson who asserts that Americans find “no subject so fascinating... as life in New York City.” As if bearing this out, the novel itself sold twice as well as any of Howells’ others. When an interviewer asked him to what he attributed this, he replied: “Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York: The public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston.”

Like a precursor of The New Yorker, Every Other Week seeks to be light and informative, and to catch the Gotham spirit, mainly for readers outside the city limits. Howells, who knew plenty about getting out a magazine, shrewdly draws on insider detail about cover designs meant to “ensnare the heedless and captivate the fastidious,” or why first issues are always so tentative and unrepresentative. The snappy, sometimes cynical give-and-take of the magazine staff may be the first fictional representation of that epigrammatic tartness which would become the staple of New York wit.

The magazine provides us with a milieu, a workplace. But always, before long, the reader is back on the streets with March, walking about opportunistically, seeking materials for a series of urban sketches the publisher wants him to write. The vogue for the urban sketch was then at its height: Newspapers routinely featured them; they were the glue of the “Sun and Shadow”—type New York guidebooks that promised to expose the secrets of the city; and aspiring writers often earned their first paychecks doing them. The irony is that March, entranced and appalled everywhere he looks, keeps putting off writing the series because he can’t seem to find the right distance or perspective, wanting first to “philosophize” the material—that is, figure out what to make of all this mass of detail—and finally gives up, whereas Howells pulled it off twice: first, in the walking-around sections of the novel, and second, in a group of pieces later reprinted in his 1896 essay collection, Impressions and Experiences. Howells was working out in essay form some of the same motifs that he would explore fictively in A Hazard: There are, for instance, essays on “New York Streets” and “Glimpses of Central Park,” and “An East-Side Ramble,” which takes him into the slums.

People-watching had become the preferred sport of New York. Part of the interest came from eyeing the immigrant masses whose colorful clothing and exotic physical gestures were a growing part of the street scene. While many nativist, English-descended New York families expressed alarm at these foreigners gabbling away in strange tongues and felt their city being taken away from them, Howells, who had traveled on the Continent, seemed energized by the Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and Germans and Russian Jews. (This was the same Howells, remember, who had welcomed the literary contributions of the Yiddish writer Abraham Cahan, the black poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the Spanish novelist A. Palacio Valdes).

“March liked the swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in them.” For the Marches, “the chief pleasure of their life in New York was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once tasted, can never be forgotten.” They visit Castle Garden in the Battery, where “the emigrants first set foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble guests.” Compare this benevolent attitude to Henry James’s dismay, in The American Scene (1910), at the “ingurgitation” of “the inconceivable alien” hordes streaming into Ellis Island.

In the decades from 1880 to 1920, New York had become a huge magnet both to foreigners and to Americans from other parts, creating a new kind of urban experiment. For the moment, it was a city of strangers looking for a leg up. “He came to New York because he couldn’t help it—like the rest of us. I never know whether that’s a compliment to New York or not,” one character in the novel says. Mrs.