The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a
textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded
Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving."
Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling
memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at
the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a
story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same
mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit.
Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet
stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger
imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the
dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into
the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.
Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the
territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped
up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in
which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the
life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the
lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe
and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of
detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York
Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the
city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State
Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically
with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from
me."
As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case.
Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates
one on this night--the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in
the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of
all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on
memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a
novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.
