20 Questions for Take Five

June 13, 2009
Lost in the labyrinth of Take Five--ok, it's not so much a labyrinth as a cluttered attic--I can't help but try to classify the thing. Where would I shelve this brick if there was no convenient catch-all like the fiction aisle? What category would be named in its honor? Staring around this bookstore I search for guidance. I know it is a novel set in New York, so we can start from there. But what kind of New York book is it?

The next few blog posts--perhaps with the aid of my anonymous ill-wisher and erstwhile competitor-in-the-race-to-finish-Take-Five--will narrow down that answer through elimination.

Is it a NY gardening book?
The fictional Van Lynxx estate harbors orchards and rose gardens, but this ancient Queens patroonship has fallen into shabby disrepair by the novel's opening. The end of the family line, Simon Lynxx, wakes up to find his grounds a pastoral nightmare. Slums circle the electrified perimeter, their residents using the manor's backyard as a convenient garbage chute and target practice. Even the lawn chairs get flattened by uninvited suicides leaping off next door rooftops: "He sat like Rodin's thinker, but the head was set on knees as if his torso had been edited out. The chair legs splayed like a young colt's first walking."

Unfortunately this disqualifies it alongside The City Gardener, a more worthy candidate for this category. "An indispensable guide to successful gardening in the city," author Philip Truex sought to give nature back to urbanites, especially those high rise New Yorkers coping with "problems peculiar to the city."

However, the problems he refers to are not the riots, racial tension, and sensational crime unfolding at street level in 1964 when the book was published. Truex, whose lineage stretched back to Dutch New Amsterdam (with a Walloon ancestor who farmed a patch near the South Street Seaport), favors the terrace set. As Kew Gardeners ignored Kitty Genovese's screams, Truax warned his penthousers not of knife-wielding lunatics but of excessive shade cast by balcony awnings. Our whiskey barrels (seen up top in an aerial view) would warrant disapproval for the squash we planted inside; Truax felt oak tubs were better suited to trees and large shrubs. But he'd applaud its placement "to break up the monotony of a long row of boxes." Perhaps that monotonous row was the source of violent outbreaks in Harlem and Bed-Stuy throughout the summer of '64.

So, since D. Keith Mano provides no proscriptive advice on ornamental vegetables and window ledge flowers, or his Van Lynxx Manor no sufficient sunlight or oasis for birds, we officially eliminate Take Five as a roman-a-vert.

Next up: Is Take Five a NY Porn Memoir?
--Peter Miller