The Subway Stops at Bryant Park

March 15, 2017
A slim debut collection of stories that deftly slip into the lives of everyday New Yorkers.Before it became the green-grassed oasis that it is today--complete with a skating rink and afternoon piano music--Bryant Park was crime-infested, run-down, and frequented by the less palatable denizens of the city. In this collection's first story, -Omeer's Mangoes,- an Iranian doorman whose building borders the park witnesses the beginnings of its gentrification firsthand: -They were planning on lowering the park to ground level. Astonishing. Impossible....'If it's not at eye level, ' Angelo explained to him, 'the police can't look in. It's like a secret world where all sorts of things can happen. You don't want to know.' - But in the majority of Moss' stories, which are set post-renovation, Bryant Park remains precisely that: a private, nestled microcosm of the city in which the vividly mundane scenes of lives play out among the plane trees. In the gorgeously nuanced -Beautiful Mom,- a college-age woman is reunited with her stunning mother near the park's -aggressively plain- Gertrude Stein statue, throwing into sharp relief both the mother's effervescence and the narrator's thrumming longing for her ultimately out-of-reach love. -Dubonnet- features an elderly widow who, encased in paranoia and rigidity, spurns her son's family that lives with her--until the Bach playing at the park releases untapped sorrow from her husband's death, leading her to view her family and surroundings in a new light. Moss' first-person portrayal of the crotchety woman, who wraps her porcelain figurines in cellophane whenever she journeys to the park and nurses an irrational dislike for her daughter-in-law---I don't even like to say her name (which is Cynthia)---is both funny and tender, one of the collection's strengths. -Dad Died,- which embodies the collection's preoccupation with parental death, is more a melancholy love letter than story; it overshadows -Next Time,- a somewhat unfocused account of a woman who must settle her father's estate that never develops its own voice and seems more a synthesis of thematic elements from earlier, more distinct stories. But overall, Moss' ability to probe the rich, complicated depths of those the city views as ordinary--its doormen, library workers, waitresses, and bench-sitters--and capture the profound currents of emotion found in the everyday animates this collection and makes it uniquely illuminating. Definitely worth reading.

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