Mr. Trebay is withholding, so that by the end we are surprised at what we don’t quite know about him ... Mr. Trebay asserts that "from the end of World War II until President Gerald Ford told New York to drop dead, the hardscape of the city remained in most ways static." This is not really true: Whole neighborhoods were transformed by a postwar building boom. Yet in other ways Mr. Trebay captures the era with poetic veracity, as when he translates the raw carnality of Manhattan’s derelict Hudson River piers into a vivid chiaroscuro of longing.
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