“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.” —Kristopher Jansma, p. 1
It’s almost every college student’s dream to move with their friends to the bright lights of New York City. Together, they could share a tiny apartment for outrageous rent, explore the sights and sounds of the big city and follow their dreams. Kristopher Jansma, assistant professor of creative writing at SUNY New Paltz, has written a stunning new novel on exactly that. In Why We Came to the City, Jansma writes about five friends who attempt to figure out their lives as they move into adulthood in 2008, when the economy is on the brink of financial collapse. It doesn’t hit the group yet that their lives are on the verge of collapse, too.
This isn’t just a book about the city. Jansma’s main focus is what happens when someone young, brilliant, and seemingly invincible is diagnosed with cancer. Irene, the artist of the group, finds that she has a small lump under her eye. In her early twenties, she is diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. This serves as a devastating blow to what the friends know as reality. They are no longer just trying to make it in the city, but rather, trying to figure out how to cope with something as debilitating as cancer.
Jansma’s greatest accomplishment in this novel is the idea that cancer doesn’t stop time. Unlike other books about cancer, where the illness becomes the main focus, the characters in Jansma’s novel still continue their lives. They have jobs, friends, and commitments that can’t be put on hold; they have to figure out how to juggle eating dinner and getting for a chemotherapy appointment. The friends see their lives slowly begin to change, and Jansma does an excellent job of noting the passage of time (he breaks the chapters up into months, while giving each of the characters their own narrative).
The characters themselves are well drawn out and leap off the page. George, an astronomer dating Sara, struggles with his work and alcoholism. Sara is a journalist, unflappable and type-A. Jacob is a “poet” who, by the time Irene is diagnosed with cancer, has stopped writing. He works at a mental hospital with troubled teens and is the loudest and funniest of the group, as well as the best written character. Irene is a beautiful and mysterious artist that doesn’t seem to let anyone too close, including the reader. On the outskirts of this tightly knit group is William Cho, who works in finance until the collapse of the economy and later falls in love with Irene. Most importantly, each of these characters are united by their love for one another and their love for their city.
This is a novel about friendship, grief, and monumental change. It is a fabulous work full of rich detail, to the point where the reader can imagine themself sitting there with the five friends, experiencing their wide range of emotions. Each of them deal with Irene’s diagnosis in their own way, which makes their narratives remarkably realistic. Jansma makes the city come alive with his brilliant world building, and makes it easy to wish you lived there (despite sky high rents, traffic, and the bed bugs). But that isn’t what this novel is about—surprisingly, Why We Came to the City is more about what is lost in the process of leaving. Jansma has created a narrative that will stay with the reader even after they’ve closed the book, whether it be on the subway, by the Gunk at SUNY New Paltz, or right before class starts.