Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney has been a staple of New York's literary intellectual scene for decades. Busted in New York offers readers the first collection of Pinckney's nonfiction works. The essays included in this volume tackle George W. Bush's election, the Black Lives Matter movement and more. While the experience of reading essays like "In Ferguson" and "Dreams from Obama" may now feel retrospective, the works themselves, written from within these moments and others, represent illuminating slices of socio-cultural insight from recent history.
Pinckney's style is both lyrical and journalistic, erudite and lived-in. These snapshots of writing draw on the traditions of writers like Joan Didion, invoked by "Slouching Toward Washington," and James Baldwin, who exists as a patron saint of the whole collection but is given particular reverence in "Under the Spell of James Baldwin." Of particular note is the titular essay, "Busted in New York," which explores racial profiling and urban gentrification through Pinckney's arrest after smoking pot on the Lower East Side. In this essay, as in many others, readers can get lost in the intimate touch the author brings to the issues and historic tragedies that face our contemporary world. Pinckney ends "Beyond the Fringe," an essay documenting his Bush election reactions, with a statement that feels relevant today: "it was hard to believe that the country would recover soon from the defensiveness and bitterness that I'd observed--and felt." But it is in this act of recognizing fear that the collection finds its greatest strength. Pinckney manages, brilliantly, to contextualize fear, at once to acknowledge it and to put it in its place. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor