Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 July 20 • Wednesday

Before reading J. G. Ballard's The Drought (1964, a.k.a. The Burning World), I thought it might be amusing to read Charles Einstein's novel The Day New York Went Dry, published the same year.

(Charles Einstein's Wiretap! was discussed briefly here on this site a couple of years ago.)

The Day New York Went Dry doesn't have much to do with its front or back cover. It's actually a light social satire, practically a comedy of manners. Don Marlowe is a young man who works for the World News wire service. New York Congressman Bert Arnold is worried about how a severe drought might end up leaving reservoirs unable to keep up with New York City's water use.

Arnold gets Marlowe to work for him, gathering information, talking to people, going places and doing things that a public servant couldn't. A romance develops between Don and the Congressman's daughter, Bess.

The other main character is an air-headed member of the jet set, DeLesseps Martineaux III, Delly to his friends. Delly is interested mostly in drinking and sex but manages to be an important part of the story, even meeting with the President of the United States at one point.

The book is divided into parts and chapters with names that suggest its light comic tone: "Autumn in New York", "In Vain the Rains Fall Mainly in White Plains", "West Side Story", "West Side Story (First Reprise)" and so on.

Several pages are devoted to technical explanations of how New York City ends up running out of water. What the book avoids almost entirely is what it's actually like in New York City as water runs out. There are a few snapshots of the residents of a housing project called Sterling Homes, but the people there, like the other characters in the book, focus on political maneuvering.

(One of the Sterling Homes inhabitants is sacrificed to introduce a cholera epidemic to the plot but this potentially momentous development is dismissed as quickly as it appears and doesn't affect the story much at all.)

Almost everything involves politics of one kind or another, and the silliness and selfishness of the players at times recall Yes, Minister in substance if not in style. The writing is practically non-stop banter of one kind or another, and Einstein can be witty.

Introducing a large advertising firm that Marlowe and Arnold hope will convince people to use less water—the ad execs come up with the idea of a Smokey the Bear-type character, Arthur the Otter—Einstein casually mentions that the company "had become, through that aboriginal form of human dishonesty known as the merger, the second largest advertising agency in the United States".

Consider also our introduction to Sterling Homes. "It was a tribute to the municipal thinking of postwar America, which said that tumbledown old homes, infested by rats and garbage, should be replaced by tumbledown new homes, infested by rats and garbage. The rats and garbage were not in the blueprints, but they got there shortly after the building inspectors."

There are also at least two chapters which consist of mail received by Congressman Arnold, a sampling that includes letters from bigots, crackpots, aggrieved constituents and political insiders.

There are also some interesting diversions, one about a blackjack system (only possible under obsolete rules) and another about how to profit by borrowing money to pay taxes.

The first line is "Something, equally secular and subliminal, made the class of Amherst '55 get married in hotels instead of churches; and few reflected this more acutely than DeLesseps Martineaux III, who in his eight-plus years since graduation had attended an endless panorama of hotel weddings, two of them his own".

It's not a bad read but it's not as good as the painting on the front cover.