Sarah Ditum

The man who made Manhattan: The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, reviewed

Lee’s novel follows the life of Andrew Haswell Green in reverse — from his puzzling murder to his heyday as New York’s creative genius

Andrew Haswell Green, the subject of Jonathan Lee’s novel. [Alamy]

What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive to create their own version of a place, their own versions of themselves; the desires of great men, whose improvements are partly intended to secure a better life for their less fortunate fellows, and partly a plea for their own immortality. This is a novel about all three, disguised as one about Andrew Haswell Green. According to one of the few memorials to him still standing, he was the ‘Directing Genius of Central Park in its Formative Period’ and ‘Father of Greater New York’. He was behind the consolidation of the five boroughs, as well as the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, the New York Public Library and the Bronx Zoo.

Yet Green’s reputation is remarkably thin compared with his achievements. The marble lettering of that memorial is, notes Jonathan Lee, covered in bird shit — an injustice of history and also an opportunity for fiction. Into the gap where thebiographical Green would be, Lee pours The Great Mistake.

It begins at the end: in 1903, when Green was 83, he was shot dead outside his home by a man with no apparent connection to his victim. So we meet Green first as an old man, the grandee looking back on his life and accomplishments:

He loved this city. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down, it might remember him or it might forget him, there was a sense of no control…

From here, the novel proceeds in two chronologies, as a city exists simultaneously in its skyline and its sewers.

There’s a bravura imagining of what it was like to be in a caisson laying the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge

In the present, we follow the investigation into Green’s murder.

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