Book Review: "Aller Retour New York" by Henry Miller

The book “Aller Retour New York” is possibly one of the most engaging works that I have read by Henry Miller in all my reading years. It is yet another of these identity crisis novels in which the main character seeks to find themselves by dislocating from their current location and moving to somewhere that is somewhat new. Henry Miller goes from living in Paris, France to living in New York, U.S.A and this is one of the biggest steps he has taken in years. When he gets there, the things he experiences are all the way from “New York is the best place in the entire world” to “America is declining at a rapid speed” - those are not quotations from the book by the way, I just needed to separate them up. However, the time he spends in New York is also special not just because of the way he sees this place, but also because of the way this place brings out some of the most existential and philosophical quotations from the brutally mundane. The way this place just extorts a lexicon of honesty, vividness, vitality and ultimately, one of the biggest philosophical breakdowns I have ever seen, out of the author is something to be witnessed and something to be read, enjoyed and inhaled.

I’m going to show you some of the quotations I really liked form the book. Some of them are mundane but deep and some of them are so packed full of ideas, it made my head spin:

“They all know how to shout. They love it. They develop whiskey voices - hard, sour, brassy. It goes well with the baby face, the automatic gestures, the broken-hearted lullabies. A colossal show that must cost a fortune and leaves you absolutely unmoved - despite the fine busts I mentioned a while back. I do honestly believe that a poor, skinny, misshaped French woman with just an ounce of personality would stop the show. She would have what the Americans are always talking about but never achieve…”

This scene is set inside a cabaret club a restaurant and the author states how much it costs to get in. It is a great description because it starts off examining things like the ‘huge dance hall’ and all this glory, richness and vibrance. It then goes on to end with a skinny French woman with an ounce of personality. It goes from amazing in looks to, as he sits there for a while, decrepit and disgusting.

“New York crushes you. You can’t breathe. It’s not the noise and dust, nor the traffic, nor the crowds - it’s the appalling flatness, ugliness, monotony and sameness of everything. The walls bear down on you. One wall is like another, and there are no advertisements of Pernod Fils or Amer Picon or Suze or Maries Brizard or Zigzag. The walls are bare and, in the case of the skyscrapers, they are like huge railroad tracks standing up, gleaming metallic, straight as a die - walls broken only by millions of windows which are let up here and there like organ stops.”

It’s a terrifying image of New York and this is only really at the start of the book. It is like something in him had just suddenly clicked about the city and its strange ability to belittle you to the point of no return. But obviously, there are the quotations that make us feel hopeful for the narrator as well, even though he’s in New York.

“I am thinking how good it is to be on the earth and just healthy, to have a fine appetite and all your teeth. If I ever come back to this country, I will skip New York and go straight to the sticks where there are nothing but ignorant and adorable people. The intellectuals are in my hear and the artists and the Communists and the Jews. New York is an aquarium - maybe I said this before - where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy, snag-toothed groupers and sharks with pilot fish and stern.”

The book is a brilliant blend between being happy to be alive and feeling hard done by when coming to New York. There is something like a Bob Dylan song in this, it kind of reminds me of something like “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” or “Talkin’ New York” or “Hard Times in New York” - all three of them at once seem to be embodied in this book because of its three dimensional state. All at once, New York is paradise, purgatory and hell.