Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans
By Ian McNulty
University Press of Mississippi
ISBN 1-934110-91-1
176 pages
While there have been more than few books and articles published on surviving Katrina and the levee failure, few have dealt with the nuts and bolts of living in the city afterward. Author Ian McNulty moves into this relatively unfamiliar territory with A Season of Night, his recollection of life in Mid-City in the weeks after the storm. Rather than dwelling on the politics of blame or destruction, McNulty writes about how it was cleaning up the mess in his house and going without hot water or electricity for months on end. Ultimately, the book serves almost as a catalog of evidence — a literary proof of a city’s struggle to live. McNulty has written a new chapter in the history of New Orleans and hopefully his careful study of the minutia of streets patrolled by the National Guard, parties by candlelight and bars open for business with doors that barely swing on the hinges will be the beginning of more explorations into not so much how cities nearly die, but more importantly, how they cling to life.
Season opens with the arrival of Katrina and McNulty’s decision to leave. His employer quickly sets up an office in exile, relieving him of the sort of financial pressure that plagued so many others. As he sneaks back into the city with a friend to check out his home, the narrative pauses so McNulty can write about his decision to move into Mid-City several years earlier. His affection for his home is heartfelt and sincere, and upon discovering its relatively limited damage (the second floor was largely untouched) he resolves to get home as soon as possible. When his employer returns to the city, he has no reason to stay away and so, even though his neighborhood is shrouded in darkness and abandoned, he packs up his dog and returns. From that moment the book truly takes off as McNulty bikes back and forth to work, finds other intrepid returnees and begins the hard physical labor of carving out a new life where his old one flourished.
McNulty namedrops with abandon throughout the book, detailing his delight at discovering favorite restaurants and bars that emerge to bring some sense of normalcy back to the city. But he also writes about the many things that are not the same, that would not exist in a place that had not fallen apart. Most poignant are his passages about Katrina debris, the “belongings that never would have been tossed under normal circumstances.� Just in case the reader has forgotten what happened down there, McNulty makes it clear:
“On another block down Palmyra Street, there was an old metal kitchen cabinet thrown wholly to the curb. In the top drawer that lay open to view, among the steak knives with rusty blades and the plastic packs of take-out ketchup, was a photo of a tall young man in a Christmas sweater hugging a woman who had her hair whipped up in a meticulous, magnificent coif. They were both smiling so hard for the camera and holding each other so tight that anyone seeing it as I did on the street in the empty moonlight would just have to hope they were okay and hanging in there wherever they happened to be now.�
The flood, he explains later, “laid it all bare� and now there was no hiding the happy memories, small secrets, or private passions. There was only everything dragged out of the corners and sitting on the street in such a casual manner that at first it cannot be ignored, but then it becomes just another pile of someone’s life that used to be, someone’s record of life from before.
In many ways A Season of Night is a small story, but it is perfect and powerful just as it is. There was a man named Ian McNulty and he had a life until a storm came and a flood followed and everything changed forever. This book is about what happened next and serves as a record for all those who wonder just what has become of the city called New Orleans.
