Radiant Fall

Some Notes on The Princess of 72nd Street

I first learned about the Modern Library reissue of Elaine Kraf’s novel, The Princess of 72nd Street, from Leigh Stein’s newsletter, Attention Economy. In a dispatch titled “how would they promote your book if you were dead?” Stein shared insights on marketing for authors who may be allergic or resistant to the internet.

Here’s where she sold me: “If Modern Library knows what they’re doing, they’ll market this title to all the BookTok creators who are part of the Eve Babitz Renaissance.”

I’m not a BookTok creator, but I am a bookseller and a reader who is invested in the Babitz Renaissance. The book’s premise also intrigued me: a novel about an artist living alone in 1970s NYC as she descends into her seventh “radiance,” which is how she describes manic episodes…radiances. I was in.

The next time I showed up for work I preordered a copy of The Princess of 72nd Street for myself and recommended that we stock the book. Interesting that the comp that sold me wasn’t a recently published book about mental health, but a classic (Babitz). This makes sense given that Princess, originally published by New Directions, was returning on Modern Library.

In her introduction to The Princess of 72nd Street, Melissa Broder asks: “Who is entitled to hold power over the inner world of another? What defines sanity? Must a functional society be rooted in consensual reality?”

I carried those ideas of a “functional society” and “consensual reality” as I read, trying to unravel how the book set out to define them, or rather, how the narrator, Ellen/Esmeralda, defines them.

I’m enchanted with the fluid surrealism of Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, the slippage from determination to self-destruction in Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, Anna Kavan’s narrators navigating dependency and psych wards and dreams in Machines in the Head. (I’m mixing nonfiction and fiction here; I hope that’s cool.) Ditlevsen’s world feels most realistic, unwarped, whereas Carrington and Kavan are sensory deep-dives, deeply atmospheric.

The Princess of 72nd Street splits the difference. Ellen’s clearheaded narration is a steady signpost. The book begins, “I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser.” From the start, Ellen leaves no room for readers to doubt her experiences. And the rest follows suit. I especially admire the moments when clarity illustrates the radiance. The effects are subtly poetic, as when Ellen admits, “For the past five minutes I have been a water lily.”

It helps that she’s an artist who speaks with equal parts fondness, frustration, and mystic wonder for painting. Give a character the job of artist and they have a pass to be a bit woo-woo, yes, but it’s also a way to bless them with a vision, heightened awareness, and fine-tuned sensitivity.

Ellen’s seventh radiance transforms her into Princess Esmeralda, a royal of the Upper West Side who dons elaborate outfits and makeup to the luncheonette, and delights in encountering (and romancing) her neighborhood’s loyal subjects. Esmeralda’s certainty and wit don’t spare her the attention of smug princes and deviant subjects. These characteristics don’t save her from harm. Quite the opposite in fact: her radiance magnetizes questionable men into her orbit. Yet our narrator’s awareness is also vital to how she translates her experience.

One joy of that translation is the “thing-ness” of this book, which has the just-cluttered-enough feel of a well-curated antiques shop. Scarves, eyeliner, flowers, plums, colors. The objects and abstractions someone else may very well write off, but for Ellen/Esmeralda are the secret to how she understands and experiences the world. One narrator’s junk, trash, and thrifted debris is a royal’s treasure.

Ellen sees the men she brings home for who they are, yet she also sees herself. She knows her radiance, recognizes the signs of oncoming episodes. She knows how she feels on Thorazine and how she feels in hospitals and how she feels in the hands of someone cruel and dangerous, or alongside someone oblivious to their own identity.

Emerging from radiance seven, Ellen visits a hair doctor. When she resists his advances, he remarks upon her dalliances with “old men, drunks, and addicts” noting, “I see everything that goes on in this crummy neighborhood.” It’s so satisfying when Ellen says, “So do I.”

Perception, and its shifts, make The Princess of 72nd Street feel like a hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse. Here, reflected, is a woman who has known herself as a princess, and who has been told by men how she should feel or behave. Here, reflected, she is “…finding a way of translating myself so that I won’t remain invisible.”

Aren’t we lucky to see her, too?

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