Her Apple is bittersweet

Only Tama Janowitz could get away with comparing the destruction of the World Trade Center to the death of Andy Warhol, arguably one of New York’s most iconoclastic icons. In her new collection of essays about New York, Warhol is recalled often -- not as an irreverent persona but as a mysteriously stabilizing presence. He is also the indirect cause of her marriage. (Mr. Right turns out to be a British expat charged with the task of helping to settle Warhol’s estate.) Janowitz isn’t just name-dropping. In fact, she avoids naming names when it suits her -- most notably when alluding to an ‘80s dalliance with an artist whom many will recognize as Ronnie Cutrone -- and she doesn’t shy away from discussing Warhol’s occasional anger or his fear of humiliation.

Janowitz visits the terrain of another New Yorker, E.B. White, whose essays and poems continue to define the city. Many of White’s urban themes are updated here: pigeons, pets, parenting and flirtation (now called harassment). One comic essay, “And Baby Makes Four” -- about Janowitz trying to converse with her daughter’s nanny -- is a perfect companion to White’s self-deprecating sketch “Memoirs of a Master.” Janowitz injects her whimsy with bleakness, though, and is less charmed than White was by the contrasts of city life. Whether living in the meat-packing district before gentrification or on the Upper West Side, Janowitz looks through a contrarian downtown lens. Here, White’s “inscrutable and lovely town” begins to sound inscrutable and loveless.

In “Slaves of New York,” her 1986 collection of stories, Janowitz established herself as a Manhattan voice. Today, she is pessimistic about Manhattan because it’s overrun by chain stores and newcomers who “spent four years calling each other ‘dude’ ” before graduating. In documenting her most recent migration -- to Brooklyn -- Janowitz speaks for those who are disillusioned by Manhattan yet unwilling to abandon a city with four unexamined boroughs. Does she also speak for previous generations who defected to the outskirts? Or is each fleeing generation unique?

Her meditations on doughnut oil and dinner parties in a section titled “Food” are not seductive. Janowitz takes a metaphoric delight in playing with her food via perverse descriptions of the hated hors d’oeuvre and “mock-Indian” cuisine. The sections “City Life” and “Family Life” contain her best essays: If you love Manhattan for its extremes (of temperature and temperament), for neighborhoods where tenements abut high-rise condos and the opposite of black is beige, “Some New York Apartments” is a jewel. These funny, flawless descriptions of interior New York tell us why some people never leave. *