Manhattan appears in the novel through work, movement, and changing ideas of home. For Lillian Kagwa, midtown is the site of a less well-paid job reached by a longer commute; for Apollo Kagwa, the island is eventually home with Emma Valentine, even as his book dealing takes him through Washington Heights and his memories return to Queens.

Work and daily life

After losing her position at Glamour Time, Lillian became an administrative secretary at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. The new job paid less, and the commute added half an hour each way. She moved into a smaller apartment and cut off communication with Brian West, who had cost her the earlier job. The change made Manhattan part of a practical reshaping of her life: a new workplace, more time spent travelling, and a less comfortable home. Although Lillian and Brian had met in 1968, they did not go on their first real date until eight years later.

Apollo’s routes through the city

Manhattan also enters Apollo’s working life as a place he passes through in pursuit of books. After a fruitless estate sale in Washington Heights, he stopped at the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library, where he searched a basement sale for inexpensive books he could resell. The modest economics of such sales—buying a book for fifty cents and selling it for five dollars—belonged to the ordinary business behind his more romantic ambition as a rare-book dealer.

His movements between boroughs also connect Manhattan to earlier ideas of status and belonging. At thirty-seven, on his way to a row house in Ridgewood, Apollo admired the building and remembered living with Lillian in a two-bedroom apartment in Flushing. As a child, he had imagined that houses like the Ridgewood home were beyond his reach; even after he and Emma had made a home of their own on the island of Manhattan, the sight still stirred that old sense of aspiration.

Home and contrast

Apollo and Emma’s Manhattan apartment represents a settled home in contrast to the places that shaped Apollo earlier: the Flushing apartment he shared with Lillian and the cramped Jackson Heights studio where, at nineteen, he surrounded himself with books and barely had room for a twin bed. The novel does not make Manhattan a refuge from the city’s movement. Instead, it places home alongside work, travel, and the continuing search for books, while Apollo’s recollections show how his sense of what a home could be has changed.