August 30, 2021 Issue

Alejandro Chacoff, in his absorbing “Doom Strolling,” in this week’s issue, reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina’s new novel To Walk Alone in the Crowd, calling it “a cautionary tale about the endangerment of the art of idle walking.” The endangerment, according to Muñoz Molina, as reported by Chacoff, is society’s “retreat into digital life”: “New York, the narrator says, is ‘a city of zombies glued to cell phone screens.’ ” But is that really a threat to the flâneur? For me, the essence of flânerie is walking and looking. It’s a “street photographer” sensibility. Chacoff doesn’t define it this way. He quotes Virginia Woolf and says it’s a matter of “imaginatively experiencing other people’s histories, if only for awhile.” He quotes Baudelaire and says, “Not being at home, not being penned in, is the essential thing.” To me, these are odd definitions of flânerie, omitting its key ingredient: attentiveness. Janet Malcolm, in her great Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), says, “I noticed it [a mosaic in the Queens Supreme Courthouse] only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.” Right there, for me, at least, is the essence of flânerie. You want a concrete example? Consider this:

From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved, dressed in a white T-shirt and a gray knit hoodie (unzipped; purchased at a Salvation Army store); the awning of the gallery, which says “American Artist, Scott LoBaido”; and, atop all that, on the roof, an unrelated billboard for a personal-injury law firm, with the words “Bite Back” in big letters and a picture of a snarling dog in a spiked collar.

That’s from Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Biting Back” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020). Frazier, like his New Yorker predecessor, Joseph Mitchell, has a flâneurial sensibility par excellence. The digital age hasn’t diminished it one bit.