Species of Spaces

I fall in love with individual books all the time, books I praise passionately, even promiscuously, to anyone who will listen. Out of the hundreds I read every year and blog about, though, only a few speak to me so loudly that I bestir myself from torpor and plunge into fanatical book-fiendish evangelizing. Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories came to me for review this January in the form of a ridiculously cumbersome wad of xeroxed eleven-by-seventeen pages, inadequately secured by binder clips: it weighed three or four pounds, at a guess, with the flat cartilaginous heft of a stingray. Once I recovered from the format, I felt the shock—painful, delightful—you experience when you encounter something so perfect you’re furious you didn’t know about it sooner. My list of such things includes the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” Paradise Lost, Fabergé eggs, and the taste and texture of meringue. You will have your own list, but find a place on it if you can for this collection of the columns Schlesinger wrote for the Village Voice from 1997 to 2006 under the rubric Shelter.

The space of a Shelter column can be thought of as something like a theater stage or one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and each of Schlesinger’s pieces functions as a miniature universe, a shrunken-down handful of people and furniture and animals tucked away inside its rooms for safety. For every column, Schlesinger interviewed the residents of a particular apartment (the top of each piece includes an enigmatic title—“Das Boot,” “Lost Placenta”—and the crucial details concerning the location, rent, and square footage), then transformed the conversation into a compact printed dialogue that captures all sorts of surprising things about her subjects and their ways of living.

“I do not use a tape recorder,” she explains in the book’s introduction. “I write down only what I want to remember—ultimately the test of what is interesting.” She attributes that choice to the experience of working on one of her first big stories as a Chicago journalist in the late 1970s, “The Call Girl Game.” A vice cop hooked her up with a pimp named Bobby who was too paranoid to let her write anything down, but the pages she transcribed afterwards from memory were wonderful material—in stark contrast to another conversation with a pimp called the Saint who was “totally open.” “We went out with his girls, and we went to lunch, and I was with them all day and I had the tape recorder and I taped them and everything,” she told me. The result was “like death.” Schlesinger likens the self-editing she does while listening to...