Maybe the People Would Be the Times

n his new essay collection, Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, Joe Brainard, David Wojnarowicz, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the musical landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City. The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante’s youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and ’80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining their subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form. “Luc Sante is a superb writer who can give astonishing form to floating moods and thoughts that no one noticed before.—JOHN ASHBERY