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Christodora 
by Tim Murphy.
Picador, 432 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 1 5098 1857 0
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The Christodora​ of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an urban planner, bought an apartment, using it as office space while he continued to live on the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of protesters trying to storm the Christodora during the riots of 1988 chanted ‘Die yuppie scum!’ as if the label included him, despite his protests (‘I support the homeless in the park!’). He didn’t work for a bank, he smoked dope, his hair was messy. Why couldn’t they see he was on their side?

Christodora may bear a (real) building’s name, but the book itself seems still to be in search of a principle of construction. Despite the prominence of the Christodora in the title and the opening passages, this isn’t one of those novels that represents a building as a world in miniature, in the manner of books as different as Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building and Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. Despite Christodora’s epigraph having a strong and even exaggerated New York accent – ‘Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don’t want to go home in the dark,’ O. Henry’s last words, though he was only quoting a hit song of the day and made no mention of the city – the geographical focus is not tight, with the plot’s most dramatic incidents taking place on the West Coast, or the ‘Left Coast’ as one of Murphy’s characters calls it.

Tim Murphy has written a generational family saga, but in the hope of writing something else. The main characters are Milly Heyman, Jared’s partner (also an artist, though her medium is painting rather than sculpture), and Mateo, the orphan the couple adopt after ‘a series of extremely random events’ in the 1990s. Not so random, in real terms, since Milly’s mother, Ava, founder of a hospice for women with Aids, had temporary legal responsibility for Mateo, who turned out to have a fully formed artistic talent at the age of four – something that was bound to catch Milly’s attention when she came in at weekends to give the orphans play-based art coaching. Mateo expresses himself with an unusually poised coherence for an institutionalised five-year-old, processing damage and able to provide a commentary on what he’s doing in his drawing: ‘It’s a monster that’s not mean but not friendly either. It’s an in-between monster ... An in-between monster that doesn’t do bad or good, he just watches everything.’ This adoption was clearly meant to be: the events dovetail in an altogether novelistic way, winnowing out the arbitrary.

The Aids epidemic is now far enough in the past (though still present enough for millions of people) to be treated as the Great War might be in literary novels of the 1920s or 1930s. The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of Septimus, worn down by the struggle with HIV. The ending, suicide by jumping, was the same in both books.

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