Always true to New York in my fashion

My major travel month ended last night as I touched down in Newark, and I'm looking forward to not leaving my city of residence for at least -- hmm -- a little while. I think I never love New York so much as when I am about to leave again, making the relationship more than a little dysfunctional, but everybody knows about absence and the heart.

Not surprisingly, it seemed like everything I read on the road reminded me of New York. In some cases, the city was cast as a fantasy in a character's mind, its outlines no more solid than a cloud; a naturalized Italian whose husband has gone missing in Gina Buonaguoro and Janice Kirk's CIAO BELLA dreams of escaping her concerned in-laws and running away with an American G.I. to dance in its ballrooms, while the escape route of a gay high school student in Nick Burd's THE VAST FIELDS OF ORDINARY doesn't even have an image associated with it, it's just a destination.

It's a fiction author's right to do some invention, or at least creative manipulation, of the place she or he is writing about -- yet I still love catching one in a lie. Two weekends ago I actually set down Sara Shepard's THE VISIBLES in the middle of a diner scene while I tried to figure out whether there was a diner on the described Village corner and, if not, whether there could have been one since the scene took place several years ago. (If there was, it's gone now, although the pizza place mentioned as being across the street from it lives.)

Nonfiction authors don't have that privilege, even if the scenes they describe must have vanished now. The Commodore Hotel, where Nikita Khrushchev attended a gala in Peter Carlson's K BLOWS TOP, is now a prosaic Hyatt, but the Waldorf-Astoria, where he attempted to preempt a national meeting of dentists who used the opportunity to do a little flag-waving, is still open for business. (To be fair, it is owned by Hilton and has replaced the hyphen in its name with what looks like an equals sign for reasons passing understanding.) "K" took in many ways the classic New York visiting-dignitary route, minus the stop that no one would see coming in 1959 -- Ground Zero.