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Blackout Blackout By James Goodman North Point Press, 272 pp.; $23

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs Uptown/ What a mess! This town's in tatters; I've been shattered," the Rolling Stones sang in "Shattered," the last song on the second side of their 1978 album Some Girls. When the album debuted, there was a legal controversy over the unauthorized use of celebrity photographs on the album package that resulted in a hasty redesign, such that subsequent purchasers of Some Girls pulled out an inner sleeve that had the band's faces pasted over those of Hollywood starlets, and which front and back bore the message, "PARDON OUR APPEARANCE! CONTENTS UNDER RECONSTRUCTION!"

Even those who remember the LP era might be forgiven for forgetting that in 1978, New York itself was in need of some reconstruction, given how completely the city has been transformed during the last decade into a destination for patriotic, consumption-oriented tourism. Viewing the city in its hagiographic mode (a gift shop in my neighborhood sells Christopher Radko Christmas ornaments of the Twin Towers for $52 apiece), it is hard to recall that not so long ago, most Americans regarded New York as distinctly alien, and something other than American.

Perhaps more than any other single event, the New York City blackout of July 1977 was the occasion and confirmation of this widespread conviction. Unlike the quiescent 1965 blackout to which it is often compared, the 1977 blackout resulted in massive looting and destruction of property in the city's poorest neighborhoods, and served to crystallize public debates about poverty and the welfare state.

The journalistic and sociological complexities of this signal event are the subject of James Goodman's new book Blackout. A professor of history at Rutgers and the author of Stories of Scottsboro, Goodman in the book's preface discusses the tendency toward oversimplification in most analyses of the "reasons" for the civil disturbance. While Goodman grants that "[t]here is, of course, a vital place for generalization and for social and cultural synecdoche … [t]here is something to be said for the dizzying accumulation of detail, the highlighting of differences often lost in generalizations based on the categories of census returns, public-opinion polls and shallow social and cultural analysis."

Given this intention, it is therefore all the more curious that Goodman chooses to begin Blackout with just such generalizations, interspersing a few facts about the power failure with tedious, imagined enumerations of New Yorkers' initial reactions, and conjecture about activities in which they were engaging when the failure of the lights took them by surprise.

Here, for example, is the text's opening trope:

Afterward, everyone wanted to know why.

There had to be a reason.

People wanted to know what it was …

which is followed within a few pages with this description of citizens' preoccupations:

Some shot heroin. Some shot hoops.

Some ran from the police.

Some studied: for summer school, the real-estate licensing exam, the LSATS …

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Happily, once Goodman is convinced that the reader has a sense of all the ways that life in New York was rocking along on the evening of July 13, he turns to the stark and compelling accounts that form the bulk of the book, about what occurred after, "at 8:37 p.m.," (and notice the contrast here) lightning "struck a tower carrying conductors between substations in Buchanan and Millwood, 345-kilovolt lines that supplied 1,200 megawatts of power from Roseton, Bowline, and Indian Point." Never mind that the specifics about what, mechanically, really happened may remain somewhat opaque (as they did for many New Yorkers, for many months afterward); the great energy of Blackout is the sense it gives of the human grid, in its hour-by-hour, almost stop-frame account of what went on all night and afterward, all over the city.

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April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48