“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” begins the essay that opens “A Town Without Time,” a new collection of Gay Talese’s New York writings. Talese then proceeds to list, with deceptive economy, the things he has noticed: chestnut vendors, pigeons, doormen, copy boys, ants.
Over more than six decades, Talese has made it his business not to miss much. Whether his subject is an icon (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,”) a monument (his cinematic account of the building of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge), the tragic or the feline, he has always observed with the same novelistic élan and gimlet eye. And, of course, he’s taken note of what everyone wore.
“When I describe people, I describe the way they look,” said Talese. “Clothes matter — especially when you get old.”
Indeed, to walk through a crowded room with Talese, 92, is to be accosted by men wanting to talk about suits. At a recent holiday party replete with writers, politicians and tastemakers, Talese, wearing a three-piece gray wool suit with a yellow silk tie with blue stripes, was stopped every few steps by boldface names (and at least one journalist) eager to discuss the finer points of men’s tailoring. One young novelist asked how much a bespoke pattern would have cost in 1980.