Book Review: The Northern Line

The Northern Line: Stories by Mike Lee, Atmosphere Press, 2021

Reviewed by MK Sturdevant

“I could see the hole. I knew it was a plane.”— from “The Details of Time”

I made a decade-long career out of understanding and teaching seventeenth-century early modern philosophy. I know exactly what to say about the year 1641, but until reading Mike Lee’s collection of stories, I had no idea what to say about 2002, or 1997, or 1988, years in which I actually existed (a category of existence made famous in 1641).

The near-distant past is often the hardest to see. It’s in that blind-spot of “somewhat recent” experience we think we’ll never forget, so we don’t bother trying to remember it.

The collection of stories in The Northern Line makes an archival assemblage of the sounds, textures, voices, and violences that characterized the late 20th century and the early aughts. As such, the collection puts up a fight against that kind of forgetting, and offers indispensable visions of distinct places and times, especially New York City at the turn-of-the-century.

The memoir quality of each piece builds that kind of sustained relationship with the reader that good reflective fiction can create. A unique feature of the writing is that it seems also to be frank about its own self-doubt in the very processes by which we document, recall, or retell those stories.

Specifically, Lee provides, by way of accumulation in each separate short story, litanies of objects that are tested in terms of whether they themselves can adequately evoke the worlds we’re mulling over. This list of artifacts begins with first-hand experience of 9–11. Here, Lee offers small details, the ones that didn’t make the news, that aren’t burned into our collective consciousness. In “The Details of Time,” he relays standing between two onlookers as the towers are attacked. He notes one of the men trying to get his phone to work: “The main cell tower was then on Tower One.” Then, “The man on my left dropped his cane and went to his knees, started a rosary.”

Just as we feel a kind of frustration when we reach deep into the past and try to pull out the details of a particular day, hour, or conversation, especially when we have no other record of it than memory, Lee’s characters often reach into their worlds to grab time, maybe to arrest control over a single moment. Even as the towers fall, “Papers fluttered. Instinctively, Jennifer grabbed one and ran with it in her hand.”

Throughout the collection, Lee’s stories use these kinds of powerfully small moments to speak to universal themes: first loves, lost love, death, doubt, and hope. The characters also deploy the technology available to them in each their own moment. The incredible ascent of technology in the years that the collection spans results in another litany, of machines of documentation that we hope might offer permanence or at least durability, both as objects and as records of our thoughts:

payphone

45s

handwritten letter

Cassette

radio

Norelco tape deck

cathode ray tubes

Kodak instamatic prints

iPod

the Olivetti

spiral notebooks

B&O turntable with a Marantz tube set-up

cell phone

email

the pencil

The characters in each of Lee’s stories become confident in, and in turn skeptical of the power of each machine, so-to-speak. The graphite pencil is observed from a high elementary school window as it is destroyed in its discarded place by each successive season. And photography becomes the focus of the most explicit questioning:

“The light from the lamp illuminated the photos on the wall, obscured by the glass reflections. He knew what they were of — he took them. Photographed them all. Yet they did not belong to him. They were hers. All of them.”

How can we reach into our lives and save or keep any single fleeting moment or vision? Which form of graphia is most capable of recording its subject?

Following the theme of movement in the text, a litany of transportation can be sussed out, showing a pattern of a repeating concern throughout: Where can I go? When can I stop moving and settle? How can I escape? Who will stay?

GTOs

Coronets

Chargers

Ford Thunderbird

1952 Buick Special

Lambretta Scooter

Greyhound

the Northern Line train

1958 Studebaker Lark

1970 Buick with a four-barrel carb

A revelatory moment occurs in “Gonna Meet You on the Rooftop,” which is a story comprised of a collection of micro moments. There, a woman offers this crucial line: “We are not past tense.” And good for her. Through her, we are prompted to observe that much like technology and transportation, the lovers throughout the collection are often described by other characters in terms like “true blondes,” “brunettes,” or “auburn-haired.” It won’t surprise us to know that these kinds of descriptions alone don’t hold their place in the heart or memory of narrator or reader, which leaves a kind of hole. It’s a question, asking: what did we miss? Or rather, what it is about humans that sets them apart from objects? How can we love and remember beyond images?

​Lee’s writing seems aware of that interior question of the collection, and I believe points toward answers in many ways, perhaps most notably in another character’s line, “When you lose yourself, you are also losing me.” It’s ultimately up to the reader, but it certainly seems to me that no technology can help us remember both ourselves and others, as they are. The question becomes one of trying to remember oneself, first of all.

“I fall in love with every guitar and every bass drum. There, I said it for you.”

On this last note, readers may also fall in love with the soundtrack of this collection, as it is woven through separate stories, played on various types of machines, or consumed live by the characters. Try the book, and try this Northern Line playlist. I have crushes on every guitar and bass drum in it.

The Trypes: “A Plan, Revised”

The Church: “Reptile”

Nico: “These Days”

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions: “2cv”

A House: “I’ll Always Be Grateful”

The Mighty Lemondrops: “Like an Angel”

The Wire: “Heartbeat”

The Jam: “The Butterfly Collector”