One Last Stop

OK. Did you leave? Click away? I don't want to hear complaints. I'm giving you space to walk away before we get into the meat of what makes this book so bad for me. This is your last warning. Click the back-button, or forever hold your peace.

A f/f time-travel mystery set in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with an Asian-American punk queer love interest, is a fantastic pitch. So I wanted this to be good. Instead it is unforgivably lazy.

To explain how, I have to start with the trains. So much of the way McQuiston pitched this book was about loving our local trains. Loving the Q line. Seeing romance and magic in the Q line where no one else (definitely not a jaded and unmagical local) can. Etc.

Here's my question to McQuiston: if they love the Q train so much, why did they get so much about the Q train, and the train lines in general, wrong?

To be honest, many of the details McQuiston gives us about NYC are wrong. Like, factually wrong. Like, "a simple google search would have cleared this up" wrong. Like, "oh my god, you didn't even do your readers the decency of checking wikipedia before you wrote this" wrong. There are too many places where McQuiston cites a supposed NYC-specific thing that actually reveals McQuiston sees NYC as an empty canvas with no real human beings or history, so I won't cite them all. I'll just focus on the train stuff, since trains are a Big Deal in this book.

I'll try to work my way from small complaint to big one.

The way McQuiston describes August's train station -- Parkside, a below-ground and yet outdoor station -- is factually wrong. McQuiston perplexingly insists it's an above-ground station. It's not and would not be referred to that way, because the Q from Parkside to Newkirk was specifically constructed to fall below the street level in order to conceal the sightline from the wealthy who once lived in Flatbush (much of the area by the Q line was originally developed for the rich, which makes the place where this book is set physically distinct from many other corners of NYC in ways McQuiston never so much alludes to or touches on. There's some extremely basic local history anyone from Flatbush could tell you. You're welcome).

McQuiston also describes August getting drenched with rain at the station. The station has an overhang and an upstairs lobby/stairwell space to wait out the rain. Was August hopping onto the tracks? How did she get so wet?

Then there's the commute August supposedly takes to get to college: take the Q train to Avenue H and walk 2 blocks. This is also factually wrong. Congratulations, August! You're not in Brooklyn College. You're standing in the front yard of a random Victorian house in a wholly residential area, staring at the Brooklyn College athletic fields glistening in the far distance across Ocean Avenue. A family of Orthodox Jewish people is probably wondering if they can politely ask you to leave.

Now -- August taking the Q to get to and from work. This is not strictly wrong. But she supposedly lives at Parkside and Flatbush and works at Church and Bedford. To take the Q train to get between these two locations would mean taking it from Parkside to just the very next station: Church Avenue. And that is baffling. I'm serious. It's the work of a deranged person who wants to give the New York City MTA a chunk of her waitressing tips for no reason. The Q line runs away from Bedford Avenue, so this commute takes August out of where she actually needs to go. But, more critically, the entrance to the Parkside station is no more than four or five blocks from the nearest entrance to the Church Avenue station. August could walk that in less than five minutes. She doesn't. At one point she takes the Q home from work (again, to get to the very next stop) and she has a full conversation on it with her love interest, Jane, and then gets off at Parkside, and I was like: what? How did you manage to talk for so long? There is no way you were on the train for more than a minute. You took the train to cross like four blocks.

Finally, August insisting that she sees finance guys on her morning commute also makes no sense. If she lives at Parkside and heads to Avenue H every day, she's going deeper into Brooklyn. The NYC Financial District is in Manhattan, in a completely different direction, so even assuming the Brooklyn morning Q train is packed with finance guys, they would be taking a different Q train entirely, because they'd be going the opposite way.

And, actually, August mostly takes the train deeper into Brooklyn in this book, barring a few places where she's heading to Chinatown to get dumplings for Jane or trying to have sex on the Manhattan Bridge for some reason, and yet August keeps referencing "commuters," even though the only direction August would ever have to commute in, to get to work or school, would take her away from Manhattan. And if she's commuting home, well, then she's going towards Manhattan, but the City's commuters aren't. They're still on the opposite train, heading back into Brooklyn. Do you see what I'm saying? McQuiston constructed August's journeys so that August is like never going the way any of the commuters on the Q line would be going, and yet August somehow keeps encountering "commuters." Are they all lost? Where are they going? Why doesn't August notify them that they're on the wrong train?

All of these details could have been fact-checked. A look at google maps or a subway map could have cleared up a few of these errors! Hell. A look at a subway map would have helped McQuiston see that "MTA" stands for Metropolitan Transportation Authority. McQuiston, bafflingly, tells us that it stands for Manhattan Transit Authority. It has, to my knowledge, never stood for that. No, not even in the 70s.

This kind of thing happens so often in this book that one fact becomes inescapable, if you know the area McQuiston is writing about: McQuiston decided that a place is the perfect backdrop for a romance, and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing about that place. McQuiston decided they want a magical realism romance on the NYC train system, and then proceeded to learn nothing about that system. Not where the stations are or what they look like, not who actually takes the train and where they go, not even the name of the goddamn train system.

Because August meets Jane (we will get to Jane; I actually didn't mind Jane) on the Q train, over and over, the Q train is supposedly this all-important place. It's August's "home," and we're supposed to feel, I don't know, magical and swoony inside when she declares the Q line is "a time, a place, and a person."

But. Uh. Since August keeps getting very basic facts about the train line wrong, to anyone who regularly rides the Q train, this line comes across like Aubrey Plaza in Parks and Rec going "I LIKE PEOPLE...PLACES...AND THINGS..."

And the problem is: the way McQuiston didn't do basic research about the train line is emblematic of the way McQuiston didn't do basic research about the surrounding area and the broader city. McQuiston, to their credit, does have a sort of general idea that NYC is a diverse place, that queer people can meet lots of other queer people here, that it's fun, and the the Q line at Coney Island ends in a really pretty vista that includes the Wonder Wheel. These things are mostly correct, and that's great! But they're also a pretty shallow dive into what makes NYC NYC, and on top of that the way all that gets strung together feels riddled with moments where the book reveals how very much it doesn't know about the area.

It's not that McQuiston's city is bad. It's diverse, in its own way. There are Colorful Characters. Drag queens and trans Puerto Rican boys from Long Island who are psychic. Etc. But these people are not deployed to create the living city that's actually here. They're deployed to meet a romantic plot point or swell a scene or to just construct a quippy friends-group of transplants to the city who get to fantasize about taking up the cause of anti-gentrification. It's a little bit RENT, but mostly what it reminds me of is a 21st-century queer Friends. An approach to place that really doesn't concern itself with the actual place. If you liked Central Perk, you'll love Billy's Pancake House, a similarly made up location that doesn't actually feel like it would be located in Flatbush (vampire guys? What?? Czech ladies? Only one West Indian person???). We're told this pancake place, a place that has roots nowhere but in McQuiston's fantasy land of pretend-NYC, is super important, even while the real locations and real energy of Flatbush, Brooklyn are carefully excised and omitted from the book.

Because I need you all to understand that Flatbush is not just any old place. It's not even any old Brooklyn. Flatbush is a hyper-specific part of the city, a place that even today has resisted enough gentrification to remain distinct in ways other parts of the city have largely lost. There's a lot here that makes it special, and McQuiston picked up on none of it. Except the Popeye's, for some reason. They got this one Popeye's right, which is incredible to me. But Flatbush, Brooklyn is more than a Popeye's. It's home to a nearly 50-year-old thriving West Indian-American community, several Orthodox Jewish enclaves, a booming Pakistani immigrant community, Prospect Park, the Parade Grounds, the Dutch Reformed Church, and numerous local architectural wonders like Erasmus Hall High and the Kings Theatre. Brooklyn College, the place August supposedly goes to school, educates something like 11,000 local New Yorkers, the vast bulk of whom are immigrants and/or non-white, on a strikingly beautiful campus that is integrated into the surrounding area in ways other NYC schools can only dream of (take that, NYU!) and therefore is a somewhat unique place. August is enrolled there, but spends no time there, and speaks to almost no one on the campus, because of course she doesn't, because McQuiston namedropped the school without bothering to learn anything about it or why it would, in fact, be a very critical part of August integrating herself into New York if she actually went to Brooklyn College. But it's not just Brooklyn College. Nothing unique to Flatbush merits so much as a line in this book, except for that one Popeye's.

This all made it really hard for me to handle McQuiston shoehorning in a gentrification plot about the fake pancake restaurant, after they failed to do a single bit of research to portray the real places in the area. The pancake place subplot reads like McQuiston realizing they're writing a shallow and lazy white out-of-towner fantasy and deciding to (half-heartedly) course-correct, by trying to get the reader to care about a fake location shutting down even while the real places in the book, like the Q train, keep being mined for poorly-researched nonsense scenes that ignore real-world history and context.

The most stunning example of this ignoring comes a little bit before we learn the pancake place will be shut down due to rising rents (oh no not the fake pancake place). August fantasizes about living in an "East Village brownstone with a West Elm sofa." The East Village? The same East Village that had many of its low-income residents forced out due to rising rents once wealthy out of towners started coming in to fulfill their adorable RENT fantasies? Which is precisely what August is doing? That East Village? "Of course," says this book. "See, it's true that gentrification is bad because they might shut down the fictional pancake place that feels like a generic quirky diner set on any old TV show. But also the real gentrification of a formerly immigrant, formerly low-income, and formerly very queer community is something to aspire to."

And here we come to another point. This book is billed as having "a deep respect for queer history." But...does it? The book does devote a few pages to Jane's past as a queer woman in the 70s, and her experiences with institutional disregard for queerness and queer lives, and I will level with you: this is the best part of the book. The book should have spent, like, more than seven total pages on it, which is about what the book devotes to it. But all of that -- memories relayed secondhand by Jane, which August later like briefly sort of reflects on for a second or so -- takes place almost entirely outside NYC. So we get some queer history, but it's...over there...in New Orleans, or California, or sort of all over but not really in New York. Meanwhile, the queer present is a placeless Friends-style fantasyland romp, that takes place in the dead zone of McQuiston's pretend Brooklyn, where the real details don't matter so much. So the queer history bit of the book is effectively segregated from the parts of the book that pretend to be about a current NYC community. And this segregation makes structural sense. It is a necessary evil, so that McQuiston can keep ignoring the real Flatbush, Brooklyn in order to instead craft their breezy, placeless gang of partying queer kids.

See, queer history in NYC is intimately tied up in real struggles for community. It's a history that's woven into and inextricable from the broader history of New York's neighborhoods. The gentrification of a place like the East Village couldn't really take off until AIDs did away with a whole -- and largely queer -- swath of that neighborhood's community. The current gentrification of Flatbush is tied to city-wide real estate booms that swelled out of an initial push by city leaders in the 70s and crescendoed under Mayor Bloomberg in the 2000s, a push to favor real estate interests over real people in a bid to transform the city from a resourceless city of the poor, marginalized, and weird, to a place where the wealthy could invest in luxury condos that sit empty for most of the year. This process made many affordable brownstones across the city into luxury accommodations for the hyper-wealthy, locking NYC's communities out of the places they once lived in (see, this is why it's kind of gross for a white girl from New Orleans to shed tears for the fake pancake place but then go "oh but I'd like a brownstone in the EV, please!"). It also hastened the clearing out of many queer spaces, spaces zoned out of existence or aggressively shut down all across the city, from the Bowery to Times Square, and sure, those spaces were in many ways unsafe and dangerous but in other ways they were all certain kinds of queer people had. When I heard Casey McQuiston was doing a time travel romance with a punk nyc lesbian from the 70s, I was like, "Wow! There's so much to mine there! This could be interesting! We could get to see a pre-AIDs, pre-real estate capture NYC queer person crash into the historical realities we live with today! We could get a romance that looks at some fascinating, heartbreaking, and deeply interesting historical trends that underscore how the city's current problems arose in part from persistent institutional disregard for the city's queer residents!"

Um. Nope.

I get that a lot of you loved this book. You all do you. To me, it took a place, community, and history that I love, and hung it out to dry to construct a bland, faux-progressive narrative of ~swoony magic~ for people who know nothing about this (largely non-white and in many ways still working class) part of New York City, and who aren't interested in learning, either.

Just to say a few nice things: I did like end up mostly liking Jane? She starts out as dead air that happens to be wearing a leather jacket, but by the end she grew on me. Also, the twist with August's uncle was good until it was undercut for no reason. And some of the parties August went to were fun, although I could have done without McQuiston weirdly implying that "New York families" are "landlord[s]" (what?? Casey, there are so many poor and asset-deprived New York City-based families that have rented for generations, like what are you talking about). But overall this book mostly alienated me, and I don't know why it was set in Flatbush when it functions to basically ignore and erase the entire living community of Flatbush. Why wasn't it set in New Orleans? I guess because Casey McQuiston really likes trains and the idea of fighting NYC gentrification.

It's nice that Casey wants to be against gentrification, and in favor of subway trains. It is. But before writing another book set in NYC, Casey should consider, like, learning literally anything about these topics. I'm begging you, Casey McQuiston. Please. At the very least? Learn the name of our goddamn subway system before you write about our subway system.