It's almost as if we were afraid to look more closely, to be burned in the bonfire. The first thing I noticed about Mr. Wolfe's city is that it has no middle ground. It's all frontier - half ruin, half high tech. No one feels any affection or loyalty to this city. It is even beyond irony, which can no more deal with New York than the Sanitation Department can.
Every public space is the third world.
In this city the police are like labor negotiators as the entire population goes on strike against law and order. In 1970, in ''The Uses of Disorder,'' Richard Sennett argued that it is part of a big city's function to confuse, interrupt and frustrate us, because this forces us to improvise. The city is the enemy of our natural or pastoral innocence, our simplicity, our reductiveness. Mr. Sennett saw disorder as a passion we could use. In Mr. Wolfe's view, the passion, the disorder, uses us.