In the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, as lockdowns took hold and the coronavirus spread, the paintings of Edward Hopper enjoyed a resurgence of interest. Hopper’s ambiguous, voyeuristic depictions of isolated figures, dramatically lit and deeply involved in their private worlds, seemed to speak to that anxious moment, even as they captured something essential about the atomized poetry of American lives. Hopper was much on my mind that summer, which I spent hunkered down with my then-fiancée in a waterfront townhouse in Tarrytown, a village in Westchester County, New York. Taking walks along the Hudson, I could see the painter’s birthplace, the town of Nyack, just across the river—near but unreachable. Like so much else.
It was, as no one needs to be told, a difficult season of an impossible year. At the same time that I was rediscovering the painter of Nighthawks, watching at one remove the growing chaos in the cities, charting the frightening symptoms of my fiancée’s long Covid, and worrying about the future, I found myself reading the novels of Alfred Hayes, a mid-century original who resembles a sort of Edward Hopper in prose.
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