Anyone who read and enjoyed Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, which was chock-full of literary allusions, will undoubtedly be simultaneously delighted and devastated by his new book’s opening meditation, which pays homage to Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, particularly its famous passage that opens with “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY kicks off with this sentence that turns Thoreau’s intentions on their head: “We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn from what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.”

The real significance and emotional weight of this passage and the sentences that follow become apparent only much later in the novel. Right from the beginning, however, the reader can both appreciate Jansma’s literary playfulness and recognize that this lively creativity goes hand-in-hand with a sort of elegiac mood, a narrative tone that might still be youthful but is nevertheless accompanied by the heft of hard truths learned at an early age.

"The events that transpire in Jansma’s novel may be extreme in many ways, but they also dramatically portray the realities that face many people in the post-college years, from coming to terms with their friends settling down to confronting a loved one’s death for the first time."

From this opening reflection, Jansma turns to a more realistic and concrete scene: an art fundraiser in a Waldorf-Astoria penthouse that’s being attended by Irene (an aspiring artist and an assistant at the sponsoring gallery) and three of her college pals. Jacob is a frustrated artist, an award-winning poet who hasn’t written much of anything since college. Their friends George (an astronomy researcher) and Sara (an editor for an online magazine) are also doing their best to muddle through imperfect jobs and rapidly dwindling expectations of what their 20s might hold for them. To everyone’s surprise, this tight-knit group is joined by William Cho, a college classmate of theirs who knows pretty much everything there is to know about them but whom they barely remember.

Over the course of that memorable evening, Irene and William fall in love, George and Sara get engaged, and Jacob (as usual) passes out naked on the sofa. And over the next several months, their relationships with each other and with themselves evolve and in some cases deteriorate, in one instance tragically so. Jacob’s observation during that opening scene that “he was steadily feeling less and less like a child left home alone without the grown-ups and more like they were the grown-ups” becomes vividly true.

WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY is set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, a period that left many young city-dwellers questioning their place in the urban landscape, especially as post-college frivolity was abruptly exchanged for something far less carefree. The events that transpire in Jansma’s novel may be extreme in many ways, but they also dramatically portray the realities that face many people in the post-college years, from coming to terms with their friends settling down to confronting a loved one’s death for the first time. More generally, the book perfectly captures the amorphous disappointment that many promising young people must deal with as they approach their late 20s (or, gasp, even 30!) and realize that they’re probably never going to be the wunderkind their parents and teachers might have imagined them to be.

Tied up in all this, as that opening chapter and the novel’s title suggests, is the characters’ rich and complicated relationship with the city, specifically New York, whose beloved landscape becomes increasingly foreign to them even as they still call it home.