Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York
By Jeremiah Moss
WW Norton, 2022

In his new book, Feral City, author and psychoanalyst Jeremiah Moss plunges his reader into the depths of an untamed New York City. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche.” Feral City is an examination of what happens when a city loses its “normal order” and its inhabitants are placed at the cultural wheel.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across the globe were abruptly halted. Streets cleared, towns boarded up, and cities became steel jungles. For many, the year 2020 will be one remembered as a time of isolation and aloneness, but for Moss and other members of the LGBTQ+ community, the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a different set of feelings, ones of a new sense of unbridled freedom and energy. Upon the start of the pandemic, Moss notes the change in the feeling of New York, a once clamorous city dulled down to an almost perfect silence:

The deserted streets are beautiful in their vacancy, an empty stage made more quiet by the memory of noise. I can hear the ambient tone of the city, a soft blanket of nothing much. When Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people,’ he meant that we are trapped by the gaze of the other, judged and interpreted. The unoccupied city fulfills the fantasy: What if there were no others? What if there was no dominating gaze?

It is within this same paragraph that Moss introduces his reader to one of the main themes running through Feral City which is that Moss, and members of his community, are able to find complete freedom and liberation, once the streets are cleared of the “other.” Those that Moss calls the “other;” a group consisting of predominantly middle and upperclass white, cisgender individuals, will later be labeled as the “ultra, or hyper-normals.”

Moss’s “hyper-normals'' are often referred to with much resentment, whether consciously or unconsciously by Moss, which makes for somewhat hostile reading for those who consider themselves part of the “other,” specifically cisgender individuals who do not push the boundaries of societal norms.

While much of Feral City focuses on the cultural rekindling of New York City and the changes of societal structures and patterns during the COVID-19 lockdowns, there are moments Moss turns much more introspective. Reflections of his first days in a city gone silent, a New York that, “feels more like itself than it has in twenty years…” Moss goes on to discuss the feelings of solitude, and of peace, that he felt on those first few, alien days, before the locked down city became the rule, rather than the exception:

I move freely on the sidewalks, breathing deep, and my body expands, or my soul, something, stretches out. I unclench, joint by joint, a glad unfolding. I wave my arms in circles, taking up space, not caring how I look because there is no one to see. It’s a sunny Saturday on Broadway in SoHo, where there’s always a crush of shoppers, but not a single person passes. No car, no truck. No push, no shove. Nothing but asphalt and brick, sunlight and air, the rough gray lungs of the city audily breathing. Emptiness gives permission. My body remembers how the quieter city of the past gave me space, and I linger for a long while on an empty corner, Lafayette and Prince, enjoying the loose-limbed, criminal pleasure of loitering.

Feral City is constructed as part memoir and part social commentary. Moss’s writing style drifts from soft and deeply intimate, to gritty, loud, and forceful. Moss writes thoroughly about many of his inner thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic, his personal anxieties and struggles, but never keeps the spotlight on himself for very long, always turning his full attention back to the streets of New York where he spends many of the days presented in his book.

In the end, Feral City most likely won’t be suited to every reader. However, for those who want to peek behind the curtain into a New York that is almost unrecognizable to the city many people know, Moss will not disappoint. Feral City delivers a vibrant look into a new kind of city, one brimming with music, art and passion.

Micah Cummins is a college student currently living in Greenville South Carolina.