I’ll make a brand new start of it

Megan Bradbury’s debut Everyone Is Watching does the opposite. By interleaving a series of parallel New York narratives spanning 120 years, she makes that great metropolis seem intimate, its inhabitants connected across the decades by shared desires.

In 1891, an ageing Walt Whitman travels by train across America to New York, in the company of his biographer, Richard Maurice Bucke. He reminisces about feeling the “great spray of ocean spatter his face” on the Long Island shore as a boy.

Next in time comes the story of despotic New York city planner, Robert Moses. We first meet Moses in 1922 – like the young Whitman, contemplating a Long Island beach. Later, he plans to build a highway by which New Yorkers can get to the shore: “no more breathing in the noxious fumes [...] the driver along this road will see the sun reflecting off water”. Over the years, his idealism congeals into a high-handed determination to impose streamlined rationality on the city, no matter what the cost.

The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s journey goes in the opposite direction to the one Moses imagines. He escapes his respectable Long Island childhood into a big city, “filthy and alive” with all its teeming chaos. Chasing a feeling of intimacy that “comes as quickly as a camera flash”, he begins to collect lovers and to capture them on film, attempting to preserve them in moments as perfect as the act of love.

One, Patti Smith, points out, almost 20 years after Mapplethorpe’s death from Aids, that such photos can only be “relics”, memories of moments from which the viewer is separated by space and time.

Threaded between these stories are prose sketches of other pieces of photographic art, as well as brief sallies into assorted New York lives, including the author and urban activist Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses’s nemesis.

The final main narrative covers Mapplethorpe’s erstwhile subject, the writer Edmund White, who returns to New York from Paris in 2013. Nostalgic, White recalls anonymous gay sex on Hudson piers, before the Aids epidemic hit, and regrets how sanitised and homogenous the city has become.

Everyone Is Watching can feel a little modish: Bradbury’s real-life narratives are often indebted to biographies, such as The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1974 portrait of Robert Moses, republished last year. Modish, too, is the historic present tense with which she attempts to remint her familiar characters.

But such is their fluency and dexterity, you often wish these narratives were expanded into novels of their own, especially the account of Whitman, wandering about the train in his undershirt, checking that Bucke is getting all his transcendental musings down. The frustration of being wrenched from such an engrossing character seems deliberate, a simulation of the way city life oscillates between intimacy and alienation, where strangers press flesh in crowded streets before disappearing, back into their own stories.

Sam Kitchener enjoys a novel about four famous Manhattan lives, starting with Walt Whitman