“I’m going to remember everything and then I’m going to write it all down,” she realizes later after identifying the mysterious cowboy spirit guide who ushers her in and out of dreams, a veritable deity who materializes to advise her at moments most dire. That the novel never feels uneven is a testament to Ms. Smith’s prose often meanders a bit before reaching profound epiphanies, although they do eventually come.

Much like the writers she credits as inspirations, Ms. It’s an echo to the lyrics of another New York Rock’n’Roll poet gone to soon, Johnny Thunders, who sang, “You can’t put your arms around a memory.” “Why is it we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us?” she wonders. Another friend’s cafe has disappeared, this time on the beach, and the train is “crippled and it’s sad bowels ripped apart, thousands of salt-coated wires, the gone intestines of motion.” She recalls that Fred was born during an electrical storm, and can’t help but feel her sense of stagnancy is again connected to his passing. Smith attempts to make sense of the disaster by lamenting the fact that she just purchased a bungalow on the peninsula. When Hurricane Sandy hits The Rockaways, Ms. “Fred and I moved about in alchemical silence, mindful not to disturb the reigning spirits,” she writes. Smith remembers every detail about the ruins of Saint-Laurent Prison. When her mind then drifts to a time that they traveled to French Guinea, Ms. Smith finds her “portal to where.” In the Proustian style of looking back, she reveals how her dream of one day owning a coffee shop was deferred when she fell for Fred “Sonic” Smith. Smith tells herself in Greenwich Village coffee shop Café Ino, which closed its doors in 2013. “It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” Ms.

While Just Kids is very much about looking back with wistful nostalgia, M Train’s memories are meant to sustain her present. Smith wandering much more-focused much less on music-as she travels from place to place without a clear trajectory. But aside from the fact that both novels are heady meditations on the passing of a lover, M Train finds Ms. Smith directly in storied musical institutions like Max’s Kansas City and The Chelsea Hotel. More chronological and rooted in a firm sense of place than M Train, Just Kids placed Ms. Now, M Train comes during a resurgence of interest around the history and aesthetic of 70’s-era New York-Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel City on Fire or Marty Scorsese’s upcoming HBO drama Vinyl, for example. Smith’s complicated and soul-nourishing relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe. As a snapshot New York in the 60’s and 70’s, Just Kids focused on Ms. Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction and has since been optioned into a miniseries for Showtime, any comparison somewhat belies the spirit of M Train. Though the novel is marketed as a sequel to Ms.

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