A Day-Glo New York Where Artists Could Afford the Rent

DO SOMETHING: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York, by Guy Trebay

Among the skills that can get a writer out of trouble, a sense of smell should not be underestimated. Stuck for an escape, cornered by the rats of cliché and sentimentality, today’s autofictionists are wont to brandish their anxiety, consort with their inner demons, flash their self-loathing and blame late capitalism — yet a nimbler response might simply be to sniff for fresh air and head for the door.

These days, it is often the memoirist (Noé Álvarez, Jane Bertch) who seems more powerfully attached to the idea of sensual delight as a point of departure. This general upgrade in the importance of the five senses may have Proustian bearings, but for some life-writers the question is really about how to survive what we recall.

Guy Trebay, a cultural critic and a reporter for the Style section of The New York Times, happens to be a sensualist so native to the task that his expertly perfumed memoir might easily have been sponsored by Guerlain.

We learn that at suppertime in his Long Island childhood, his mother would routinely dab herself with Shalimar before his father got home from work. In a slightly later part of the author’s life, whirling in otherness amid the beautiful freaks, dropouts and freedom-chasers in late-1960s Manhattan, he would occasionally fetch up at the Chelsea Hotel suite of the designer Charles James, a man of style and squalor who would cover the reek caused by his incontinent beagle with frequent spritzes of Habit Rouge.

Trebay has always been a slave to what we might call the olfactory sublime, and with good reason: His father enjoyed a short-lived success as the inventor of a “groovy” men’s cologne called Hawaiian Surf, “for the use of manly descendants in spirit, of a special breed of adventurer.”