Fourteen months into the pandemic, Manhattan is showing few signs of recovering its vibrancy. The office workers who used to crowd the sidewalks of Midtown are still working from home. It doesn’t look like they’re returning any time soon. Everyone I talk to gives me the same message: we’ll go back part-time later this year or in 2022, but we’ll never re-occupy our offices in the ways we did before. Time will tell, but for now it feels like a city stuck in a never-ending Sunday morning.

I used to complain about the crowds in galleries and museums. Yesterday, in my first visit for more than a year, MOMA felt like my private museum. If you have longed to study in solitude your favorite Rothko, Pollock or de Kooning, now is your moment. I was alone so long in the room devoted to Matisse’s The Swimming Pool that the motion-sensitive lights switched off.

The purpose of my visit was to see the Alexander Calder exhibition, Modern from the start. Spread over the sculpture garden and some interior galleries, the show includes a number of pieces loaned from other institutions and rarely seen. Calder’s magic was to make sculpture, traditionally that most solid and immutable of art forms, seem fragile, delicate, and impermanent. It’s hard to imagine a genius and a vision better suited to these difficult times.

I love Haruki Murakami’s writing. All of it. That would have once made me part of the in-crowd, but not so much these days. I sense a shift among critics about Murakami. The reviews are getting that little bit less adoring than they used to be, and it feels as if it’s becoming safe and fashionable for some reason to knock him. Not so much a volte face, but certainly the beginnings of a shift. It’s hard to know what’s changed. Yes, he can be repetitive, long-winded, and inconsistent, and he has glaring weaknesses such as the depiction of women in his writing, but that’s been the case for many years.

I’ve always admired his short stories especially, so I was eager to read his latest collection of eight tales, First Person Singular. I expected to enjoy it, and I did very much. Having said that, I admit the flaws that infuriate his critics are here in abundance and this is not by any means Murakami on top form. And yet there are passages of lovely writing and that unique, unmistakable voice.

Now in his early 70s, Murakami seems preoccupied here by time passing, by aging and mortality, and by the strange unreliability of memory. Murakami Man in First Person Singular is as puzzled and confounded by life’s big questions as he always was, and remains consoled by the same small comforts; music, mainly jazz and classical, baseball, and reading. Women, as before, seem to beguile and confuse him – failing to show up when they should, confronting him aggressively without warning, committing crimes, or even killing themselves without explanation. First Person Singular is familiar Murakami but never vintage Murakami.

I was well aware after it won the Booker Prize in 2019 that Girl, Woman, Other was a critical and popular success, but I’m not sure I would have read it without my wife’s fulsome recommendation. I’m very pleased I did. It’s a novel with such distinctive and vibrant energy, and quite unlike anything I can recall reading before. It’s a beautiful kaleidoscope of the experiences of black, British women and a cross-section of society whose voices have for so long been largely muted in, or entirely absent from, UK fiction.

I’m probably guilty of nitpicking, but I wonder about the author’s decision to (almost) eliminate punctuation from the novel. It must, in part at least, have been motivated by a desire to allow the many voices to come across distinctly and singularly, but I found it ended up having the opposite effect and muffling the differences between the characters. No matter. It certainly didn’t diminish my enjoyment and clearly didn’t impede the huge commercial success of the novel.