BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL, by Jonathan Lethem
Before “a writer living in Brooklyn” became a tiresome stereotype, there was Jonathan Lethem, who — like Bernard Malamud and Betty Smith before him — was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, giving his portrayals of the place, or a swath of it anyway, a dingy verisimilitude. He knows deep in his bones that a coffee shop is not a Starbucks but a diner, and what it means to take that coffee regular (milk and two sugars), like gas in a car.
It’s surely no coincidence, given Lethem’s deep reservoir of feeling about the borough, that his most heralded novels, “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999) and “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003), were set there. Now, after somewhat quieter forays to California, Maine and parts as exotic as Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he has returned, to kick the crushed can even further down the potholed street. The new book is titled “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” with a Gen X shrug, but has a memoirish aspect. The narrator seems to be peering at events from a distance behind the stiff collar of an upturned trench coat.
These events are told in staccato language and chronological hopscotch, a game too innocent for the skateboarding, Spaldeening small fry of these pages, the erratic parenting of whom recalls those old public service announcements made improbably by celebrities like Cyndi Lauper and Andy Warhol: “It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your children are?”
We are mostly in the so-called bad old days, the ’70s and ’80s, with skips further back in history and forward to the precipice of the pandemic — scratchy needle drops on a spinning LP. “We” is also a concept that will be interrogated in an awkward breaking-the-fourth-wall moment near the halfway mark of “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” where the pronoun is deemed “increasingly nervous” and possibly needing to “apologize to anyone whom it makes nervous as well.”
“Anyone still reading at this point?” he asks, six words that should probably never be put between covers.
The main characters, such as they are — backdrop and foreground shift continually — are not named but indicated: a “millionaire’s son,” a “spoiled boy,” a “younger brother” (all white); a Black boy given the benediction of an initial, C. The auxiliary ones, the “real characters” in the sense of comic relief, get kooky nicknames: the Slipper, an affluent, easygoing Black kid who goes out on the stoop in his pajamas; the Wheeze, a balding barfly and neighborhood historian — he’s a real microfiche enthusiast — who grumps about yuppies and cellphones; the Screamer, a “crazy” girl whose shrieked utterances get organized into a hypothetical greatest-hits album, Nick Hornby-style. Girls, though, are with few exceptions unapologetically marginal to this zigzagging story, which is about how boys navigate varieties of intimacy and violence.
Told in 124 parts that are more episodes and intervals than chapters, laden heavily with long epigraphs, “Brooklyn Crime Novel” doesn’t focus on any crime in particular, though there are a couple of upsetting doozies toward the end: an outing to the Duffield Theatre (R.I.P.) gone terribly awry; another involving a fast-acting gravity knife and a Nixon mask reminiscent of the one Christina Ricci’s character wore in “The Ice Storm.” Still, Lethem examines what constitutes a crime — and the arbitrariness of justice — throughout the novel.
Maybe gentrification, the sometimes forcible displacement of those who came before, is a crime unto itself. Maybe bad architecture, municipal neglect, a school system segregated economically if not legally, are also crimes. In his best-selling memoir, Trevor Noah wrote of being “born a crime” during apartheid because of his interracial parentage. Lethem’s narrator, a “former white boy,” has no such encumbrance. “Maybe the crime is to remember?,” he muses, and then later, a little ponderously: “Rememberers are the ones who remember. Who consider the before and after too much.”
He’s investigating whether “Dean Street’s novelist” — someone who wrote a book titled “Take Me to the Bridge” and resembles an earlier Jonathan Lethem — got it right the first time, or was moral and fair in his fictionalization of his Brooklyn upbringing. There’s a great deal of analysis in “Brooklyn Crime Novel” of something termed “the dance,” an intimate but hostile encounter between boys on the street that in “Fortress of Solitude” was referred to as “yoking.” That book romanticized Boerum Hill’s founder, Helen Buckler, as the Miss Havisham-like character Isabel Vendle; this one makes her a nameless “flat cutout, like a shadow moving through our inquiry, one with the words ‘old lady’ attached to it,” and notes that Boerum was the name of a slaveholder. (“Why, old lady, why?”) Maybe history is a crime.
Lethem also addresses the sin of inspiring so many imitators. “It isn’t the novelist’s fault that he glazed it all in the amber of his self-pity, is it?” the narrator wonders. “It really can’t be held against him that whiteboy Brooklyn novelist became such an unbearable thing, so shortly thereafter.” (Perhaps he can join a support group with Jonathan Safran Foer.)
Densely populated with bulldozing renovators, would-be reformers and their complicated casualties, “Brooklyn Crime Novel” is a book that itself, structurally if not plotwise, is stripped down to the studs. It’s an interesting and affecting experiment, even if it sometimes feels like being flagellated with irony and ironworks.
Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs
BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL | by Jonathan Lethem | Ecco | 384 pp. | $30
