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mkara10's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.75
modernoddity's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
blackoxford's review against another edition
5.0
The Crime Nobody Talks About
What’s the crime here? Even more to the point, what’s the here here?
Dean Street, Brooklyn, is a sociological jungle - crude, violent, without law. Or rather with only one law - The Street - and the Dance of conflict that takes place there - mainly among the children. These are the Dean Street Boys: “They came into consciousness in a distinct time and place. Later they’d find evidence, deep inside their bodies, of how they’d been formed by certain arguments that time and place was having about itself.” Only they know the rules and pass them through generations. Chaos pervades this time and place - the derelict soil, the pot-holed asphalt, the polluted air, that infamous open sewer of the Gowanus Canal, the surface of which has been known to burst into flame from time to time. “In this absconded zone, you take what you want, everyone knows this.”
But Dean Street is a synecdoche of a larger whole, a non-place called Boerum Hill, which is neither a hill nor anything other than designation someone dreamt up to enhance property values. “Consider, fine people of the jury, the possibility that it is just a fucked-up place… “ Long ago it was a suburban haven from the slums of Lower Manhattan. Then it reverted to that same slum. Now it has been revived, gentrified, spawning entirely new forms of routine violent criminality. It is “A land of negation. A neighborhood called Boredom Hell.”
Then again there’s the larger system, the Borough of Brooklyn, blackmailed into association with the City, that quite literally looks down on it, by criminal threats to cut off its water. The City now supplies Brooklyn not just with water but also police, and schools, and criminal justice facilities. The first is part of the cast in the corrupt Dance of the Street; the second the stage upon which the Dance is rehearsed and passed along to the next generation; the last is the Broadway-equivalent in which the real professionals get their starring roles - right their in the heart of Boerum Hill at the Brooklyn House of Detention (Ghislaine Maxwell recently guest-starred there)
But of course Brooklyn is not untypical of the even larger, and possibly even more criminal thing, called America. Blockbusters, red-liners, quick-buck estate agents have always been de riguer in America. Like Brooklyn, the whole country was usurped in the name of need and greed (the particular native victims in Brooklyn were the Canarsies, the remnants of which are hidden in plain sight). But these crimes have always succumbed to the special American penchant for narrative spin: “The more imaginary an American thing, … the deeper the ache to drape it in the bunting of provenances, lineage, Victorian frills.”
And so, “Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years. Nobody cares that nobody knows.” These, people, these Americans are “people who want to live neither in the present nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.” The American dream was never something to achieve but something to displace reality.
What can possibly hold all this together. Certainly not an idea. Who in “this ambient criminal potential” could possibly consider any abstraction relevant? Shared goals, some higher purpose, an inherent sense of community? Gedaddahere: “The street is the truth... Because this is a criminal world. You wouldn’t want to be on just one end of it, would you? Always the victim, never the perp? Recipient of the memo, taker of the call, unable to shout back? No.” This is the world of Hobbes not Locke, perpetual conflict not mutual tolerance.
What keeps everything together in this political maelstrom is simple: “Shame is the glue binding this universe together” (James Baldwin would certainly agree). There is just too much crime, too much casual injustice, too much consequent misery baked into existence to deal with: “Once you start compiling crime it’s hard to stop.” Casual racism, pervasive inequality of opportunity, institutionalised poverty, overwhelming cultural deprivation are not incidental to the American dream. These things are the reason the dream was invented - to rationalise them as motivating forces. This is the crime, at least according to Lethem, that nobody wants to talk about.
What’s the crime here? Even more to the point, what’s the here here?
Dean Street, Brooklyn, is a sociological jungle - crude, violent, without law. Or rather with only one law - The Street - and the Dance of conflict that takes place there - mainly among the children. These are the Dean Street Boys: “They came into consciousness in a distinct time and place. Later they’d find evidence, deep inside their bodies, of how they’d been formed by certain arguments that time and place was having about itself.” Only they know the rules and pass them through generations. Chaos pervades this time and place - the derelict soil, the pot-holed asphalt, the polluted air, that infamous open sewer of the Gowanus Canal, the surface of which has been known to burst into flame from time to time. “In this absconded zone, you take what you want, everyone knows this.”
But Dean Street is a synecdoche of a larger whole, a non-place called Boerum Hill, which is neither a hill nor anything other than designation someone dreamt up to enhance property values. “Consider, fine people of the jury, the possibility that it is just a fucked-up place… “ Long ago it was a suburban haven from the slums of Lower Manhattan. Then it reverted to that same slum. Now it has been revived, gentrified, spawning entirely new forms of routine violent criminality. It is “A land of negation. A neighborhood called Boredom Hell.”
Then again there’s the larger system, the Borough of Brooklyn, blackmailed into association with the City, that quite literally looks down on it, by criminal threats to cut off its water. The City now supplies Brooklyn not just with water but also police, and schools, and criminal justice facilities. The first is part of the cast in the corrupt Dance of the Street; the second the stage upon which the Dance is rehearsed and passed along to the next generation; the last is the Broadway-equivalent in which the real professionals get their starring roles - right their in the heart of Boerum Hill at the Brooklyn House of Detention (Ghislaine Maxwell recently guest-starred there)
But of course Brooklyn is not untypical of the even larger, and possibly even more criminal thing, called America. Blockbusters, red-liners, quick-buck estate agents have always been de riguer in America. Like Brooklyn, the whole country was usurped in the name of need and greed (the particular native victims in Brooklyn were the Canarsies, the remnants of which are hidden in plain sight). But these crimes have always succumbed to the special American penchant for narrative spin: “The more imaginary an American thing, … the deeper the ache to drape it in the bunting of provenances, lineage, Victorian frills.”
And so, “Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years. Nobody cares that nobody knows.” These, people, these Americans are “people who want to live neither in the present nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.” The American dream was never something to achieve but something to displace reality.
What can possibly hold all this together. Certainly not an idea. Who in “this ambient criminal potential” could possibly consider any abstraction relevant? Shared goals, some higher purpose, an inherent sense of community? Gedaddahere: “The street is the truth... Because this is a criminal world. You wouldn’t want to be on just one end of it, would you? Always the victim, never the perp? Recipient of the memo, taker of the call, unable to shout back? No.” This is the world of Hobbes not Locke, perpetual conflict not mutual tolerance.
What keeps everything together in this political maelstrom is simple: “Shame is the glue binding this universe together” (James Baldwin would certainly agree). There is just too much crime, too much casual injustice, too much consequent misery baked into existence to deal with: “Once you start compiling crime it’s hard to stop.” Casual racism, pervasive inequality of opportunity, institutionalised poverty, overwhelming cultural deprivation are not incidental to the American dream. These things are the reason the dream was invented - to rationalise them as motivating forces. This is the crime, at least according to Lethem, that nobody wants to talk about.
jeffrossbooks's review against another edition
4.0
What a fascinating book. Lethem is one of the great innovators in modern American fiction. This novel is a pastiche of a neighborhood over time. We dip in and out of the lives of different characters. The crimes, both small and large, are a part of their lives. There is no one narrator we follow, other than the authorial voice. Yet by the end of the book you feel as though you've lived through these events, been there during all of the times.
kybrz's review against another edition
4.0
A panoply of characters come together to form a kaleidoscopic novel/memoir of growing up as a boy in Brooklyn in the 70's and 80's, with brief digressions forward and backward into other decades. Experimental in form, with a century of slapdash passages sewn together with no real care for chronology or cohesiveness. Many of the passages are one-off stories, while others tie into one narrative despite being 50 or 60 pages apart. Through this work, Lethem addresses crimes, both big and small, moral and philosophical, theorized and real. Looming over all of this is gentrification, multiple waves of it and how it shaped those who lived through it.
Many of biggest criticisms for the books are addressed ahead of time in-text with Lethem breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader. This is done the same short, staccato prose as the rest of the book and it is largely charming and lends the feel of the cool kid putting his arm around your shoulder and inviting you into the inner circle. A book likely not for everyone but largely enjoyable and a great insight into a vanished era.
Many of biggest criticisms for the books are addressed ahead of time in-text with Lethem breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader. This is done the same short, staccato prose as the rest of the book and it is largely charming and lends the feel of the cool kid putting his arm around your shoulder and inviting you into the inner circle. A book likely not for everyone but largely enjoyable and a great insight into a vanished era.
jakewritesbooks's review against another edition
5.0
Widows is one of my favorite movies from the last few decade, a criminally underrated mismarketed gem of a flick that should have not only got more commercial love but awards love as well. I won’t say what it’s about, you should watch it. Don’t even Google the plot, just watch. It’s excellent.
Anyway, there’s a great tracking shot that is not only my favorite scene in the movie but one of my favorite scenes of all-time. Colin Farrell’s nepo baby city council candidate character gets in a limo with his campaign advisor after giving a speech on his success in supporting Black businesses in Chicago. The speech happened in a predominantly Black section of the city, one within Farrell’s political district. As he is arguing with his advisor in the car, the camera tracks only the limo as it drives through said district from the place in which he has campaigned to another, presumably his home. In that time, we see the transition from a working class neighborhood to a high end upper class neighborhood with all the glassy condominiums and high end boutiques a gentrifier’s heart can delight in. Both locations separated a few blocks geographically and many years socially by white supremacist politics.
Basically, that’s the premise of this book, only if it was set in Brooklyn, written by Jonathan Lethem, and ping ponging between years telling the story of a crime amidst the broader story of a neighborhood.
Yes, there is a crime at the center of it but the details of said crime are the least interesting part of the neighborhood. This is a hang out book in which you get to know the characters and the neighborhood. Using the postmodern meta-storytelling device I hate but works here, Jonathan Lethem is giving you the grand tour of the neighborhood he get up in, that weird space in downtown Brooklyn that didn’t carry a name for decades until real estate agents threw Boerum Hill on a brochure. You never get settled because once you interact with one, you’re immediately bounced to another. Or another story. It’s a panapol-istic (sic?) method and it works.
And thus the crime, when it takes center stage, is given added heft because you know how everyone got here. But even that is not told in a simple way.
In the hands of a lesser storyteller, this would come off as a smarmy gimmick. But Lethem is an experienced writer, knows his neighborhood to a t and tells the story with brutal honesty and wistful examination. It’s not the streamlined narrative of his classic Motherless Brooklyn but I liked it a lot more for what it is doing and how it does it. It’s not for everyone but it’s definitely for me and it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year.
Anyway, there’s a great tracking shot that is not only my favorite scene in the movie but one of my favorite scenes of all-time. Colin Farrell’s nepo baby city council candidate character gets in a limo with his campaign advisor after giving a speech on his success in supporting Black businesses in Chicago. The speech happened in a predominantly Black section of the city, one within Farrell’s political district. As he is arguing with his advisor in the car, the camera tracks only the limo as it drives through said district from the place in which he has campaigned to another, presumably his home. In that time, we see the transition from a working class neighborhood to a high end upper class neighborhood with all the glassy condominiums and high end boutiques a gentrifier’s heart can delight in. Both locations separated a few blocks geographically and many years socially by white supremacist politics.
Basically, that’s the premise of this book, only if it was set in Brooklyn, written by Jonathan Lethem, and ping ponging between years telling the story of a crime amidst the broader story of a neighborhood.
Yes, there is a crime at the center of it but the details of said crime are the least interesting part of the neighborhood. This is a hang out book in which you get to know the characters and the neighborhood. Using the postmodern meta-storytelling device I hate but works here, Jonathan Lethem is giving you the grand tour of the neighborhood he get up in, that weird space in downtown Brooklyn that didn’t carry a name for decades until real estate agents threw Boerum Hill on a brochure. You never get settled because once you interact with one, you’re immediately bounced to another. Or another story. It’s a panapol-istic (sic?) method and it works.
And thus the crime, when it takes center stage, is given added heft because you know how everyone got here. But even that is not told in a simple way.
In the hands of a lesser storyteller, this would come off as a smarmy gimmick. But Lethem is an experienced writer, knows his neighborhood to a t and tells the story with brutal honesty and wistful examination. It’s not the streamlined narrative of his classic Motherless Brooklyn but I liked it a lot more for what it is doing and how it does it. It’s not for everyone but it’s definitely for me and it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year.
emily_stimmel's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism, Violence, and Racial slurs
Minor: Homophobia, Rape, and Blood
ana_distracted's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
christiek's review against another edition
I'm in a slump. Maybe the book is irritating, but maybe it's just me.