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A review by literarycrushes
Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem
4.0
Brooklyn Crime Novel is Jonathan Lethem’s sort-of-sequel to The Fortress of Solitude, his 2003 semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the changing world of Brooklyn in the 1970s (Dean Street in Boerum Hill, specifically). Brooklyn Crime Novel returns to Dean Street, but not in any linear way. The title itself is misleading – not only because it’s not really a crime novel – the crimes here are multitudinous and petty - but it’s not really even a novel in the traditional sense. Told in short bursts that jump back and forth between at least a dozen different time periods (all spanning between 1960 – 2019),
While reading this book (and hearing him speak), you feel just how deep his feelings run for the neighborhood and its changing tides (his complex and contradictory view on gentrification, for example, given how he himself (as author and character) was one of the first white families to begin buying up real estate in the neighborhood). Brooklyn, to him, was a place people strove to escape, and has now become, confusingly, a place to be in its own right. Lethem, though he has not lived in Brooklyn for many years, joins the ranks of Paul Auster or Pete Hamill in his depiction of his home borough and his genius integration of the memoir with literary fiction. While I found it occasionally difficult to follow along with the jumpy narrative style, his writing was as beautiful as ever, and I hope he finds a way to return to Dean Street again and again in the future.
While reading this book (and hearing him speak), you feel just how deep his feelings run for the neighborhood and its changing tides (his complex and contradictory view on gentrification, for example, given how he himself (as author and character) was one of the first white families to begin buying up real estate in the neighborhood). Brooklyn, to him, was a place people strove to escape, and has now become, confusingly, a place to be in its own right. Lethem, though he has not lived in Brooklyn for many years, joins the ranks of Paul Auster or Pete Hamill in his depiction of his home borough and his genius integration of the memoir with literary fiction. While I found it occasionally difficult to follow along with the jumpy narrative style, his writing was as beautiful as ever, and I hope he finds a way to return to Dean Street again and again in the future.