January 2022
-
My bedmate informed that last night, in the wee hours, I uttered the strange words, "fear of clowns." Thanks to her I then remembered doing so (I had forgotten). But why those words? I had no context. Was I in the throes of some sort of clownish nightmare? Or was it merely a vocabulary exercise? …
-
I was steered to A J Rich's The Hand that Feeds You by a pair of websites that listed books set in Brooklyn, but I'm sad to say that there's almost nothing of Brooklyn in the novel — a considerable disappointment to expectant me. It's a murder mystery in which various places in and around…
-
I had never heard of L. J. Davis until I searched out his black-comic novel, A Meaningful Life. It's about a young man named Lowell Lake from Boise, Idaho who moves to Brooklyn (as did the author himself) and buys a decrepit mansion in a newly gentrifying section of Bedford-Stuyvesant that was eventually to be…
-
Of the ten or so novels that I've read since I began this project, Homage to Blenholt is certainly the most regional and the most "Jewish." It is positively marinated in local color. Even in the first few paragraphs, we encounter the "dirty cobbled streets" of Williamsburg, a milkman's plodding horse, the subway and the…
-
Jonathan Lethem nominally sets Motherless Brooklyn in downtown Brooklyn, but it's more accurate to say that it takes place in the world of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. Or, to be even more precise, in the Land of Noir. It's a textbook example of superior detective fiction, with all the trappings: a…
-
I read the first fifty pages of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and then decided, No More. It's an ugly, brutal book, not one that's going to offer me either instruction or pleasure. I read two chapters — the first about the murderous gang wars and the second the transsexual who dies of an overdose…
-
Daniel Fuchs was known to me only as the writer of the screenplay of Criss-Cross, a noir that epitomizes "gritty." Or perhaps grimy. I was not aware that Fuchs began his writing career with three Brooklyn novels, the first of which is Summer in Williamsburg. It's a novel that hits home, because Fuchs was born in 1909…
-
Here's a "painting" that is on exhibit in the lobby of the condominium in which I've lived since 2009. It's been there as long as I have been. It is unsigned — the "artist" hasn't been courageous enough to inscribe it. In the privacy of my aggrieved mind, I attribute it to creature-of-my-imagination whom I…
-
Paula Fox's Desperate Characters feels to me less like a novel than a short story, or perhaps a set of short stories sutured together. It's comprised of a series of incidents that concern a married couple and like many fictions in the short story genre, resists closure or resolution. Though it's a miniature of a…
-
Well, one might ask, how goes the reading-Brooklyn-novels project? I've been taken by surprise. Solely by the luck of the draw, just because the books were available at the public library, and without planning or intention on my part, my first three novels all had the same focus: coming-of-age-as-a-girl-in-Brooklyn. First, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn…