Dr. Metablog

Friendship is definitely an urban novel, but there's little in it that is particular to Brooklyn. Certainly not to my Brooklyn. It's a modern, contemporary coming-of-age novel, but, unlike prior-century works, adolescence is delayed or postponed, because the two thirtyish women about whom it revolves would have solved their problems when they were a decade younger if they weren't so rich and spoiled. It's healthy that they try to maintain a profound friendship in a world of meaningless temp jobs, bad boyfriends, inchoate ambitions, voluntary poverty, and impulsive and irresponsible sex. 

It's an amusing novel, well-plotted but written without much in the way of flair or style. Not weighty. Perhaps I was a little put off by the indulgences of first world difficulties. 

For one of the characters, Williamsburg was a "hotbed of youth and culture." For another, it was a "hotbed of European tourists and restaurants with thirty-five dollar entrees." Wow, Williamsburg. It's hard to imagine how Daniel Fuchs would have reacted. Is there another part of the U. S. so fundamentally altered in a couple of generations?

Re: Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation (2014). "Shimmering." "Breathtaking."  "Radiant, sparkling with sunlight and sorrow." "Powerful." "Glitters with different emotional colors."  "Each line a dazzling perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart."

That's what they say. How about "undisciplined," "faux-poetic," "self-indulgent", "unreadable." Which is what I say.

Whatever happened to my gritty Brooklyn?  When did it become so absurdly soft?  During gentrification, when the corner candy store turned into chi-chi fern bar?

It appears that Offill is from North Carolina and lived in Brooklyn for "a while." Not long enough to make an impact.  

The "chiseled arrowheads" may have been aimed for my heart, but they missed their target by at least a sewer and a half.

I grow all weak-in-the-knees sentimental when novelists write about such icons of my childhood as spaldeens and stoopball.

Such delights abound in the first half of Jonathan Lethem's novel Fortress of Solitude. The novel's Boerem Hill (newly upscaled from Gowanus) in the 1970s was as rich in such street games as my Flatbush in the 1940s and 50s. Nevertheless, it' can't be said that these elements of nostalgia redeem Lethem's huge undisciplined sprawling novel. Fortress of Solitude is crazily inventive, profuse, uncontrolled. I have rarely read a novel by a respectable author so in need of a dictatorial editor. Surely, there's enough material here for four or five fine novels, each of which would deliver more bounce and impact than this door-stopper. If Fortress of Solitude were a building, it would be called overdecorated; if it were a piece of music or a film, it would be overproduced. 

Some of my Flatbush cohort like to think that 1950s Brooklyn was a paradise for children. I am not of that opinion. To me, Brooklyn was frequently menacing when it wasn't just plain boring. The so-called "melting pot" was a cauldron a racial animosities. But it wasn't all bad — there were the Dodgers and the camaraderie of the schoolyard. The public schools were crowded and disorderly, but there were great teachers and enthusiastic students. Not so in dystopian Fortress, a lord-of-the-flies world of vicious adolescents, incompetent adults, and dysfunctional government. Far worse than I remember; and worse, I think, than the reality.  

The author of Motherless Brooklyn, a much finer novel, presents us this time with two motherless youngsters, one white and one black, who through thick and thin maintain a deep abiding friendship. But alas the novel veers into territory that some might call magic realism, but to me was neither realistic nor magical nor even remotely credible no matter how much disbelief I tried to suspend. To read the last embarrassing third of the novel was a sad chore.

I don't think that I have ever read a substantial and ambitious novel that paid so little attention to female characters. Where are the ladies of Boerum Hill?  Not only are the mothers missing, but the occasional inadvertent woman who wanders unto the page remains an unrealized cipher, a nothing.

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 Brooklyn are mentioned, but in fact the novel takes place in a cliched fictional city in which murders are committed, red herrings are liberally strewn, police are not very bright, and the actual perp is lo and behold revealed in the last chapter.

I'm not a great reader of crime fiction, but I found this one "suspenseful" and "gripping." Against my better judgment, I swallowed it in one gulp.

I would have liked it even more if I had any affection or even interest in dogs, because in The Hand that Feeds You, the mystery is whether it was Morgan Prager's or Billie Badgirl-Richbitch's dogs who ripped out scamming boyfriend Bennett's throat. The novel might also have been more up my alley if protagonist-narrator Prager had been able to form warmer bonds with humans than with canines. The novel concludes with Prager receiving a chaste peck from her human crush and a sensual roll in the grass with her devoted doggy. Borderline perverse, in my opinion. But what can be expected of a novel in which dangerous "pitbulls" are re-branded as "pitties."

It's odd and something of a curiosity that scenes in the novel are located in Rangeley and Oquossoc, the only towns in rural Maine with which I'm even remotely familiar.

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 dignified and upgraded into Boerum Hill. In his endeavor to repair the building, everything that could go wrong, goes wrong — and does so in inventive, unpredictable ways.

If it's a satire, as it's sometimes called, A Meaningful Life is not gentle, Menippean or Horatian, but, rather, far beyond the outer limits of Juvenelian. It's nasty, and sometimes falls into just plain ugly.  It reads less like a novel than as an extended turn by a stand-up monologist or comedian. Plot and character are regularly sacrificed to jokes. It has the saddest ending of any novel I can recall reading

Lowell Lake is afraid of "Negroes" and doesn't much like Puerto Ricans or Jews or gays (whom he calls "fruits," and "fags") or old people, and he, and the author, indulge themselves in brutal stereotyping. 

It's one of the bleakest books I've ever read, and, if you hold your nose, one of the funniest.

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 trolley, "gutters," "seltzer," and a "stoop."  Kids play Johnnie-on-the-pony, punchball, and ringolevio. There's a pickle man and a hot corn man and a peddler selling imitation pearls. Even when characters are not kvetching outright, they speak in a thick dialect that ladles English words onto Yiddish structures and inflections. 

The thin but adequate plot concerns young Max Balkan, who yearns for a more glamorous, more powerful life. — but every reader soon realizes that despite his ambitions he's doomed to a life of slicing pastrami behind the counter of someone else's delicatessen. Max admires Blenholt, a corrupt politician whose graft has earned him a shiny suit and an extravagant funeral, — but in his more romantic moments he dreams of being an Alexander, a Caesar, or, his favorite role model, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, the Scythian shepherd who rose from poverty to become the scourge of God and conqueror of Persia.

In the novel's finest phrase, poor Max's unromantic mother dismisses her son's fantasies: "Tamburlaine, Schmamburlaine." 

The bell of nostalgia rang most powerfully with the appearance of a word, well known to me but no doubt unfamiliar to most readers. The word is "Forverts." It was my task, on Sunday mornings, to buy and deliver a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward to my Yiddish-speaking grandparents, who lived around the corner on Coney Island Avenue. So with 50 cents in hand, I purchased the Times and the Eagle for my parents and for my grandparents, the "Forverts." Until Homage to Blenholt, I had not seen or heard that strange foreign word in 65 or 70 years. My thanks to Daniel Fuchs.

I should add that, like Balkan, youthful me was dazzled by Tamburlaine. Marlowe — a young man's poet — was my first serious literary love. He offered me romantic escapism of a high order. But I was far too unimaginative to see myself as the conqueror of the known world. For me, it was quite enough to appreciate Marlowe's exotic landscape and still unsurpassed poetry. 

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 clever gumshoe (who, of course, gets himself bopped on the head), a bad girl, two (count 'em two) car chases; a mysterious international crime cartel (on loan from Ian Fleming), a scary assassin, seedy all-night joints, endless stakeouts, even a police detective who's always just a step behind our guy. It's so self-consciously, unapologetically derivative — less plagiary than homage. One character even quotes Sam Spade: "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." The novel is suspenseful, clever, and occasionally witty.  It kept me engaged and guessing, so I have no complaints. Of course I couldn't follow the intricacies of the betrayals and counter-betrayals, but then, I never can.

It's a Brooklyn novel in the sense that it recognizes the astonishing provinciality of the borough. Lionel Essrog, our detective, thinks of New Jersey and Connecticut as exotic territories. Most of the action is specifically located in downtown Brooklyn, which happens to be a neighborhood that I know rather well. The investigators have their office on Court Street, where I often visited my father's law offices, first at 125 Court and later on the 13th floor of a tall building at 66 Court (the floor was listed, believe it or not, as 12A, so as not to alarm the triskaidekaphobic). Also mentioned is Joralemon Street, where Dr Irving Pollack, my smooth-faced orthodontist, painfully tightened the metal braces on my teeth every other week for the entire duration of my childhood and youth.

Motherless Brooklyn seems to be designed for the big screen. In 2017 a version appeared that was written and directed by the rather brilliant actor Edward Norton, who also plays Lionel Essrog. On a whim, we rented and watched the film last night. It's an engaging film, very handsomely rendered. I watched it, I'm afraid, with a chip on my shoulder, because I came to it with the novel fresh in my mind and resented the liberties the film takes with the novel. In fact, after just a few introductory scenes, Norton left the novel behind. Instead, he crossed it with the Towne-Polanski Chinatown. It's a mistake, but not a bad one, because if your intention is to imitate a film, you might as well imitate an excellent one. Into the film, Norton imports a series of elements that are utterly foreign to the novel. There's a dictatorial character who is modeled on Noah Cross, a child of mysterious origin similar to the daughter of Evelyn Mulwray ("she's my sister and my daughter") and a contrived plot device that brings us deep into impenetrable Harlem. I'm sorry to say that Motherless Brooklyn, the film, doesn't escape the gravitational pull of Chinatown.

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 of benzedrine. Then I looked up the wiki article and realized that I was about to come face to face with "the novel's most notorious scene, in which a young prostitute is brutally gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking and is left for dead in a vacant lot." Sorry, not for me.

Not much about Brooklyn either in this grim novel; no local color, though the story is reputed to be set in Sunset Park or Red Hook. 

Selby crosses William Burroughs (whom I also can't read) with Jack Kerouac. Plus innovative grammar, confusing punctuation, and inventive orthography. 

Not my cup of tea. Sorry, life is too short,

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 and grew up in exactly the same part of Brooklyn, and in the same circumstances, as did my father, who was born there in 1904. 

The novel comprises a single summer of tenement life and it's not optimistic or cheerful: "people in tenements lived in a circle without significance, one day the duplicate of the next until the end, which occurred without meaning but accidentally." Fuchs' Williamsburg is filled to the brim with anomie, petty criminals, violent teen gangs, multiple suicides, harridan wives and unfaithful husbands, ungratified sexual longings, business failures and consequent poverty. Even a fatal fire. In some Brooklyn novels, it is through books and reading that a character stumbles upon a clue to another and better world; not in this one. Fuchs' tenement world is claustrophobic and imprisoning. And yet, Fuchs occasionally offers a touch of poetic language — sometimes even breaking the novel's "fourth wall" and intruding a bit of inventive authorial charm into the narrative. Redeeming moments, for the most part, but few and far between.

Other elements that might offer hope to a hopeless world: athletics, either participatory or spectator; religion, not a shred, even though almost all of the characters are Jewish; music; any sort of aesthetic concern. No beauty in Fuchs' Williamsburg.

I wonder how my father managed to survive his many Williamsburg summers without bitterness and with such a cheerful, optimistic demeanor.  Why was he not soured and jaded by his grim environment?  Or perhaps Williamsburg had its particular glories while Fuchs had an eye only for nastiness.

Yesterday, while reading this book, my browser took me, by chance, to a travel site that advertised a stay at a 4-star hotel in Williamsburg, "New York's coolest neighborhood." Fuchs (and my father) would have been flabbergasted.  "Coolest neighborhood."

And so, it appears, the whirligig of time continues its whimsical way. 

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 (TGB) about a Irish-German girl in the period around WWI, then Another Brooklyn (AB) about a Black or African-American girl in 1970s Bushwick, and yesterday, Brown Girl, Brownstones (BG,B) by Paule Marshall, written in 1959 but neglected and then rediscovered during the 1970s. BG,B focuses on young Selina Boyce, daughter of immigrants from Barbados, who was raised in a West Indian neighborhood somewhere between Fulton Avenue and Crown Heights.

The three novels, and their three heroines, share common concerns. In all three, an intelligent young girl, a reader, tries to achieve selfhood in a challenging environment. The young girls come from families that are led by strong mothers and are compromised by weak, failing fathers. Religions (Catholicism in TGB, Nation of Islam in AB, and a dictatorial new religion led by "Father Peace," whom I take to be Father Divine, in BG,B) are unhelpful and damaging.

Today's novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is the most detailed, informative, and moving of the trio. It's a substantial, rich, highly-detailed, and I would say old-fashioned novel about self-discovery. It used to be said that "every modern writer's first novel should be titled "my horrible adolescence.'" But BG,B is more complicated than the stereotype. It's an "immigration novel" about the conflicts between the foreign-born parents and the Brooklyn-born daughter. It's also a story of regional interest, very strong in depicting the peculiarities of Brooklyn culture.

Barbadian-Americans are depicted as an entrepreneurial class, upwardly mobile, anxious to get ahead. The first step is to acquire a brownstone and become a landlord rather than a tenant. And yet young Selina rejects her aspiring mother, whom she sees as hopelessly materialistic. She fears the success of a move to the boring suburbs — a familiar 1950s theme.

BG,B is a novel about race, and, in my opinion, hits its stride in the last few chapters when Paule Marshall analyzes bigotry. There are a few pages that either anticipate or follow the powerful critiques of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. And Richard Wright. I suspect that it's such pages that helped bring deserved attention to Brown Girl, Brownstones.  

I read, first with irritation but eventually with appreciation, Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson. If I had purchased the book, rather than borrowing it from the Boulder Public, I'd be peeved, because it's more of a novella or long short story than a fully-grown novel. Only 165 pages of minibook size(8" x 5"), with spacious margins, large font, and double or triple spacing between frequent one-sentence "paragraphs." The whole could be compressed into 30 normal book size pages. I felt cheated because I want my words worth. But quality should not be measured by quantity, or Mrs. Trollope would be twenty times as good a writer as Jane Austen. Jacqueline Woodson is apparently a very famous novelist, but you wouldn't know it by me, for I had never heard of her, so out-of-date I am. It's a poetic, I think, novel, about "growing up girl in Brooklyn" (white flight Bushwick to be precise) in the 1970s. It's not dense with detail, so each incident has to do a lot of work. It concerns four young girls, each frustrated by the surroundings. The narrator says, "Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat," but I don't think the novel makes good on that stuck-in-the-craw assertion. It's not, in my opinion, a regional novel; it's a coming of age story with a perennial theme: how do we get out of this constricting space: "Everywhere we looked, we saw people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was something other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn."

A paragraph that resonated with me, for as an adolescent I myself know only one thing: "I need to get out of here."