Books about Brooklyn
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Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance…
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Girl in Translation is the story of a young, impoverished immigrant from Hong Kong. I may be wrong, but it reads as if it were less a novel than a barely fictionalized autobiography (Jean Kwok, the author, made her way from an unheated tenement to Harvard; Kimberley Chang, the central figure, escaped to Yale.) Mutatis…
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I liked Paul Auster's, The Brooklyn Follies (2006) so much that I read it twice. It was even better the second time. Even though it begins scary ("I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn…."), it's a cheerful and warm-hearted novel. Auster's gift is to make barely credible events seem commonplace…
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This curiously named novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (no relation, thank goodness), concerns a 30-year-old Baltimorean become Brooklynite who drifts from bed to bed but is incapable of lasting love. Adelle Waldman takes a scalpel to Nathaniel P[iven] and also to his various lady friends. Her analyses are sharp, incisive and sometimes painfully…
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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…
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Some years ago, I wrote about meetings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle, a biennial gathering of my immigrant grandmother's family and also of her many cousins, spouses and descendants. I recalled that Youthful Me objected to being dragooned into attending these sessions. I also confessed that I hadn't a glimmer of understanding…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…