Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age 9781472593818, 9781441132536, 9781472590756

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Brooklyn Fictions

Bloomsbury Studies in the City Series Editors: Lawrence Phillips, Regent’s University London, UK; Matthew Beaumont, University College London, UK. Editorial Board: Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London, UK); Professor Brycchan Carey (Kingston University London, UK); Professor Susan Alice Fischer (City University of New York, USA); Professor Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida, USA); Professor Richard Lehan (University of California, USA); Professor John McLeod (University of Leeds, UK); Alex Murray, Lecturer (University of Exeter, UK); Professor Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton University, USA); Professor Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester, UK); Professor Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK); Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge, UK); Professor Judith Walkowitz (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Professor Julian Wolfreys (Loughborough University, UK). The history of literature is tied to the city. From Aeschylus to Addison, Baudelaire to Balzac, Conrad to Coetzee, and Dickens to Dostoevsky, writers make sense of the city and shape modern understandings through their reflections and depictions. The urban is a fundamental aspect of a substantial part of the literary canon that is frequently not considered in and of itself because it is so prevalent. Bloomsbury Studies in the City captures the best contemporary criticism on urban literature and culture. Reading literature, film, drama, and poetry in their historical and social context and alongside urban and spatial theory, this series explores the impact of the city on writers and their work.

Titles in the Series: New Suburban Stories Edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen Irish Writing London: Volumes 1 and 2 Edited by Tom Herron London in Contemporary British Literature Edited by Nick Hubble, Philip Tew, and Lynn Wells Salman Rushdie’s Cities Vassilena Parashkevova G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby

Brooklyn Fictions The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age James Peacock

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diano logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © James Peacock, 2015 James Peacock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-3253-6 PB: 978-1-3500-0373-6 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9075-6 ePub: 978-1-4725-9076-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in the City Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

List of Figures 0.1 1.1 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2

View of downtown Brooklyn from the Brooklyn Bridge “Maddening, magnificent towers”: View of Midtown Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge Brownstone Brooklyn P.S. 321, Park Slope Wildstyle graffiti, Clinton Hill Brooklyn Superhero Supply, Park Slope

4 15 126 147 165 168

Acknowledgments At the risk of sounding as sentimental as some of the stories I critique in this book, I would like to thank the borough of Brooklyn for endless inspiration. The many hours I’ve spent walking its streets have provided exercise for both body and brain. To Eve in Ditmas Park and Liani in Nostrand Avenue—I extend my gratitude for the warm welcome to your beautiful neighborhoods. Special thanks are owed to Edythe Rosenblatt, who took the time to introduce me to the wonderful, rich “Brooklyniana” collection at Brooklyn College Library, and to Martha Nadell, also at Brooklyn College, who was kind enough to share her illuminating thoughts on literary Brooklyn with me. Special mention should also be made of Kevin Dettmar at Pomona College, who helped organize the interview with Jonathan Lethem and gave me the chance to talk about the East Coast on the West Coast. This project would never have come to fruition without the assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who offered me an Early Career Research Fellowship to complete my research and write this monograph. The three peer readers of my original proposal gave me excellent feedback and asked some probing, pertinent questions: for helping me clarify my position on a number of key ideas, please accept my heartfelt thanks. As ever, my colleagues at Keele University, especially Tim Lustig, deserve special praise: thanks for your support—intellectual, administrative, emotional—throughout the project. Warm thanks are due to Ann Hughes and Scott McCracken for their invaluable expert feedback on my original AHRC proposal. And thanks to Yvonne Lomax for sorting out the money. Some of the material in this book has been published elsewhere, in slightly different forms. Sections of Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 7 appeared in “‘New York and yet not New York’: Reading the Region in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions,” European Journal of American Studies 2008–2. The section of Chapter 4 on The Brooklyn Follies appeared in “Faking it or Making it? Forgery, Real Lives and the True Fake in The Brooklyn Follies,” The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011. The material on Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and Girl in Landscape (Chapters 6 and 7, respectively) is greatly abridged and edited but first appeared

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in Jonathan Lethem, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Many thanks to the editors of these publications. The author quotations used in the Introduction and elsewhere are all taken from interviews conducted by the writer of this book. The interviews with Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Amy Sohn took place in late April 2012 on a research trip part-funded by the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Keele University. The interviews with Paul Auster and Reggie Nadelson took place in early June 2013, on a research trip funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of an Early Career Fellowship. The interview with Emily Barton was conducted via email correspondence between late 2012 and 2014. The interview with Michael Gregory Stephens was again funded by Keele University, and took place on November 30, 2013 in London. In Chapter 5, I quote from an interview with Kitty Burns Florey, which took place in New Haven, CT on June 5, 2013 and was also funded by the AHRC. To all the writers who agreed to be interviewed for the project—Paul Auster, Emily Barton, Kitty Burns Florey, Jonathan Lethem, Reggie Nadelson, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Amy Sohn, and Michael Gregory Stephens—thanks for your time and for the pleasure and intellectual stimulation your novels have given me. And finally, to Sheena, Bonnie, and Ruby: words cannot express. Next year in Brooklyn!

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 A Small Town in the World City 2 How to Read Brooklyn—Leaving Brooklyn 3 (Anti)mythic Community—Season at Coole and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead 4 Divisions—Brooklyn Crime 5 Old Frontiers and New Picturesques—Fictions of Brooklyn Gentrification 6 “Brooklyn Style”—Race, Authenticity, and Urban Space 7 Reaching Out, Reaching In—Transnational Brooklyn in Geographies of Home, Brooklyn, and Girl in Landscape Conclusions and Further Thoughts Bibliography Index

vi vii 1 11 41 67 93 123 157 189 215 235 249

Introduction

This is a book about books about Brooklyn. Even if the study of fiction set in the neighborhoods of one borough in one city ostensibly represents a narrow focus for a scholarly monograph, the sheer number of Brooklyn novels published in the last quarter of a century or so, and the diversity of their themes, genres, and narrative voices, open up for analysis an extraordinarily rich literary landscape, and make a fully comprehensive study impossible. To put it in the very simplest terms: a lot of people are writing a lot of different stories about New York’s most populous borough. That fact alone provides motivation enough to write this book, and yet it also means that there must be some regrettable lacunae. In order to make the arguments as clear as possible, certain strategic choices have been made in the writing of this book and these choices have led to some notable omissions. Some novels have been left out because they fall outside the “contemporary” period within which I have chosen to work; others because I have written about them elsewhere; still others because they tread similar territory to novels which, after some consideration, I have decided better exemplify certain themes in Brooklyn fiction. Lest the brief list of omissions that follows seem too dispiriting, the reader is invited to regard it more as a celebration of the richness of the field, one that outstrips the reach of a single scholar. Thus, no value judgment should be inferred from the absence of Pete Hamill, a writer inextricably linked to the borough through his novels, memoirs, short stories, and journalistic essays. Hamill is a perceptive critic of Brooklyn cultural productions, and when he appears within these pages it is chiefly as a critic, but vivid and evocative works such as Snow in August (1998) and The Christmas Kid and Other Brooklyn Stories (2012) are not analyzed. However, Hamill’s are among the most perceptive and affectionate literary portraits of postwar Brooklyn and are recommended. Also missing from this study—purely because they fall outside my temporal parameters (outlined in due course)—are the Brooklyn crime stories of Thomas

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Brooklyn Fictions

Boyle—Only the Dead Know Brooklyn (1986), Post-Mortem Effects (1987) and Brooklyn Three (1991). Grisly and Gothic, yet unashamedly intellectual at heart (as the references to Thomas Wolfe and D. H. Lawrence in their respective titles indicate), these thrillers have much to say about Brooklyn’s famed ethnic diversity, the limits of multiculturalism, and urban transformation. After a crime narrative directly prompted by the inequities attendant on gentrification, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn ends with one of the main characters (who has recently survived being taken hostage by a psychopathic killer), lying back in his Park Slope brownstone, disturbed “by the intermittent sounds of his next-door neighbor stripping paint from his cherrywood shutters, punctuated by water dripping from the toilet bowl into a bucket” (1985: 282). Scenes such as this in Boyle’s writing sardonically capture a Brooklyn in the throes of change, situated uncertainly on a border between different versions of authenticity. Lovers of hard-boiled crime fiction might also be disappointed to find only passing references to Gabriel Cohen’s series of novels featuring Brooklyn detective Jack Leightner. In Red Hook (2002), The Graving Dock (2007), Neptune Avenue (2009), and The Ninth Step (2010), Leightner’s investigations take us through immigrant, traditionally working-class neighborhoods now on the verge of gentrification and into his own troubled past. With the line between cop and criminal frequently blurred, reflections on the diminution of organized crime and the loss of the “waterfront kingdoms” belonging to the old mobsters (Cohen, 2007: 220) become, ironically, nostalgic yearnings for a disappearing sense of face-to-face community. The enduring image in these stories is of “a cold, dank basement in Red Hook” (2007: 217) in which Leightner takes a bullet at the end of his debut: the basement symbolizes the detective’s dark heart, the past that refuses to fade, and the postindustrial bleakness of the dockland areas soon to be redeveloped. Jack Leightner walks very much the same streets as Reggie Nadelson’s detective Artie Cohen, and as Chapter 4 shows, I have chosen Artie over Jack because of the explicitly transnational nature of his detections, not as a comment on the virtues of Gabriel Cohen’s writing. Also in the realm of detection, I can direct lovers of Jonathan Lethem’s dazzling Motherless Brooklyn (1999) to an extended reading of that novel elsewhere, which explores the ways narrator Lionel Essrog’s Tourette’s syndrome functions partly as a metaphor for an idiosyncratic imagining of his very restricted, nostalgic version of Brooklyn.1 Finally, though this book includes readings of several classic twentiethcentury Brooklyn fictions in its search for continuities and its tracing of the 1

See James Peacock, Jonathan Lethem. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

Introduction

3

development of key contemporary concerns, it finds, unfortunately, no room for Wallace Markfield’s uproarious satire of the Jewish family saga Teitelbaum’s Window (1971). Its absence, like the absence of Hamill’s and Boyle’s novels, stems from the strategic choices I have made (specifically, to trace, in Chapter 2, the lineage of female coming-of-age stories beginning with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). It should not be seen as a dismissal of a novel which, in its formal innovation, the vertiginous extremes of its dialogue and its outrageous humor, shares much with the best writing of Philip Roth. So why does Brooklyn attract the attention of so many literary practitioners— not just borough natives but also Manhattanites, migrants from other parts of the United States, and writers born beyond America’s borders? What do these writers actually think about it? In Chapter 1, further evidence of Brooklyn’s importance is adduced, supported by literary analysis and theoretical ideas, but it is revealing at this early stage to ask some of the writers themselves. Although there are some pronounced differences in opinion among these novelists, certain recurring themes, strongly suggesting a line of inquiry for the study that follows, do emerge. New Jersey-born Paul Auster, who claims to find the tendency of contemporary critics to call him “The Bard of Brooklyn” frankly “hilarious,” attributes Brooklyn’s unique popular appeal partly to the construction of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, which he calls “one of the wonders of the world at the time,” and partly to the borough’s history, the fact that “it was its own city for many years” before being assimilated into Greater New York in 1898. (He shares this fascination with Emily Barton, whose 2006 novel Brookland begins in the late eighteenth century when, in the author’s words, Brooklyn “was still largely rural, a collection of small towns with tracts of farmland in between.”) While neighboring Queens, Auster emphasizes, has a population even more diverse than the one for which Brooklyn is celebrated, he suggests that it is the complex and resistant self-identification engendered by the loss of independence that gives Brooklyn its unique character. Most of all, Brooklyn is a desirable place to live and to write about because of its “horizontal babble,” the clamor of neighborhood voices made possible, Auster argues, by its lower-rise architectural landscape and, consequently, a less concentrated population than in the metropolitan center. Auster feels “anonymous” in Manhattan because: “the population is so dense there. The buildings are so tall, there’s so many people in the streets. [. . .] It’s too populous to be a neighborhood, it seems to me.” In Brooklyn, by contrast, the “sense of neighborhood” that inspires novels like The Brooklyn Follies (2005) is inspired by a space more conducive to overhearing the

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Brooklyn Fictions

Figure 0.1 View of downtown Brooklyn from the Brooklyn Bridge. Photograph by James Peacock.

kinds of outlandish conversations the author remembers from the barbers on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope: “You can just sit there and listen to some of their conversations and there are a lot of older guys from the neighborhood come in there just to sit and talk. And some of those conversations are so hilarious I can barely contain myself as I’m getting my hair cut [. . .] The put-downs they have in Brooklyn—I’ve never heard such things. They were talking about a singer, who has a bad voice and ‘yeah, well he sings the national anthem at cock fights’.” The implied positive values in Auster’s anecdotes—history, family ties, face-toface proximity, humor—are consistent touchstones in writing about Brooklyn (Figure 0.1). For Amy Sohn, author of My Old Man (2005), Prospect Park West (2009), and Motherland (2012), Brooklyn differs from Manhattan in its dedication to “stoop life. You know, how people hang out on their stoops, on the street even, kids play on the sidewalk.” Citing, like Auster, examples of Brooklyn’s many eccentric local characters, such as “a white woman who wears her hair in dreadlocks and she wears Yohji Yamamoto expensive-looking designer clothes but then wears them with flipflops and is always feeding birds,” Sohn argues: “I think that is an aspect

Introduction

5

of neighborhood living that’s unique to neighborhood living, which is that you know faces but not names.” In Brooklyn, one can feel a connection with such characters simply by passing them in the street on a regular basis. (This is the inspiration for the italicized interchapters in her novels, which describe events in the lives of otherwise incidental figures.) And yet, she stresses, “distinctions are narrowing”: with gentrification, with the massive influx of affluent professionals many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods have experienced since the 1970s, “you no longer need to go to Manhattan for certain things the way that you once did” and, indeed, large swathes of “Brownstone Brooklyn” are “becoming much more like Manhattan, like certain neighborhoods in Manhattan, like the West Village or the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side.” Though Sohn says that there remain “so many Brooklyns,” a process of homogenization is well under way: “There’s less and less of old Brooklyn and there’s more and more of new Brooklyn.” “Old” and “new” are heavily overdetermined in this context: the former simultaneously connotes affordability, a working-class neighborhood sensibility, authenticity, and grittiness; the latter suggests expensive real estate, yuppie aspiration, and a decline in respect and neighborhood values. These negative qualities are epitomized, rather ironically, by “the assault on private space” enacted by young mothers with strollers, pavement-hogging kissing couples, and those who “pick their baby names on a messageboard.” Sohn’s writing, with its gleeful dissection of the scurrilous lives of Brooklyn’s celebrity and yuppie classes, might be seen as an ironic literary “assault on private space,” a satirical exaggeration of the mechanisms by which “neighborliness” mutates into something more intrusive and corrosive. Lynne Sharon Schwartz acknowledges Brooklyn’s transformation from an “intensely provincial” place in the mid-twentieth century (when Leaving Brooklyn is set) into somewhere more glamorous and cosmopolitan in the latter half of the twentieth century: “I grew up in Brooklyn in the 40s and 50s. It’s completely changed; then Brooklyn was truly boring and Manhattan was romantic and now it’s almost the reverse.” Of particular interest to the study that follows is her claim that “Brooklyn is now divided into many neighborhoods”: the temporal adverb subtly historicizes the concept of “neighborhood” in a way that serves as a rebuttal of the organicism and timelessness so often attributed to it. And by observing that formerly “Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Sunset Park—these names didn’t exist” she implies that neighborhood formation, in which nomenclature plays an important part, does not happen accidentally or naturally: it relies on purposeful acts, ideologically motivated. Michael Gregory Stephens makes a similar point in describing the 1970s transformation of “East New York,”

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the setting of his novel The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994), into the more picturesque-sounding “Ocean Hill Brownsville.” After noting the recent influx of young people and independent coffee shops into the area, he wryly observes: “there’s very few hills in Brooklyn.” Lynne Sharon Schwartz rejects the idea of Manhattan’s anonymity. Having lived there for four decades, she sees it as “a collection of neighborhoods” just like Brooklyn. Her opinion is shared by Reggie Nadelson, author of the Artie Cohen detective thrillers. Acknowledging that Manhattan is, and has always been, “the global place,” she goes on to stress: “of course, Manhattan has its communities and its tribes: you just have to kind of get into it.” And yet, as Emily Barton notes, the believed distinction between borough and center survives, despite the economic realities: It’s funny to me that the Brooklyn/Manhattan divide still endures in the popular imagination as a bucolic/urban one. People still talk about ‘moving out to Brooklyn’ as if that’s prudent, cheap, a way to get one’s family a saner way of life. It still was, well into the 1990s, and probably remains so for people who bought property then or found rent-stabilized apartments. But at this point, it doesn’t seem one could buy even a tiny, derelict house in brownstone Brooklyn for less than a million dollars. If one wanted to live in the historically desirable areas (Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope), a house would cost much, much more. So the only people who can choose at this moment to enjoy this ‘saner’ life are partners in law firms, advertising executives, well-paid actors, and people with family money.

Brooklyn, she suggests, remains synonymous with the idea of a “saner,” more neighborly life, but this ideal is attainable only to those with the financial means. What connects these views on Brooklyn as a place to live and to inspire fiction is an abiding concern with community, a term that for sociologists has “traditionally designated a particular form of social organization based on small groups, such as neighborhoods, the small town, or a spatially bounded locality” (Delanty, 2003: 2). This traditional understanding of face-to face local relations, it is widely believed, is being challenged by, among other developments, “the crisis in solidarity and belonging that has been exacerbated and at the same time induced by globalization” (2003: 2). On the streets, in academic publications, and in the online forums held partly responsible for the decline in face-to-face relations, people are speculating about whether community is disappearing, whether it has become at best a vestigial romantic concept under global capital.

Introduction

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Brooklyn Fictions: the Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age takes Brooklyn as a case study for an exploration of these issues and for an interrogation of the intrinsic virtues of “community” as an idea. The book might best be seen as a work of “literary sociology” in its combination of literary analysis and sociological theory by scholars such as Gerard Delanty, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, and Miranda Joseph. To a significant extent, it begs also to be seen in the broad context of the “spatial turn” in the humanities, and thus is indebted to theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja, and David Harvey, even if they are cited only sparingly in the pages that follow. One must also acknowledge the substantial body of work on regional literature in the United States, including books like Tom Lutz’s Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (2004) and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse’s Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2005). To consider Brooklyn a distinctive place is clearly to draw on some regionalist conceptions in an urban environment, but few of the novels examined here can be considered “regional” in the manner proposed by Lutz, and my emphasis is very much on the endurance of “neighborhood” as a marker of value, making “community” a more logical umbrella term. Finally, Brooklyn Fictions, though distinguished by the close attention it pays to the one borough, joins a growing body of work interested in the implications, for localities and individual identities, of globalization as revealed through literary texts. Stimulating recent examples include: James Annesley’s Fictions of Globalisation (2006); Judith Newman’s Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (2007); David Cowart’s Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (2007); and Aliki Varvogli’s Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction (2012). All these works, like mine, participate in debates that have been exercising the minds of American Studies scholars for several decades: to what extent should “America” be considered as a nation-state synonymous with the United States or as a set of globally exported ideas? At what point is the national superseded by the transnational as an adequate descriptor of identity and cultural value? How does American identity change in an era of mass migration and rapidly shifting demographics? Does locality continue to have significance in a globalized world? It is hoped that Brooklyn Fictions will make a worthwhile contribution to these debates. Chapter 1 proceeds from the anecdotal observations included in this preface, and explores in more depth the suitability of Brooklyn for this project, as well as its vexed relationship with Manhattan. It then develops, with reference to a number of sociological theorists, a working definition of the hotly contested

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term “community” which might be applied to the contemporary situation. It also argues for the novel’s unique capabilities in representing complex and changing communities which include disparate individuals. Necessarily, the use of “contemporary” in this book is quite broad: it describes a period of some 24 years between the publication of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn in 1989 and that of Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. in 2013. The reasons for this breadth are several. First, it covers a period that includes both rapid gentrification in many parts of Brooklyn and the rise of “Brooklyn” as a byword for a certain kind of hip. Secondly, it allows for an exploration of the changes in attitude, as revealed through the novels, to these ideas, and representations of the different stages of development the borough has undergone. However, the book does not proceed in a straightforwardly chronological way. Though Chapter 2 focuses on Leaving Brooklyn, discovering in the deep metaphor Schwartz employs in this novel a useful model for the readings that follow in subsequent chapters, my choice of texts in those chapters is governed by thematic and generic congruities rather than dates of publication. Just as Brooklyn Fictions unpicks the complex relationship between local and global—globalization’s effect on the texture of locales, but equally the feedback from local particularities into global forces and institutions—so the developing local narratives that emerge from the specific links between novels in each chapter contribute to a global understanding of how Brooklyn fictions have addressed this relationship. Chapter 3 looks at Michael Gregory Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994) with reference to its predecessor Season at Coole (1972). Uncompromisingly bleak and unsentimental (though not without humor), Stephens’ writing offsets the romanticism of many other Brooklyn stories. In this respect, it might be seen as exemplifying a strand of contemporary “realism”—perhaps that which Robert Rebein calls “dirty realism,” of a mode “in both subject matter and technique that is somewhere between the hard-boiled and the darkly comic” (2001: 43). According to Patrick O’ Donnell, dirty realism sets out to reveal the unpalatable truths “located in narratives of family, class, addiction, and escape” (2010: 47). This is certainly true of Stephens’ work: family as the de facto unit of community is exposed as a myth or a fantasy that attempts to hide utter dysfunction. And yet, as Chapter 3 argues, his novels also put pressure on the very idea of realism in fiction. If the novel is a kind of community, as Raymond Williams has famously declared, then the question of realism is important precisely because communities are both real and imagined and because “community” as a perceived force for good is ideological in basis.

Introduction

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Chapter 4 examines a remarkably popular and generative genre of Brooklyn fiction: the crime novel. Taking in a diverse range of authors and texts, from Reggie Nadelson’s hard-boiled detective thrillers to Paul Auster’s story of an eclectic band of squatters, Sunset Park (2010), this chapter explores the relationship between crime and place, and challenges the conventional assumption that crime destroys communities. Rather, in highlighting socioeconomic disparities and the patterns of inclusivity and exclusivity inherent to community formation, it participates in the creation of different social groupings. In these diverse novels, a variety of crimes in a variety of neighborhoods express a variety of fears related to the status of the contemporary community: authenticity, bourgeoisification, immigration, and the changing urban landscape. Chapter 4 includes novels such as Nadelson’s Red Hook (2005) which are expressly about the rapid redevelopment of Brooklyn’s old industrial areas. Chapters 5 and 6 continue with this theme and can expediently be considered together here because they are both concerned, to differing extents, with gentrification. As the author interviews cited above imply, gentrification is the single most important phenomenon to have affected Brooklyn in the decades since World War II. It distils questions of class, economics, race, and urban space and shows how communities form, fragment, coalesce, and come into violent conflict in response to a multitude of factors, including urban planning, strategic decisions made by banks, population migrations, and changing tastes in architecture and interior design. Chapter 5 follows literary depictions of gentrification, starting with a brief engagement with Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970) and finishing with Joanna Smith Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age (2009). It traces changes in representational strategies which reflect ideological shifts: earlier novels depicting a hostile frontier between existing working-class residents and settlers make way for a form of picturesque gentrification novel in which dangers and potential conflicts are airbrushed out in favor of local color and aesthetically pleasing diversity. In what I have called “the novel of Brooklyn motherhood,” examples of which include Thomas Rayfiel’s Parallel Play (2007) and Amy Shearn’s The Mermaid of Brooklyn (2013), the limits of this diversity are tested. Stressed middle-class mothers in these stories edge, often very reluctantly, toward an understanding of their own class and racial prejudices through intensely protective relationships with their children in alreadygentrified neighborhoods. Chapter 6 surveys both ghettos and gentrified areas in its examination of how race is represented in four contemporary Brooklyn fictions: Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), Michael Thomas’

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Brooklyn Fictions

Man Gone Down (2007), and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) and Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008). As the next chapter reveals in more detail, Brooklyn’s identity is inextricably linked to its history as an immigrant destination. Throughout this book, movement and migration are important themes. To offer two examples: Michael Stephens’ novels focus on the Irish immigrant experience and Reggie Nadelson’s detective hero is a Russian-born Jew who spent several years in Israel before moving to New York. In Chapter 7 the focus moves specifically to transnational (and in the case of one of the novels, interplanetary) movements to argue for the centrality of immigrant experience to a nuanced understanding of Brooklyn as a place of multiple mobilities in a globalized world, and as what one might call a transnational locality. The Conclusion, as well as summarizing the key arguments of the book, reiterates the importance of immigrant experience and speculates on new genres of the Brooklyn novel. A novel may constitute a kind of community of relationships, but it is also a form long associated with the deep interior lives of individual protagonists. In using Brooklyn fictions to explore changing conceptions of community, I am not limiting myself only to reflections on large collectives, bounded groupings, or abstract institutions. This would be impossible, in any case. Rather, I tell a story of how individuals constantly reassess their physical and psychological placement in different communities, and how that endless process of reassessment can inspire an altered sense of selfhood and a modification of the idea of “belonging.” Questioning the boundaries of self, as characters in these novels do, requires a concomitant questioning of community boundaries, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of all these ideas for an age of mobility and rapid change.

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A Small Town in the World City

Brooklyn is the world’s largest small town. McLoughlin and Adcock, 2008: 3 People really care about “community,” even if each person’s definition of the word is different. It is an idea about which it is impossible to feel indifferent. Miranda Joseph, criticizing certain poststructuralist theorists who advocate a kind of “political passivity or paralyzing relativism” in their approaches to the issue, argues that “they seem to miss the whole reason that community is interesting at all, which is to say the fact that community generates not an attitude of ‘whatever’ but rather the strongest of passions” (Joseph, 2002: xxx). This chapter does many things. It builds on the ideas sketched out in the Introduction and further justifies its choice of location. It demonstrates awareness of the paradoxes inherent in the analysis of a place that is frequently proclaimed as unique and yet also as representative of all that is good about “community.” It explores the contested meanings and implications of “community” before moving toward a working understanding of the term for the chapters that follow. It suggests that the novel, which, as Jonathan Lethem argues, contains “too many individual moments, too many connections between words in sentences, sentences in paragraphs, paragraphs in chapters, and also too many different possible realms of activity” (“Hypergraphia,” 2007: 28), has a formal complexity which equips it for the representation of complex communities. And with this in mind, it finishes with a brief case study of a formally complex Brooklyn fiction— Gilbert Sorrentino’s Steelwork (1970). What the chapter does not do is offer a literary biography or history of Brooklyn; it does not explore the lives of the numerous writers who have made Brooklyn their home and their subject. For such a study, the reader is best advised to seek out Evan Hughes’ Literary Brooklyn: the Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (2011). One point I would take from Hughes is this: what

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Brooklyn Fictions

unites the writers of Brooklyn is not “style” or genre. There is no “aesthetic camp” in the borough (Hughes, 2011: 3). What connects Brooklyn fiction makers is the decision to live, for whatever reason, “just outside the colossal, churning center of the metropolis” (Hughes, 2011: 3). This spatial reality, which becomes an imaginative trope and in many cases an assumed ethical position, is, as we shall see, vital to the construction of Brooklyn in the texts I examine. It makes Brooklyn a testing ground for a number of issues pertaining to community: as Martha Nadell eloquently summarizes: “Through a number of genres—the coming-of-age novel, the crime tale, and the memoir—Brooklyn becomes a site for meditations on the language befitting modern urban life; on the contrast between an imagined New York cosmopolitanism and an ostensibly authentic ethnic, working-class, or religious provincialism; on the spatial and temporal construction of collective and individual identity; on the figuration of memory in the sights, smells, and sounds of the street; and on the physical and figurative cartography of social inclusion and exclusion” (2010: 110).

Why Brooklyn? For now, I hope the reader will indulge me if I postpone more nuanced definitions of the key term “community” while I outline, by way of some anecdotal and necessarily selective examples, the reasons why Brooklyn arouses the passions about which Miranda Joseph speaks. The first part of the chapter, therefore, dedicates itself to the adducing of further evidence, for even the most cursory examination of cultural artifacts pertaining to Brooklyn as a community reveals passionate identifications and mythologies undimmed by their repetition, by the passing of time, or by spiralling real estate values. As we saw in the Introduction, famous Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster (to give him one of his customary appellations) regularly eulogizes his adopted neighborhood, Park Slope: “[e]veryone lives there, every race and religion and economic class, and everyone pretty much gets along. Given the climate in the country today, I would say that qualifies as a miracle” (2003: 18). This is Brooklyn in one of its most enduring characterizations, as the epitome of e pluribus unum, a place of extraordinary size and diversity, yet a place where, to quote just one of the many enthusiastic residents interviewed for Seth Kushner and Anthony LaSala’s celebratory book The Brooklynites, “your local baker [. . .] knows how many sugars you have in your coffee” (2007: 106). The local baker participates in a telling metonymy: as Miranda Joseph states, in traditional romantic discourse

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community is always spatially conceived of in terms of localism and face-toface relations, in contrast to anonymous global forces of capital too enormous and abstracted to comprehend (Joseph, 2002: 1). Such a small town, quirky Brooklyn emerges in Auster’s own Smoke and Blue in the Face (1995), and in Brooklyn Follies (2005), in Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos (2004), and in many recent autobiographical accounts written by borough residents. In the anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, for example, Philip Dray remarks: “It was in Brooklyn that I learned what it meant to live in a small town” (2008: 125). Equally revealing is Hal Sirowitz’s foreword to Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, in which he declares: “This collection maps the human heart’s desire to live in a utopian community” (2007: xiii). His sentiments epitomize the curious interactions and tensions between the local and the global that characterize even the coziest and most sentimental discussions of Brooklyn community and, I would argue, all viable discussions of community. On the one hand, he can say, referring to Coney Island institution Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs’ decision to “go national”: “As soon as a frankfurter is eaten away from the beach, it doesn’t taste the same. It becomes flavorless, like other brands” (2007: xiii). On the other hand, he can confidently declare one paragraph later that “[t]his book isn’t only for Brooklyn residents but for all those who value community” (2007: xiii). So rapid and subtle is the shift in Sirowitz’s perspective from geographical specificity to Brooklyn as allegory of supposedly timeless ideas like “community” that it is almost imperceptible, but it is, as we shall see, very much the crux of the matter. Every Brooklyn represented in movies, television programs, and literary texts (the focus of this book) is simultaneously “Brooklyn,” an imagined set of ideals, symbols, neighborhood priorities, myths, and values which lends the borough a powerful self-allegorizing force and which is sometimes only tenuously related to the place itself. Philip Lopate’s introduction to Brooklyn Was Mine expresses it slightly differently, while recognizing what is at stake: “Not just a place, Brooklyn has become an idea, a symbol, and a contested one at that” (2008: 5). One of the key issues in analyzing Brooklyn fictions is the extent to which this allegorical or symbolic ambition is coyly elided, resulting in an allegorical Brooklyn that is substituted wholly for the “real” borough, or, in more critical and deconstructive works such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn (1989) and Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994)—texts dealt with in Chapters 2 and 3 of this study—made the central subject of the narrative. According to Jonathan Lethem, whose novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003) are at least in part about the attractions and the potential pitfalls of imagined and idealized communities of the past, the borough

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can be considered “the conscience of New York” because its attitude to the past embraces a specific kind of ambivalence: While Manhattan tears everything down and changes everything, Brooklyn does a similar thing, but fails miserably at it. It is a crazy quilt of a place. A mongrel place of sorts. It mixes old and modern in a haphazard way. It represents a tiny microcosm of the world—a functional utopia. There is also a weakness for nostalgia here, but it is a flinty and cold-eyed nostalgia. Brooklynites sort of have a built in shrug about nostalgia while still caring about it. (qtd. in Kushner, 2007: 14)

Suleiman Osman, writing about the brownstoner movement of the 1960s and 1970s, says something similar when he observes that Brownstone Brooklyn is composed of “multiple layers,” with “the sediment from each historic cityscape seeping into the others” (2011: 22–3). The “flinty-eyed nostalgia” Lethem invokes reverberates throughout writing on Brooklyn and finds a counterpart in what Pete Hamill calls “the essential Brooklyn style,” which is “an irresistible (for a writer) combination of toughness and lyricism” (1994: xiii). Michael Stephens, in his essay collection Green Dreams, locates it in the “stereotype” of “the drunken, brawling Irishman with the heart of a poet” (1994: xv). There is utopianism in all of these examples, but a brand of utopianism which is aware that utopia in its purest form is unattainable and even undesirable because it tends toward exclusion. Lethem’s comments represent an extended articulation of the “fuhgeddaboudit” sentiment immortalized on the Belt Parkway road sign as one drives out of Brooklyn. Even as it enshrines a certain community ethos and spirit, the sign urges one not to make too much of it, yet also acts as an exhortation not to leave Brooklyn. Moreover, it reminds us, as do Lethem’s thoughts, that whether or not “community must not always be seen in retrospect” (Williams, 1993: 104), it very often is. Fond recollections of the past are as much about willed amnesia as they are memory.

Why not Manhattan? This tension between past and present in depictions of Brooklyn, and in discussions of community more generally, becomes central to the argument of this book, but for now it is important to highlight another aspect of Lethem’s analysis which is nonetheless bound up in an embodied relationship between past and present: the contrast with Brooklyn’s glamorous, aspirant neighbor

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Figure 1.1 “Maddening, magnificent towers”: View of Midtown Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge. Photograph by James Peacock.

across the water—Manhattan (Figure 1.1). Jonathan Lethem once again adeptly crystallizes some of the key differences: “The thing about Brooklyn that seems to me most definitive is that it’s a negotiation, and a visible negotiation. Walking down the street is a negotiation; trying to make neighborhoods out of these incoherent areas is a negotiation, and it’s undisguised. In Manhattan the claim is being asserted that the job is done, that the glorious result has been arrived at” (Peacock, 2011). In keeping with his sardonic, “flinty-eyed” outlook, Lethem celebrates the pull of the past in these Brooklyn streets, in contrast to the future-driven smoothing over of history in Manhattan, but ascribes it, in part, to Brooklyn’s ineptitude. It aspires to be like Manhattan, building things anew, rushing headlong into a glorious modernity, but never quite succeeds: “It’s a place where the renovations that are so characteristic of American life never quite work. It’s a place where the past and memory are lying around in chunks even after they’ve been displaced” (Zeitchik, 2003: 37). Despite their

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more wryly ironic tone, Lethem’s comments are consistent with earlier literary comparisons between Manhattan and Brooklyn, such as Carson McCullers’ “Brooklyn is My Neighborhood”: “Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister. Things move more slowly out here (the streetcars still rattle leisurely down most of the streets), and there is a feeling for tradition” (McCullers, 1994: 144). The temptation to deconstruct the ideological underpinning of McCullers’ words is strong, especially the precise causes of Brooklyn’s complacency, as well as the unquestioning assumption that Manhattan’s “neurotic” aspiration cannot be in its own way a “tradition” (and one constitutive of the neighboring borough’s sense of what is traditional). But it is sufficient to note that in a sizeable majority of the fictions with which this book deals, the same opposition between Manhattan as “land of opportunity” fixated on reinvention (Stephens, 1994a: 224) and Brooklyn as the embracement of tradition and the past is recalibrated and played out. In Martin Tucker’s words, Brooklyn, unlike Manhattan, “has played the fictional role of sheltering home and quasi-family, almost akin to those regional novels in which the central characters fall back on rural and small-town values to sustain them in their journeys outward” (1988: 9). Whether it be Kitty Burns Florey’s fantasy of a bohemian Williamsburg on the brink of obsolescence, or Michael Stephens’ embittered East New York in which sons habitually rehearse the vices of their fathers, the lure of the past in these texts is often so strong and the contrast with Manhattan so cherished, as to assume distinctly neurotic qualities themselves. As R. P. Draper observes, it is frequently the very presence of a perceived colonizing other (in this case, Manhattan) which heightens awareness of regional or community identity in the first place (1989: 5). This is a familiar enough idea, of course, yet the urgency of the repetition of difference revealed in these examples surely suggests a traumatic basis. And, as Pete Hamill explains, there may well be specific historical reasons why Brooklyn retains a feeling of traumatic loss, and thus why “[m]illions of older Brooklynites, those who stayed and those who departed, live with a sense of a lost Eden in their imaginations, a collective memory of a time and place in which they were young and innocent and happy” (1994: xii). Brooklyn’s “poignant sense of lost, prelapsarian identity” (Lopate, 2006) stems, in the majority of accounts, from its assimilation into New York City on January 1, 1898, the so-called “Mistake of ’98” (Thrush, 2001: 331). On the evening of December

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31, 1897, as historian François Weil describes it: “In Brooklyn, there was no celebration. The Common Council had organized a sober ceremony in its chamber” (2004: 166). And, on the day of union, while Manhattan “rejoiced,” there was an air of “funereal melancholy” on the other side of the water (Weil, 2004: 167). Arguably, this is a mood that has persisted and since become an expedient in representations of Brooklyn in contrast and opposition to Manhattan. Yet simply to accept the melancholic view of traumatic loss is to ignore a multitude of ironies both historical and theoretical. From its charter as a city in 1834, Brooklyn grew rapidly in terms of population and industrial production. Yet, as Alan Trachtenberg explains, “a vigorous village pride persisted in Brooklyn throughout the century. Early in its years of growth the spirit of localism was defensive; members of the older generation set their teeth to resist the encroaching metropolitanism represented in Manhattan” (1979: 35). Despite all evidence to the contrary, important civic figures such as Mayor Jeremiah Johnson spoke of Brooklyn as a distinct region protected from Manhattan’s commercialism by natural geography. Additionally, in Walt Whitman’s series of vignettes for the Brooklyn Standard, the borough is portrayed largely in pastoral mode, with reference made to local traditions, family bonds, and to the fertile soils and attractive woodlands that had made Brooklyn more inviting to the earliest Dutch settlers (Whitman, 1989: 222–325). The first irony, then, is that this defensive localism and the “civic boosting” to which it inevitably led (Trachtenberg, 1979: 36) helped precipitate first the building of the bridge (opened in 1883) that has come simultaneously to symbolize Brooklyn and its loss of separate city status and secondly the city’s eventual assimilation into Greater New York. And the second irony is that at the precise moment a singular identity is seemingly lost (on January 1, 1898), a new identity is hypostasized, one based on crude oppositions between before and after, between idealized past and debased present. But with new traumas come new pasts and new presents. In Pete Hamill’s words: “The details of such powerful nostalgias are different for every generation, often for every neighborhood, but the impulse is persistent. A voice always seems to whisper: There was another place here once and it was better than this” (1994: xii). In his brief introduction alone, Hamill mentions a number of historical crisis moments for Brooklyn in addition to 1898: “the driving of the subways out past Prospect Park around the time of World War I” (1994: xii); the highway construction that opened up Eastern Long Island, enabling “the great flight to the suburbs” in the 1950s (1994: xiii); and, shatteringly, the closure of the

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Brooklyn Eagle in 1955 and the departure of The Dodgers to California in 1957. All heralded real demographic and cultural changes as well as a deeply imagined denigration of the sense of Brooklyn community, whether or not the latter can be regarded as a “delusion [. . .] as vivid and concrete as any great fiction” (Hamill, 1994: xii). Of these examples, it is the closure of Ebbett’s Field and the loss of The Dodgers that continues to resonate most profoundly. As a microcosm of community sentiment and as a channel for “social memory” (Brown, 2003: 145), baseball has assumed a revenant quality in representations of Brooklyn. In Paul Auster’s appropriately named Ghosts, watching the Dodgers helps Blue escape his isolation and feel part of the community, partly (and ironically) because “the geometric simplicity” of the diamond and “the sharp clarity of the colors” (1987: 156) provide a model of demarcation, of social differences rendered neat, visible, and innocuous, and partly because the disparate members of the crowd can unite in celebration of Jackie Robinson, the first black Major League player. Through Mookie’s replica shirt in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), the ghost who admonishes Victor Argo’s shop owner in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Blue in the Face, and the signed baseball given to detective Artie Cohen in Reggie Nadelson’s Red Hook, Robinson endures as a reminder of what Brooklyn is believed to have lost. To this point, I am aware, my approach has resembled bricolage: by compiling an eclectic range of sources, I hope to have created a picture of Brooklyn (or, more accurately, “Brooklyn,” its symbolic or allegorical partner) as it is commonly represented. Such an approach might be justified by arguing that the presentation of these congruencies between very different literary and filmic texts echoes the unity in diversity for which Brooklyn is so often celebrated. Reiterated almost to the point of neurosis, Brooklyn’s characteristics are, as we have seen, this diversity and (relative) harmony; a sentimental, lyrical, nostalgic impulse to some extent counterbalanced with a knowing, sometimes cynical toughness; a deep-seated sense of a lost Eden and a lost former identity; and an adherence to local, small-town, somewhat old-fashioned community values in contrast to Manhattan’s obsessive aspiration, its desire to smooth over the past and drive endlessly forwards. Jonathan Lethem has coined a new adjective to describe this desire. When, in Motherless Brooklyn, narrator Lionel Essrog describes the clients of the Boerum Hill Inn as “Manhattanized,” he is referring to a willed negation of past narratives, a melancholic spirit of newness, and a homogenizing impulse spurred on by capital’s desire to maximize an aspirant, bourgeois consumer market. This “dressed-up crowd at the inn” is “oblivious to the neighborhood’s

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past or present reality” (Lethem, 2004: 239). In other words, globalized, capitaldriven Manhattan is encroaching on local, old-style Brooklyn. It is worth noting at this juncture that Lethem’s employment of the word “neighborhood” is of great importance to any study of literature about Brooklyn. Throughout the fictions examined in the proceeding chapters (and indeed in sociological works such as Ray Suarez’s The Old Neighborhood [1999]), “neighborhood” is the unit of community most cherished, most romanticized, most fetishized, and, in some cases, most impressively satirized. As Philip Lopate expresses it: “In our day—with the metropolis threatened by forces of globalization, cyberspace, and suburbanization—the word neighborhood, as the locus of mundane, face-to-face encounters, has taken on a quality of almost mystical longing for a vanished ideal, side by side with its continuing existence as a reality in a few places, such as . . . Brooklyn” (2008: 6). Judith N. DeSena and Timothy Shortell argue that global, immigrant mobility in Brooklyn, “a place of neighborhoods,” works in tandem with local mobilities in the form of “displacement of lower status communities by higher status populations—also known as gentrification” (2012: 1). Thus, “neighborhood” as a concept inevitably embraces local and global perspectives in the same way that “community” is fundamentally ambivalent, denoting “locality and particularness” and “the universal community in which all human beings participate” (Delanty, 2003: 12). From Paul Auster’s Park Slope to Kitty Burns Florey’s Williamsburg, from Michael Stephens’ East New York to Jonathan Lethem’s Gowanus, “neighborhood” distils issues of loss, nostalgia, community relations, and economics and is frequently seen to have offered the last line of defense against Manhattan’s insidious homogenizing influence. In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, such a view of Manhattanization was prevalent but incessantly contradicted by Brooklyn’s advertising of itself to the big businesses of Manhattan. As Trachtenberg explains, “Brooklyn businessmen wanted closer ties with the market of Manhattan; they wanted more New Yorkers to cross the river, to live on Long Island and buy their goods there” (1979: 36). Even Walt Whitman, who let us not forget extolled the natural and geographical virtues of the region as well as its local traditions, joined in the sales pitch, happily proclaiming that Brooklyn, with its cheap gas and cleaner water, was “steadily drawing hither the best portion of the business population of the great adjacent metropolis” (Whitman, 1989: 56). What is clear is that the vision of Brooklyn as an ideal site for capital investment did not supersede the vision of the village locale, but was partly sustained by it, the dream of the village marketed as one of the chief attractions to prospective businesses.

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Brooklyn in the world city Given that the imagined differences between Brooklyn and Manhattan evidently still exist in the minds of writers, filmmakers, and the general population, one would imagine that in the contemporary (i.e., late-twentiethand early-twenty-first-century) context—the age of, to paint in rather broad strokes, globalization, free market capitalism, rampant consumerism, virtual communities, and hypertechnology—any attempt to assert some kind of local, down-home community identity in a place like New York would be fraught with even more exaggerated tensions and contradictions. After all, New York is in so many ways regarded as a “world city,” one of “a small number of centres [including London, Tokyo and Paris] that are the command and control points for global capitalism,” places where capital accumulates and is rapidly distributed (Clark, 2006: 156). Twice as populous as the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, New York is, according to Nancy Foner, “a receiving city, in many ways, like no other in the United States” (2007: 1,000). Foner’s statistics, deployed in the service of her argument that New York has to be seen as distinctively multicultural and international, are impressive: between 1990 and 1996 more than 20 countries sent 5,000 or more immigrants to New York; in 2000 approximately 36 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born (and, according to the 2011 US Census, more than 900,000 residents of Brooklyn in 2009 were foreign-born. If these people had their own city, it would be one of the top ten biggest cities in the country); there is a large immigrant population of non-Hispanic whites, unlike many other American cities, and, moreover, the Hispanic population is not dominated by any one nationality. Most significantly, perhaps, Foner stresses that multiculturalism is not restricted to bald population figures; it is enshrined in city legislation and in the processes of political coalitionbuilding. There is an “official commitment to cultural pluralism and cultural diversity” (2007: 1,004) which stimulates a high degree of political, cultural, and economic mobility for immigrants and implies that “New York City’s political culture bears the stamp of earlier European immigration” (2007: 1,003). With her accounts of relaxed parking restrictions during Diwali celebrations and Fiorella LaGuardia’s speeches peppered with Italian and Yiddish phrases (2007: 1,003), Foner’s tale, statistics and all, is undoubtedly as romantic as Carson McCullers’ or Paul Auster’s, but makes a compelling case nonetheless for New York as a city developed from global input and with an equally global outlook.

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A Brooklynite insistence on localism and a recognizable regional identity is surely thrown into sharper relief when one considers, in addition to these demographic aspects, the number of international institutions based in New York City—the United Nations, global media organizations such as NBC, CBS, FOX, and Time Warner, the numerous financial companies with international influence based on Wall Street. Indeed, some business people, journalists, and sociologists go even further, employing the neologism “NY-LON” to denote “a symbolic kind of unification” between New York and London (Hahn, 2005: 88). Despite the geographical separation, the two capitals together achieve a recognizable communal identity by virtue of their financial and business links, and the fact that residents of the cities think nothing of commuting across the ocean to their places of work. As Kornelia Hahn stresses: “A characteristic of NY-LON is its role as a leader in film, television, and pop music production; publishing; and the new economy in general” (Hahn, 2005: 88). And the differences in local “spirit” Hahn acknowledges between these cities imply a conception of identity and community no longer based solely on space or propinquity but on, among other things, money as “a symbolic medium that circulates among persons and creates certain types of relationships” (2005: 88–9). The role of capital in community formations, as becomes increasingly evident in the pages that follow, is of particular relevance to the depiction of Brooklyn in many novels, especially those that concern themselves with gentrification and its effects on the composition and culture of neighborhoods. If one subscribed to the traditional, primarily spatialized, and romantic conception of community, then it would be easy to perceive in a phenomenon such as NY-LON a threat to face-to-face manifestations of togetherness and to the ideals “Brooklyn” epitomizes. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, records a number of factors leading to a contemporary “devaluation of local opinions” and a degradation of local community in his book Community (2001: 63). While acknowledging that there has always been a tension between freedom and security in community (2001: 20), he acknowledges that travel and informatics have further destabilized the notion by elevating “extraterritoriality.” Extraterritorial individuals are mobile, liquid, global, cosmopolitan, yet ultimately have no interest in the kind of “new global cultural synthesis” NY-LON might ostensibly celebrate (2001: 55). Rather, their ideal is a private, individualistic aloofness, a secession from intimacy based on “a series of new beginnings” (2001: 53). Bauman attributes this “self-chosen exile” (2001: 52) quite specifically to consumerism; money, it seems, may facilitate certain types of fungibility and fluidity but does not facilitate a strengthening of human relations. Bauman’s thinking on this issue

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contrasts with that of sociologists such as John Urry. Urry’s insistence on the “social as mobility” (2000: 2) acknowledges the part that flows of commodities and capital have in shaping new forms of mobile human relations, without decrying their negative effects: “Diverse flows of objects across societal borders and their intersections with the multiple flows of people are hugely significant” (2000: 3). Unlike Bauman, Urry refuses to assume that communities inevitably become less unified as extraterritoriality—both physical and virtual—becomes an ever more common mode of existence. Bauman’s thesis is itself temporalized and spatialized, in that it perceives the history of community in terms of before and after, as a series of distinct epochs and subsequent ruptures. Meaningful community, he therefore feels, comes before extraterritoriality, before freeflowing capital, and before celebrity culture. Bauman’s views are usefully representative of “what many see as the logic of globalization”—the degradation of locality and face-to-face relations (Bender, 2007: 243). Following this logic, globalization—as an intensifying of worldwide relations; a rapid increase in connectivity through business, capital, travel, and communications; or even as a new kind of empire—signals the demise of locally situated institutions, activities, and ethics as borders between nations become more porous and free trade more dominant. However, Thomas Bender, in discussing the “historic cosmopolitanism” of New York (2007: 186), suggests that this logic “is not persuasive” because “[h]uman agency is rooted in the domain of the accessible, and that is local and concrete, not universal and abstract” (2007: 243).

Theorizing community in a global age I find Bender’s view compelling, and for a more nuanced and more measured view of how the local and global relate, and one more aligned to the argument I pursue in this book, I wish to draw on three theorists with whom he would surely have some sympathy: first, and briefly, Anthony Giddens, and secondly and at some length, Raymond Williams and Miranda Joseph (who is also influenced by Williams). In Consequences of Modernity (1990) Giddens acknowledges that globalization, precipitated by communication and transportation technologies, works to dissolve spatial and temporal boundaries and thus profoundly alter social relations. However, he resists Bauman’s stark opposition between extraterritoriality and community, arguing instead that “[a]t the same time as social relations become laterally stretched and as a part of the same process,

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we see the strengthening of pressures for local autonomy and regional cultural identity” (Giddens, 1990: 65). Although Giddens does not employ the neologism “glocalization” as Kornelia Hahn does (2005: 92), the term is descriptive of the dialectical processes he observes: regions and local communities shaped by worldwide economic and cultural forces yet at the same time inflecting them with local characteristics. Similarly, John Urry sees a locality as “the particular nexus between, on the one hand, propinquity characterised by intensely thick co-present interaction, and on the other hand, fast flowing webs and networks stretched corporeally, virtually and imaginatively across distances” (2000: 140). So a Nathan’s hot dog may well taste different away from the beach, just as a Moscow Big Mac tastes different from the New York version (Hahn, 2005: 92), but all this illustrates is how global elements are selected and transformed to suit the tastes of a particular place. This is the productive paradox of contemporary community identity: the longing for cosmopolitanism is combined with a desire for “authenticity,” the local, the familiar. As Kornelia Hahn observes, “particularity is becoming a global value” (2005: 95). This observation, as we shall see, reveals the importance of post-Fordist “flexible specialization” which, according to Miranda Joseph, exploits and encourages differentiation rather than insisting on uniformity, and thus actively participates in the creation of communities. In one sense we appear to have returned to the nineteenth-century tensions discussed earlier, the ways in which virtues seemingly incompatible with global capital—landscape, fresh water, local community spirit—are extolled in order to encourage capital investment. (Indeed, Thomas Bender argues for “first and second rounds of globalization in the 1890s and 1990s” [2007: 249], which differ only in the ideological underpinning of the latter.) And this similarity between nineteenth-, late-twentieth-, and early-twenty-first century concerns is crucial, because it gives the lie to the separation of “before” and “after” that typically underpins romantic conceptions of community, or at least reveals their ideological basis. As Raymond Williams’ classic work The Country and the City demonstrates, both the lived experiences of community and the idealizations derived from them are historically conditioned and bound up in class relations, economics and politics: “Old England, settlement, the rural virtues—all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question” (1973: 12). Historicizing the relationship between rural and urban settlements in this way reveals that although the idea of “traditional” communities persistently reemerges during the period under Williams’ scrutiny (England from the sixteenth to the twentieth century), it participates in a more

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general “reaction to the fact of change” (1973: 35) at any given moment in history: “For a retrospective radicalism, against the crudeness and narrowness of a new moneyed order, is often made to do service as a critique of the capitalism of our own day” (Williams, 1973: 35–6). Williams explores in detail a range of linked historical and literary factors— the pastoral mode and the transformation of its point of view from that of the working countryman to that of the tourist or spectator (1973: 20); the further idealization of the countryside as “the suburban or dormitory dream” of escape from the filthy, corrupted city (1973: 47); and the way in which the confrontation between social groups produces a mode of internalization in eighteenth-century English fiction (1973: 62). But his masterstroke is to stress how the critique of “a new moneyed order,” filtered through contrasts of country and city, comes to answer a desire for stability by evading “the actual and bitter contradictions of the time” (1973: 45). When satires and critiques of city life become “incorporated into a version of relationships between any urban and any rural order, as a way of ratifying the latter” (1973: 48), we arrive at “the point of ideological transition” (1973: 48). In this ideological binary, genuine conflicts of interest and shifting realities can be sidelined in favor of a fixed view of an “innocent and traditional order [. . .] being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless order” (1973: 49). Such a binary is ahistorical in that it ignores the interpenetration of urban and rural that has for a long time existed, and it is theoretically dubious because it refuses to take into account the constitutive dependence of each element of the binary on its supposed opposite. In order to maintain its ideological thrust it therefore cannot acknowledge the complex historical and sociological factors involved in specific cases—for example, the fact that, as James L. Machor argues, a form of urban-pastoral has been an ideal of American writers and thinkers since the nineteenth century (1982: 331). But ideology is extremely powerful and generative, of course, and Williams goes on to show how the opposition of country and city has been applied to a variety of situations. In the nineteenth century, for example, attributes of “the country” could be applied, in the industrial novels of writers like Elizabeth Gaskell, to the colonies to which characters escaped from the grime and degradation of the industrialized cities. Yet at the same time colonists could picture Great Britain as “home,” imputing to it bucolic qualities “of belonging, of community, idealised by contrast with the tensions of colonial rule and the isolated alien settlement” (1973: 281). If one considers the frequency with which the contrast between Brooklyn as down-home and authentic and Manhattan as anonymous and fake has been

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reimagined in American culture, it is clear that the ideological construction discussed by Williams can be mapped very convincingly onto the current argument. There are obvious examples of Brooklyn as country: Darcey Steinke’s essay “Brooklyn Pastoral” describes a life reawakened after a painful divorce by the move to a property near Prospect Park, Frederick Law Olmsted’s “otherworldly utopia” (2008: 105). Although the garbage she sees there is “a constant reminder of the sad parts of [her] life” (2008: 100), it is soon placed in the background as Steinke extols the virtues of this urban oasis. Animals—the great egret, the “six turtles, babies resting on their parents’ warm shells (2008: 101)—are used as metaphors for the park’s family-friendly virtues, and the diversity of people using the space is qualitatively distinguished from that of the urban streets beyond: “everyone moved freely, and yet there was none of the hostility one sometimes sees between people on the subway or in the street” (2008: 98). Prospect Park is, Steinke suggests, connected to wider nature: “It was like massive landscapes had been torn from the greater wilderness, miniaturized and sewn together” (2008: 102). Acknowledging the psychological purposes to which the pastoral can be put (in this case a recuperative purpose), Steinke says: “Olmsted had designed the park with an understanding of what immersion in nature can do for a melancholy soul” (2008: 103). Other examples of the Brooklyn pastoral include Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943): the titular tree, “the only tree that grew out of cement” (1943: 4), stands as a metaphor for endurance through hardship of the main characters and of the pastoral ideal itself. And in contemporary fiction, certain novels of gentrification (as Chapter 5 elaborates) rely on a picturesque idea of Brooklyn community as quirky and village-like in contrast to sleek, urban Manhattan. For example, the Williamsburg of Solos feels to the protagonist like an entirely separate world: “You wouldn’t know you were in New York if the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan hadn’t glittered just across the river” (2004: 52). From these examples, it is evident that the ideology of country versus city has been employed, consciously or otherwise, by writers keen to emphasize Brooklyn’s supposed traditional, communal qualities. At first glance, Emily Barton’s Brookland appears to have the same agenda. It is a historical novel which recreates, in the words of one reviewer, “the borough’s brief pastoral moment” (Reese, 2006) from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Prue Winship, daughter of gin manufacturer Matty Winship, lives in a Brooklyn of “old Dutch houses scattered across the landscape despite a newly laid grid of regular streets” (2006: 5) and gazes out across the East River to “the Isle of Mannahata” which her young and superstitious mind

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leads her to believe is, “in fact, the City of the Dead” (2006: 7) or “the Land of the Shades” (2006: 13). To the ten-year-old Prue, Manhattan is a place of mystery and wonder, and the river one crosses to reach it assumes mythological qualities: it is, in her imagination, the River Styx. Brooklyn, on the other hand, is a rural community populated by a small number of old families whose names have survived in the streets of the present-day borough—the Cortelyous, the Schermerhorns, the Remsens—and where, according to Prue in one of her letters to her daughter Recompense, “scents of ripe corn, horse dung, & my father’s juniper berries tickled my nose in summer” (2006: 8). In the same letter Prue stresses that “memories of Brookland & [her] childhood” are among her “dearest possessions” (2006: 21), so that in the opening chapter Brookland has the feel of a nostalgic novel, extolling the virtues of a lost, pastoral Brooklyn and the lost innocence of childhood. However, the more the reader learns about Prue, her family, and her community, the more it becomes apparent that any simple binaries between Brooklyn and Manhattan, country and city, past and present, local and global can be dismissed as the products of a childish consciousness. (This is why the novel alternates between passages of omniscient narration and epistolary interpolations: the contrasts between the young Prue’s fantastical ideas, the elder Prue’s nostalgic vision, and the material realities of the period are consistently laid bare.) Rather than simplistically positing a “before” and “after,” Brookland begins in media res: Matty Winship’s gin distillery is already a thriving concern in 1772 when Prue is born and his customer base is spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard: therefore, the juniper berries, whose scent appears to evoke the pastoral mode, also signify the industry which depends on them. Moreover, the presence at this time of king’s troops in Brooklyn is a reminder of how global forces inevitably interact with local concerns. The Twin Tankards tavern makes “a good profit from the presence of lonely, halfidle soldiers on guard duty,” whereas the rural environment has already felt the negative effects of the war: “Brooklyn’s forests had been denuded of all but their sapling trees” (2006: 24). Far from being insulated from the rapid changes happening in the wider world in the manner of Washington Irving’s Tarrytown, Brooklyn is shown to be always already affected by those changes, and is shaped by the interaction of local “character” and global movements. As Prue trains to become a gin maker and then begins to see her dream of a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan come to fruition, the inseparability of local identity, national and global concerns becomes ever more apparent. It can be seen as émigrés arrive after the war (2006: 76), the federal government

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is installed in Manhattan (2006: 103) and national and international trade increases (2006: 158). Brookland is in the tradition of Brooklyn coming-of-age stories (examined in more detail in the next chapter), but the most important aspects of Prue’s maturation are not the death of her parents, her sexual relationship and eventual marriage to Ben, or even the climactic realization that her mute and gifted younger sister Pearl has been fully aware of the jealous curse Prue placed on her before her birth (2006: 432), but instead her burgeoning understanding of the world’s interconnectivity, of the multiple mobilities that contribute to a community’s sense of identity, and the demystification of her childhood assumptions about Manhattan. In fact, it is during one of her most magical childhood experiences— the walk across the frozen river in 1782—that her education truly begins.1 As she traverses the ice, she looks forward to seeing “[t]he buildings that so fascinated her” (2006: 31), but arrives at “a wooden dock as solid and lichen-stained as any in Brooklyn” (2006: 32) and reflects: “How workaday New York appeared when she saw it face to face! The height of the warehouses was awe-inspiring, but their windows rippled just as old glass did in Brooklyn, and the buildings were clad in the same weathered shingles and Holland brick” (2006: 32–3). The real wonder resides in similarity, then, in the material congruities between the two places, and it heralds the beginning of both Prue’s adolescence and her professional life (her training begins soon afterwards). Later in the chapter we are told that “Prue felt she had learned a good deal about the world outside Brooklyn that day” (2006: 39): what she has learned is Brooklyn’s ineluctable connection to that world. And the following morning, the fantasies of childhood melt away and commerce takes precedence again: “there was no trace of there ever having been an ice bridge, and the distillery and ropewalk were bustling earlier than usual, as if to atone for the previous day’s ‘Saint Monday’” (2006: 42). No longer “a sacred destination,” Manhattan is now simply a place where deliveries are made “in all kinds of weather” (2006: 66). Likewise the bridge becomes a practical proposition, not simply a childhood fantasy: “it would ensure the easy shipping of gin in winter, after all” (2006: 65). Even if the descriptions of it as it is being constructed connote its eventual failure and destruction (2006: 472), as well as Prue’s hubris—it is both “a partly obscured rainbow” (2006: 405) and “a ghostly structure” (2006: 425)—it nonetheless continues to symbolize 1

Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis also describes a walk across the frozen river to Brooklyn, only a century later. For protagonist Frank Harris, the walk signifies his break for freedom from the clutches of the Whyos gang, and the nascent towers of the new Brooklyn Bridge the promise of a brighter future (2006: 284). Yet again, Brooklyn becomes a haven away from the oppressive urban center.

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the mobility and commerce that have defined Brooklyn from its founding. It also, of course, proleptically references the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the nineteenth-century debates about Brooklyn community and regional identity discussed earlier in this chapter. With its lengthy descriptions of the technicalities of distilling and the exigencies of bridge building, Brookland is a novel which acknowledges the romantic view of local community and the ideological oppositions required to sustain it, while consistently deconstructing that view. As Melvin Jules Bukiet says, Prue has a dream, but that dream turns out not to be especially romantic; it is about “stone and lumber, detail after precise detail of structure and angle.” Moreover, “Barton’s book is about the peril of dreams rather than their comfort” (2007: 32). Within this vision, community is something always in process, rather than fixed and in situ, and it is fitting that its most enlightening metaphor in the novel derives from the gin industry. Watching her father at work with the ingredients, Prue “came to understand how a gifted rectifier introduced these sundry essences in novel and harmonious proportion to the final distillation of spirit, such that their individual properties would be less evident than the balance of the whole” (2006: 59). Gin, like community (and like the novel, it should be noted, looking ahead to my comments on the novel’s unique ability to depict and formally reflect communities), is a complex system made up of diverse elements that lead to a precarious balance. It is significant that throughout Brookland no two batches of gin turn out the same: subtle variations in the ingredients and in the production process create different results. Thus, Prue learns that her life in Brooklyn is not, and has never been, about what is known, secure, familiar, or unchanging: rather, it is also a process, one of continual reassessment from varying perspectives. Brookland is properly historical, in the sense that it demonstrates the inevitability and omnipresence of change, resists the nostalgia from which some of its characters suffer, and disallows facile divisions into rural and urban, before and after. In these respects, it serves as a useful bridge between Raymond Williams and the theorist with whom I engage most extensively in Brooklyn Fictions—Miranda Joseph. In her 2002 book Against the Romance of Community, Joseph argues that community, far from being separable temporally, spatially, and conceptually from global capital, is constituted by it. Indeed, “capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies” (2002: viii). Joseph’s approach to the study of community is to combine Marxist social theory with poststructuralist theory. “To invoke community,” she states, “is immediately to

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raise questions of belonging and power” (2002: xxiii); community depends on “questions of social relations and social activities as mobilized for particular political and economic purposes” (2002: xxxii). Thus, in Joseph’s view: “the work of community is to generate and legitimate necessary particularities and social hierarchies (of gender, race, nation, sexuality) implicitly required, but disavowed, by capitalism, a discourse of abstraction and equivalence” (2002: xxxiii). But if these “particularities and hierarchies” rely on oppositions between self and other, on exclusionary discourses, then it is vital that the critic of community engages in a process of deconstruction. The “notions of purity” (2002: xxv) upon which traditional, naturalized, romantic conceptions of community are founded themselves rely on oppositions which are constitutive, so that self is never pure and always-already incorporates the other. Thus, the relationship between community and capital is one of supplementarity. Drawing on Derrida’s definition of the supplement as “a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude” but one which “intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of” as if filling “a void” (Derrida, 1974: 145), Joseph explains that because a structure “constitutively depends on something outside itself ” (2002: 2), the supplement would appear to make it whole, to complete it. But paradoxically, the supplement supplants the structure because the structure depends on it; thus, the supplement becomes “a blockage to the continuity, a sign of crisis or incompleteness” (Joseph, 2002: 2). Yet it is precisely this constitutive dependence that destabilizes, that reinforces internal discontinuities. As Joseph stresses: “In a supplementary reading, community and capital are both internally incoherent and externally connected” (2002: 2). So, dismantling the notion that close-knit communities came before global capital, Joseph stresses that affiliations of class, ethnicity, race, and gender associated with community lubricate the workings of capital, which is frequently, and erroneously, seen as transcendent of such categories, as abstract and “free.” And yet “it is precisely in generating and legitimating social hierarchy that ‘community’ supplements (enables, fills a void in) capitalism.” Echoing Raymond Williams’ insistence on the historicization of community formations, Joseph continues: “To imagine that a long-lost communality might return to nurture contemporary capitalism requires detaching community from the social, economic, political and historical conditions that enabled the particular forms of sociality that would seem to be so appealing” (2002: 9). A simple illustrative example, to which I attend in Chapters 5 and 6, is the gentrification movement that engulfed Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a nostalgic, and frequently sincere, impulse to regenerate blocks and neighborhoods and make them more attractive places for

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young families, the architects of the brownstoner movement were nonetheless caught up in a complex constellation of economic, political, and social forces— suburban migration, the decisions of certain banks not to invest in inner-city areas, the relative lack of affordability of Manhattan real estate, and the racial segregation attendant on all these factors. Applying the same deconstructive approach to the perceived opposition between the local and the global, Joseph looks at stories (such as Anthony Giddens’ account of regional autonomy in the face of globalization, and Kornelia Hahn’s of “glocalization”) that see localization and globalization as corollary effects of capitalism’s need to innovate after the crisis of state economic regulation. Moving from Fordist mass production and mass consumption to “post-Fordism” or “flexible specialization” (2002: 17), capital moves freely across national boundaries and extends its reach even as it “attends ever more precisely to place and culture and depends ever more profoundly on the extra-economic bonds of community and kinship” (2002: 147). Joseph sounds a note of caution here: while the close attention paid to difference and locality ostensibly indicates a sympathetic transformation in the nature of capitalism, it should be seen rather as another means to “legitimate hierarchies within and among cultures, localities and communities,” even as capital “reincorporates precisely those communal formations that have been ‘othered’ by capitalism” (2002: 149). Nick Heffernan says something similar; lurking in post-Fordism is “a political and ideological offensive waged upon the capital-labour accord institutionalised under Fordism” (2000: 6) predicated on “new forms of customised or ‘niche’ consumption which revolve around notions of difference and distinction and imply new kinds of status gradation and social exclusion” (2000: 7). In other words, the apparent “rediscovery” of the local and the individuated masks the fact that they have always been supplementary to global movements, and reinvests romanticized social units associated with the local—marriage, family, neighborhood—with a particular form of exchange value. Joseph’s analysis (gloomy though it might appear) can thus offer a new and productive perspective on one of Brooklyn’s most celebrated characteristics: its human diversity. She is far from alone in connecting it to economic forces. For Jerome Krase, riding the B68 bus along Coney Island Avenue, multiculturalism (or as he prefers it, “cultural pluralism”) emerges most clearly in public spaces as “an unintended consequence of globalization” (2012: 242). Suleiman Osman suggests that diversity may in part result from Brooklyn’s “non-Fordist industrial and commercial landscape” of “small manufacturing firms,” which provides fertile ground for “a new post-Fordist middle-class romantic urbanism” (2011:

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34). Whereas the scenario described by Marx in Capital volume one, in which industrial production requires a deskilled, interchangeable workforce and thus results in a “particular social formation” of homogeneity and equivalence (Joseph, 2002: 17), may have applied to Taylorized mass industry in the early twentieth century, Miranda Joseph argues that recent narratives of post-Fordism and flexible specialization now paint a different picture. Flexible specialization explicitly manipulates and indeed produces diversity and difference: “Capitalism no longer produces conformity but rather addresses us in our cultural particularity” (2002: 17). This is, it can be assumed, an extremely effective strategy because it encourages a form of what one might deem ironic or even paradoxical identification—a sense of communal belonging based on one’s sense of individual uniqueness and authenticity: “Corporations have taken up a discourse of diversity as a strategy for extending and intensifying the articulation of social elements within capitalist practices; diversity discourse deploys existing differences and elaborates new ones as occasions for the voluntary and enthusiastic participation of subjects as niched or individuated producers and consumers” (2002: 22). This is most directly revealed in the discourse of marketing, advertising, and commodities, of course, and it is remarkable how often Brooklyn novels, especially those which explicitly tackle gentrification and middle-class anxiety about lost “authenticity” in upmarket neighborhoods, employ the language of marketing demographics as a metonymic shorthand to express both individual character and group attachments. Amy Sohn is particularly fond of this technique, which simultaneously satirizes the ostentatious display of commodities and endorses product placement. In Prospect Park West (2009), for example, Karen Bryan resentfully mentions “the two-thousand-dollar Mulberry handbags that some women took to the playground” (2009: 18). On the very first page of the sequel Motherland (2012) reference is made, without further explanation, to a “Marimekko blanket” (2012: 1). Such glib allusions to the stereotypical commodities that help delineate the community formation known as “Park Slope ubermoms” rely on readerly familiarity with the products and, therefore, run the risk of excluding the reader from the satire through lack of identification. Moreover, the use of such allusions for satire is short-circuiting, in that it makes a double assumption absolutely consistent with a post-Fordist marketing strategy: character dictates one’s consumer choices, but consumer choices, here deployed as literary shorthand, reveal character. In Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), the redoubtable Miss Fortini’s unequivocal claim that “[c]oloured women want Red Fox stockings” (2009: 2010) demonstrates (and satirizes more effectively

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than Sohn) the hegemonic power of flexible specialization. And in many other novels—Solos and Brooklyn Follies included—diversity is metonymically, and facilely, represented in shorthand by the range of consumer products available in the neighborhood stores. What is crucial about Joseph’s argument, and what makes it so useful in discussing novelistic representations, is the way it repeatedly highlights the tension between concreteness and abstraction in community formations. Just as community and capital are discontinuous concepts, so too is the chain commonly assumed to describe most vividly the labor theory of value. In traditional accounts, “labor is represented by value, which is in turn represented by money, which then appears transformed by capital” (2002: 13), so that the trajectory described is one of increasing abstraction from use value to exchange value. But Joseph, following Gayatri Spivak, argues that each stage of this process is itself open and subject to supplementarity: “The movement toward abstraction—that is, the predication of capital itself—depends on the intervention of other orders of value or an investment in particular use values” (2002: 14). For instance, as money is exchanged for commodities, its quality of abstraction is temporarily negated. Seen in this way, it is a mistake to argue that labor, family, community, the things traditionally associated with concreteness, humanity and nature, are antinomies of capital. They must be subjected to the same critique as abstract capital because “the particularities of historically and socially determined use values, which include particular social relations and ‘values’, supplement the discontinuous circuit of abstract value, enabling its circulation” (2002: 15). It is in the interests of global capital, however, to maintain the misapprehension, to fetishize those supposedly human elements.

Community and the novel Having looked at a number of theories of community, it is time to take stock, to consider precisely what it is I understand by “community” in the pages that follow, and to make some specific claims about prose fiction’s utility in depicting community formations. Proceeding from my earlier observation that there is Brooklyn and there is “Brooklyn,” I take from Raymond Williams the understanding that the recurring opposition between Brooklyn and Manhattan is ideological in nature. In turn, I take from Miranda Joseph an understanding that community emerges from the dialectical interplay of concrete and abstract,

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of physical elements and imagined virtues, and of material and symbolic signals. Jerome Krase, a sociologist who has done extensive fieldwork in various Brooklyn neighborhoods, provides a lucid working definition: What emerged from my pioneering work in Prospect-Lefferts-Gardens, during the 1960s and 1970s, is a definition of community not as a real entity with physical substance and attributes but as a possible social reality that can be confirmed through observation and interpretation of symbolic cues. The end product of my ethnography was a collection and analysis of accounts of doing community, and perceiving community. These accounts were analyzed in reference to conceptual categories that developed in accomplishing this particular research project. The concept of community was therefore transformed from an empirical object to a phenomenological possibility. It became a social potential that is confirmable and producible through various methods. (2004: 157)

Krase’s interest in “symbolic cues,” which include in his work photographs and other visual representations, but can also include repeated patterns of behavior, landmarks, and tacitly agreed boundaries, aligns him with Anthony Cohen, who likewise sees community as symbolically constructed. For Cohen, the symbols from which community is constructed “do not so much express” a particular meaning as give individuals “the capacity to make meaning” (1985: 15). Once again, any meaning created is potential rather than actual; it is processive and constantly open to reinterpretation and transformation rather than fixed, empirically observable, and quantifiable. It is one of the main contentions of this book that literary texts, especially novels, participate in “the workings of representation in the production of space as simultaneously real, symbolic and imaginary” (Kennedy, 2000: 9) and should thus be regarded as “symbolic cues” to community. There are several reasons for this, which I outline here and develop with reference to specific texts in subsequent chapters. First, the formal complexity of the novel, theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin and taken up by critics like Benedict Anderson, Raymond Williams and Ian Watt, who states that “the world of the novel is essentially the world of the modern city” (1987: 192), is in some ways analogous to the complexity of community. Bakhtin, who refers to the novel as “a dialogised system” (2004: 262), says that elements of the novel find themselves subject to “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces, to processes of “centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification” (2004: 271). Just as a participant in a community repeatedly reassesses, even if unconsciously, the type, scale, and number of his or her affiliations, any element of a novel “weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a

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third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse” (2004: 276). Thus, the novel is “fluid” and “developing”: it “reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding” (2004: 7). In the case of urban communities like Brooklyn—vast, multicultural, ever changing—the reality reflected can only be comprehended by individuals through the repeated imagining of “steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (Anderson, 1991: 25), helped, of course, by the many “symbolic cues” described by Jerome Krase. Thus, as Benedict Anderson says, the novel becomes “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile”’ (1991: 25), a demonstration of the ways in which affiliations and connections arise when characters assume themselves to have similarities with like-minded citizens and consumers around them. This raises the possibility, which is particularly pertinent to the work of a writer like Paul Auster, that community is a matter of contingency or coincidence: the mere fact that two people have similar experiences implies a connection, even if that connection has no intrinsic meaning. The peculiar metonymic status of a literary character—a unique, rounded “individual” and yet sometimes perceived by the reader as representative of a group or a common condition—means that the reader is necessarily engaged in processes of abstraction and extrapolation from symbolic cues (in this case, words) that mirror those required to imagine community formations. In many novels these processes are assisted by the depiction of small, localized groups of people from which wider communities united by social class, economic status, race, education (and combinations thereof) can be inferred. The prototypical example, perhaps, is the eclectic selection of people involved in the publication of “Every Other Week” in William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)—the means by which Howells explores the compatibility (or otherwise) of art and commerce in a rapidly growing and diversifying New York. More recent examples include the various residents of Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman’s Flatbush rooming house in Sophie’s Choice (1979), through which the dream of a Brooklyn writer’s utopia is brought into rude collision with the horrors of the Holocaust; the Coole family in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, through which Michael Stephens is able to explore the complexities of Irish immigrant experience; the oppressive church congregations of Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999); the reading groups to which many of the characters belong in Amy Sohn’s My Old Man (2004); and the rather self-obsessed band of friends simply dubbed “the group” in Joanna Smith Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age (2009), representatives of a post-gentrification generation desperately clinging to dreams of bohemian authenticity while slowly mutating into their parents.

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Some of these groupings, such as the family, are regarded by characters as organic, mythical, pre-capital (mistakenly, if one agrees with Miranda Joseph). Others, like the reading group, more closely resemble what John Urry calls “bunds” (2000: 144)—highly specialized groups based around leisure interests and shared enthusiasms that construct their own zones of activity and display a high degree of mobility, in the sense that participants are free to come and go at any time. Still others, like “the group,” are consciously aware of the socioeconomic factors upon which their survival depends. Many of them assemble in what Ray Oldenburg famously calls the “third places” outside home and work, informal spaces like bars, cafés, and clubs where neighborhood life is often experienced. All of them allow authors and readers to discuss big questions about the local and the global, and the discontinuous nature of communities. In so doing, they imply “an underlying stance and approach [. . .] that the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (Williams, 1973: 165). It is important to remember that just as real-world communities are to a large extent subjectively imagined, a matter of perception, so the “knowable communities” of novels (Williams, 1973: 165) depend on point of view. As Raymond Williams explains: “What is knowable is not only a function of objects—of what is there to be known. It is also a function of subjects, of observers—of what is desired and what needs to be known” (Williams, 1973: 165). Therefore, the point of view of the observer “is part of the community being known” (Williams, 1973: 165), such that a relationship of supplementarity pertains between observer and observed and, by extension, between writer, reader, and character. This is important for my argument, firstly because it implies a strong analogy between community and the ethics of reading practices, and secondly because the discontinuous state of writer and reader—plural, open at every stage of the reading process to transformation by each other and by the characters inhabiting the communities of the pages—has important implications for the reader’s role in negotiating the relationship between local and global. When Tom Lutz posits a “dynamic of alternating cultural visions structuring a reading that exceeds them all” in “great regionalist writing” (2004: 31), he ascribes to the reader a privileged position. Regionalist texts, he argues (and Brooklyn fictions display many regionalist characteristics): represent the arguments alive in the culture about city and country, nature and culture, center and periphery, tradition and modernity, high and low, masculinity and femininity, the costs and benefits of progress, and any number of other issues; but instead of resolving these debates, they oscillate between the sides, producing, finally, a complex symphony of cultural voices and positions

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However, I argue in the proceeding pages that Brooklyn fictions can reveal a great deal about potential community formations precisely because they disallow the reader access to “the fullness of the scene” and instead implicate him or her in the partiality and subjectivism crucial to the creation of knowable communities. This further destabilizes the relationship between author, character, and reader because, as Mariangela Palladino says, “the teller only offers fragments of his/her own self, and it is incumbent on the receiver to refigure those pieces, to take on the authorial role” (2012: 336). The “reader–writer compact” reveals only how limited the reader’s and writer’s perspectives are in such an involved dialogic space, and how dependent they are on imagination and on the perspectives of others. If narrative, as a result, necessitates intersubjectivity, then it is intrinsically ethical, as critics such as Adam Zachary Newton and Giorgio Agamben have argued: “A narrative is ethics in the sense of the mediating and authorial role each takes up toward another’s story” (Agamben, 1991: 48). Narrative’s ethical qualities, its status as “relationship and human connectivity” (Newton, 1995: 7), connect it strongly to discussions of community, similarly concerned with relations accomplished, in no small measure, through stories and imagination. Certain Brooklyn fictions with a strong metafictional aspect, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn, employ deep metaphor to explore just these issues of perspective, partiality, and ethics. As a consequence, it is evident that in addition to the thematic elements of Brooklyn fictions that reveal knowable communities—the family and friendship groups, the descriptions of neighborhood landmarks, the detail of shared consumer choices—the formal decisions authors make contribute to an understanding of how communities are constructed and interact with each other. (Like Adam Newton, I recognize no simple division between form and content, in fact: his neologism, “the content of form and the form of content” [Newton, 1995: 53], neatly summarizes the ways in which they interact and together perform ethics.) The first-person narratives of Leaving Brooklyn, Brooklyn Follies and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999); the italicized interchapters in Prospect Park West and Motherland; the multiple points of view of The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Geographies of Home; the way Jonathan Lethem switches between third-person omniscience, first person, and free indirect discourse in The Fortress of Solitude: all of these techniques prompt models of reading that

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themselves symbolically cue types of community formation. Accompanying these potential communities, which are all versions of “Brooklyn,” are ethical perspectives on the extent to which individuals within communities are themselves fragmented and discontinuous entities, or, in Miranda Joseph’s words, “not the same as themselves.” By which she means that “subjectivities, ideologies, and relations are ‘mobile’, ‘tactical’ and ‘oppositional’—that is, dialectically constituted in relation to configurations of power” (2002: xxvii). As we shall see, Joseph sees cautious grounds for optimism in this idea; mobile subjects have the potential for resistance by slipping between the categories through which flexible specialization addresses them. To pull together the various strands laid down so far, and to set the tone for the readings that follow, I end this introduction with a brief analysis of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Steelwork (1970). It cannot be classed, I am aware, as a “contemporary” novel, but it shares with many more recent works a strong attachment, often through gritted teeth, to a Brooklyn neighborhood undergoing numerous changes and, in its experimental form, provides a challenging starting point for an exploration of how literary form and community inform each other. Moreover, I refer to classic twentieth-century Brooklyn fictions throughout this book to show the genesis of certain ideas and to demonstrate continuities with late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts. Set, as are many of Sorrentino’s other novels, in Bay Ridge, which in his hands is “for the most part a very delimited territory, comprising not much more than fifteen square blocks” (Howard, 2011: 149), Steelwork is nonetheless ambitious in scope, structure, and style. In a series of short episodes, it follows a group of Bay Ridge locals between 1935 and 1951 and, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, alludes to the major historical events of the period: the Depression, World War II, and the nascent Cold War. Eschewing both a linear chronology and a conventional plot (“a narrative strategy that minimizes narrative” [Andrews, 2011: 39]), Steelwork also resists what might conventionally be called “character development,” preferring instead to reveal through short, occasionally related sketches the consistent venality and prejudice of the residents. There is, for example, Red Mulvaney, who stalks the neighborhood in the early 1950s, “looking for more Reds, or pinkos at least, to beat up” (1970: 5). There are “the Vikings”— four Norwegian lads, “asshole buddies” who are brought together by the war, “some twisted Americanization of Aryan power and sublimity,” and by the fact that “their fathers were all super-intendents who hired bums and immigrants to do all their work for them” (1970: 14). And there is the unnamed man who in the depression year of 1938 buys a “dark green Plymouth coupe [. . .] symbol of

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hope and regeneration, a sock full of golden eagles sewn into the mattress” and verbally and physically abuses “a greasy-haired Dago bastard” called Artie Salvo for daring to look at it (1970: 53). The car owner later dies in the war with “a Fascisti bullet through his head, relieving him forever of his American dream” (1970: 54). The nonlinear structure allows for these kinds of ironies: clichés of “the American dream” and unrealistic expectations of entitlement and success are consistently undermined as the reader is compelled to observe them from different points of view and temporal perspectives. Filtered as it is through a number of individual consciences rendered, in a majority of cases, in free indirect discourse, community only rarely appears in face-to-face encounters in Steelwork, which is unflinchingly unsentimental about the idea. Instead, it resides in shared delusion, shared avarice, shared brutality, and in the shared clichés of spoken discourse through which these negative qualities are revealed. As a chapter like “1940 Sexology: the Facts” indicates, community is often a matter of simple contingency and the accretion of neighborhood clichés and rumors. As David Andrews states, the long list of dubious assertions, which begins with “1. If you jerk off you get hairy palms” (1970: 46) and ends with “100. Girls shoot a load like men when they come” (1970: 49), is reminiscent in its concrete specificity of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman (Andrews, 2011: 40). Yet it is also intensely abstract, its main subject being language. Disengaged from character, any of the statements could belong to any Bay Ridge resident, and hence “character” becomes interchangeable, as fungible as the money flowing through Brooklyn during the war. In this way, Sorrentino’s formal choices are entirely appropriate for a novel about the way capital flows shape character and community. And it is hard to imagine a vision of community less romantic than this one. Though the area is superficially diverse (there are Polish, Italians, Hispanics, Scandinavians, and many other ethnic groupings), there is no celebration of that diversity for its own sake. Nor is there the repeated auditing of consumer choices as a shorthand for diversity one finds in more picturesque Brooklyn fictions. Rather, ostensibly diverse groups of individuals are shown to be stultifyingly (and ironically) homogeneous because of their adherence to received American ideals of opportunity and success. Equally ironically, their rejection of others who do not share their ethnic makeup or political views—an example of what Bulent Diken calls the “violent hierarchy” at the heart of community (1998: 41)—is the other connecting factor. Moreover, the formal demands of the text, particularly its disrupted chronology, resist nostalgia as much as they discourage sentimental attachment

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to character. The last chapter, teasingly called “The Lot” as if to signal finality, finds a neighborhood boy looking at the local park from the vacant lot. As he contemplates the bulldozers and the “heaps of rock and brick and soil” (1970: 177), we read that “[i]t was sad to see the park going like that, the tunnels would soon have highway streaking under them” (1970: 177). However, the regretful nostalgia that might be provoked by the highway construction and the advent of “white flight” is disallowed. The reader cannot share the boy’s sadness, because this scene takes place in 1939, and hence temporally before many of the scenes placed earlier in the novel. Thus, the binary opposition of “before” and “after” crucial to the nostalgic impulse cannot easily be summoned. And knowing what he or she does about the succeeding years, the reader has to agree that “the parkways signal continuity rather than change,” that they are “the visible resurgence of the ‘American dream’ at the end of the Depression, a dream that will profit by the slaughter of the Second World War and the Korean War” (Andrews, 2011: 40). The boy’s sadness is, finally, an empty gesture which fails to appreciate that in terms of attitudes and aspirations, things are going to stay much the same. What Steelwork does so effectively is to show (like Raymond Williams and Miranda Joseph) the tension between fixed ideological standpoints—in this case subscription to a hackneyed idea of individual success and wealth creation— and historical change. Yet even this relationship is complex and supplementary: historical change, after all, can come about as a result of such ideological views. The roads being constructed in “The Lot” thus signify the ongoing pervasiveness of the “American dream” while also symbolizing the mobility, the breaching of boundaries that always complicates the sense of local community. Such multivalent images or symbolic cues abound in Brooklyn fictions: the abandoned house in Sunset Park, the oak upon which Marina gazes in Geographies of Home, the graffiti tag in The Fortress of Solitude. The next chapter looks at perhaps the most complex of all: the rogue eye that operates as deep metaphor in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn and offers a model for reading all Brooklyn fictions.

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How to Read Brooklyn—Leaving Brooklyn

Coming-of-age in the community Let us begin this discussion with, ostensibly, a simple genre attribution: Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn (1989) is a coming-of-age novel. Its narrative trajectory describes the emergence into adulthood, through sexual awakening and the burgeoning of a literary perspective, of the first-person narrator Audrey, a teenager living in wartime Brooklyn. (The novel shares with Gilbert Sorrentino’s Steelwork this historical setting, though the two novels differ in significant thematic and formal ways.) With a deliberate allusion to both Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” (2003: 184) and the pun that configures Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the novel opens with a line that introduces the powerful concretized metaphor at its heart: “This is the story of an eye and how it came into its own” (1990: 1). It employs the same pun as Auster in order to remind the reader that coming-of-age tales, like memoirs and autobiographies, are less about the development of a person and more honestly about the maturation of perception and the ways in which one looks at oneself and the past. If Leaving Brooklyn draws heavily on Schwartz’s adolescent experiences, and therefore hovers somewhere in between bildungsroman and memoir, then in so doing it acknowledges the difficulty in allowing autobiographical writing to be “a privileged form of referentiality” (Jay, 1984: 18). Precisely because autobiography is a genre in which the writer “declares himself the subject of his [or her] own understanding” (DeMan, 1979: 922) and regards himself or herself to some extent as other, it implies a distance. However empathic that distance might be, it is the stuff of fiction, and texts such as The Education of Henry Adams (1918) and Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) amplify it by means of shifts in narrative voice. Despite its adherence to the first person, Schwartz’s narrating “I/eye” is every bit as self-conscious as these predecessors in recognizing the constitutive

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distance. The disjunctions and correspondences between the two Audreys we find in the novel—the teenage protagonist and the first-person narrator who has grown up, left the borough, and become a writer, “this I who makes up stories” (1990: 145)—are the subject of much philosophical and metageneric reflection in the novel. Thus, Leaving Brooklyn enacts at thematic and formal levels an important truth about the coming-of-age genre: adult writers employ ideas like “youth” and “innocence” as vehicles for the airing of certain critical concerns. The young person becomes “inhabited by the desires, fantasies and interests of the adult world” (Grossberg, 1992: 35), and his or her position “as subaltern” (Millard, 2007: 13) allows the adult writer to voice a desire for social change. Many of the novel’s reflexive passages are focused on the physical condition that also serves as a hugely generative metaphor for individual perception of the world and, I argue presently, for differing views of place, community, and the collective work of imagination required to sustain a myth of unified communal identity. Sustained after she was dropped at birth, Audrey’s defective right eye—“[a] wandering eye, it is aptly called” (1990: 4)—inspires a deconstructive view of Brooklyn and “Brooklyn,” local and global, real life and art, individual and community, present and past. It shows that even though “we want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity [. . .] we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it’s anything but” (Ford, 1995: 439). Because of the eye, my argument goes, Audrey’s is a deeply ironic bildungsroman: maturation arrives with a burgeoning literary perspective which casts doubt on the very efficacy and veracity of the coming-of-age narrative, and also makes it clear that any understanding of dwelling and community emerges from an idiosyncratic mode of reading the world. Her way of reading can, I suggest in this chapter, be productively applied to the Brooklyn fictions that feature in the chapters to come. So the attribution of genre turns out to be far from simple and, of course, such things never are. What is particularly significant in this context is that many of the complications arising from the attempt to define and demarcate the generic territory, and many of the questions of referentiality, temporality, historicity, and originality that make coming-of-age texts such as Schwartz’s so complex and compelling, are the same as those discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to Brooklyn’s sense of community identity. First there is the question of age and of defining, perhaps traumatic, moments. Noting that the literary term bildungsroman (coined in Germany in 1819) is “endlessly disputed and contested,” and that critics might rightly query its application to the study of late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American novels (Millard, 2007: 3), Kenneth Millard goes

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on to highlight the “cultural relativity” of the anthropological term “comingof-age” (2007: 4). As the wide variety of coming-of-age novels concerned with periods before or after adolescence indicates (including Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Corrections), the term in its literary and cultural manifestations cannot be restricted to depictions of characters who reach legal adult status, and therefore cannot focus on a prescriptively narrow range of social or psychological threshold moments associated with attaining this status. Age, quite simply, is not the only defining criterion in the coming-of-age story: it is perfectly possible to argue, for example, that in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections Enid comes of age, in the sense of achieving an identity separate from the needs of her husband Alfred, only in advanced old age and after Alfred’s death (Franzen, 2001: 568). As Kenneth Millard stresses, “the proper focus of the coming-of-age narrative” is a “teleological process” (2007: 5) rather than a determining moment or a culturally sanctioned transitional age. To complicate the idea of a determining or pivotal moment which is supposed to enable a clear conception of “before” and “after” is important precisely because such moments are invariably weighed down with mythological and ideological ideas such as “innocence” and “experience,” “authenticity,” and, inevitably, “nostalgia.” In addition, it requires an acknowledgment of the power of history. Not only are there a potentially infinite number of transitional moments into maturity, but also there are any number of possible “origin” moments—supposed starting points, often antecedent to the action of the text, that nonetheless precipitate the plot which culminates in the coming of age. Kenneth Millard’s description of the origin moment suggests that it reveals an important tension between the demands of historicity and the individual’s sense of continuous uniqueness: “This origin has a privileged (ontological) status as a form of historical ‘explanation’, but it is simultaneously a fabricated story that is often self-consciously recognized as a self-justifying fiction that is a necessary foundation to the constitution of subjectivity” (2007: 9). If an important part of the protagonist’s awakening in the bildungsroman is increased historical awareness (and this is certainly true of Audrey in Leaving Brooklyn), then what also inevitably emerges is “a struggle [. . .] between self-fashioning on the one hand, and historical determination on the other, and it is in the tension between the autonomy of the individual and the shaping pressure of history that the political ideology of each novel lies” (Millard, 2007: 10). Rather than being an innocent American Adam figure “emancipated from history” (Lewis, 1955: 5), the protagonist of the coming-of-age novel finds herself increasingly aware of and embroiled in the vicissitudes of history, the legacies of race, class

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and family, and the global movements that shape her immediate environment. What differentiates examples of such novels from one another is the extent to which individual sovereignty rather than historical determination is ultimately celebrated. If coming of age has been an especially prominent genre in twentiethand twenty-first-century Brooklyn fictions, it is because the issues affecting the protagonists are germane to our understanding of the borough and its neighborhoods as they struggle to carve out distinctive characters. Just as the ideology of self-fashioning comes into conflict with historical determination, so the ideology of an organic community rooted in timeless virtues such as neighborliness and locality comes into conflict with global forces of capital and migration as they influence community formations. Likewise, the pastoral ideal analyzed by R. W. B. Lewis and Leo Marx and “used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery” (Marx, 1964: 3) tells a very particular kind of origin story, one which venerates an idealized past, and, as the previous chapter demonstrated, has regularly found its way into the urban topos of Brooklyn stories. And just as the search for, or self-conscious fabrication of, origin moments and transition moments (deaths, inheritances, sexual experiences, the witnessing of traumatic events) defines the comingof-age narrative, so the epochal ruptures of Brooklyn history—the opening of the Bridge, the assimilation into New York City, the loss of the Dodgers—have come to define the “befores” and “afters” so crucial to cultural constructions of Brooklyn’s identity. Moreover, closer examination of the ideological underpinning of these events (consistent with the theoretical arguments laid out in Chapter 1) indicates that they are not in fact ruptures after which “everything changed,” but symptoms of historical continuities and larger movements. With Adam Kelly and Andrew Hoberek, I share a critical attitude toward the “fascination with immediately visible, paradigm-shifting events” (Kelly, 2010: 314) which informs my analysis of the coming-of-age genre and its textual exemplars as well as the wider Brooklyn community in which individual characters reach maturity. Tempting though the evocation of epoch-making moments might be, it masks the complex, supplementary relationship between what might be viewed as a “dramatic, readily visible cultural transformation” and the “uneven, tentative, local shifts” (Hoberek, 2007: 241) which gradually produce a perceptible change. It is an ongoing dialectical process in which the individual’s relationship with the communities in which he or she participates is constantly being recalibrated.

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This is important because coming-of-age narratives are invariably about this relationship. Schematically speaking, the narrative trajectory is either one of a previously estranged or isolated person’s assimilation into a community, or the breaking free from a community perceived as restrictive by an ambitious, talented, discontented, or simply idiosyncratic individual. In each case, the maturation of the protagonist has an ethical aspect, and results in a reconfiguration of existing social structures, or at least increased understanding of their foundational biases and limitations on the part of characters and/or readers. Thus, Huck Finn’s passage down the Mississippi River on the raft, however “temporary and illusory” an escape it might be (Millard, 2007: 10), constitutes a critique of both his racist society and the American dream of heading west to freedom. And Oliver Twist’s discovery of his true class and his eventual move to the country with Mr Brownlow articulate the ideological opposition of country and city discussed by Raymond Williams, while showing how it has its basis in economics. With regard to late-twentieth-century examples, one might agree with Kirk Curnutt’s assessment that their protagonists lack a worthwhile ethical dimension and that the young people in novels such as Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X are “emotionally and morally obtuse” (Curnutt, 2001: 94), seeking “only a reprieve from boredom” (2001: 98). Yet this hopeless anomie still serves as a critique of a stultifying and hypocritical Western society, and thus at least implies a need for systemic change. Whether or not these novels “implicitly [endorse] an idealized, nostalgic vision of family” and thus “break with the genre’s antiauthoritarian tradition” (Curnutt, 2001: 95), they nonetheless encourage reconsideration of the extent to which “the family” still resides at the heart of our understandings of “community” values. Curnutt surely romanticizes the anti-establishment figure of Holden Caulfield, hero of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), but his argument illustrates the importance of historicizing the relationship between the individual and the community. So given the understanding of community proposed in this book—a phenomenological potential revealed through symbolic cues and irreducible to concrete, empirically observable realities—and the fractured view of individual identity it necessitates, it is clear that seeing coming of age as a straightforward solidification of (or rejection of) a character’s place in a community, and as the emergence of a unified self, is untenable. Rather, it is likely that sophisticated coming-of-age texts depict maturation, in part, as dependent on an increased understanding of just how provisional and open to change categories such as “community” and “self ” really are. They may do this purely at the thematic level, by showing, for example, how economic concerns impinge upon a received sense

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of homogeneous ethnic identity, as is the case in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Or they may do it by means of metafictional reflexivity, as is the case in Leaving Brooklyn. However it is achieved, the problematizing of the key terms and ideas reveals community to be a matter of contingency and fragile consensus, poised always between freedom and restriction. Moreover, the tense relationship between freedom and restriction, self-fashioning and historical determination in Brooklyn coming-of-age texts provides a useful analogy to debates about the local and the global in community formations. To what extent can a locality, a neighborhood, or even a block fashion its own identity without the determination of global forces? Is the attempt to do so merely a form of collective solipsism?

Coming-of-age in wartime Leaving Brooklyn tackles these questions directly by means of its historical context. By setting the novel during World War II, Schwartz can historicize both the action of the plot and, importantly, the collective fabrication of a parochial mindset. Moreover, the temporal distance allows for the application of an anthropological gaze, similar to Edith Wharton’s in The Age of Innocence (1920), to both the young protagonist and the community in which she grows up. This is “Brooklyn on the eve of war, a locus of customs and mythologies as arbitrary and rooted as in the Trobriand Islands or the great Aztec city of Teotihuacán” (1990: 1). It is an urban area which, in a time of global conflict, affects a downhome regionalism, “a presumption of state-of-nature innocence, an imaginative amnesia, and a disregard of evidence such as photographs of skeletal figures in striped pyjamas clawing at barbed wire” (1990: 13). Most importantly, this image of the nurturing safe haven, remote from the world at large, is quite selfconscious and deliberately constructed. “Whatever depth perception there was in Brooklyn,” Audrey observes, “was flattened by the collective will” (1990: 15). Concerned to preserve the community idyll, the citizens of Brooklyn admit of “no gulf between image and reality” (1990: 13). To put it another way, they refuse to acknowledge the distance (but also the constitutive supplementarity) between Brooklyn and “Brooklyn.” This “imaginative amnesia” is a recurring element of Brooklyn fictions set during or just after World War II. As we saw in the previous chapter, the characters in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Steelwork tend to be too busy trying to make money or achieve sexual conquests to acknowledge their own prejudices and

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the clichés that keep them in a state of arrested development. And in Sophie’s Choice, the eponymous heroine bemoans Americans’ willful ignorance of the horrors that occurred in Europe: “People here in America, despite all of the published facts, the photographs, the newsreels, still did not seem to know what had happened, except in the most empty, superficial way. Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz—all stupid catchwords. This inability to comprehend on any real level of awareness was another reason why she so rarely had spoken to anyone about it” (Styron, 1998: 164). Indeed, the young writer Stingo’s coming of age consists of an education at the hands of Sophie in the experience of the Holocaust, such that the names of the camps and the Nazi generals who manned them cease to be “stupid catchwords” and become subjects which dominate his narrative. In turn, his Brooklyn changes from a “placid and agreeable” outpost with “a serene, almost pastoral quality” seen through “pollen-hazy light” (1998: 41) and reminiscent of an “outlying area in a modest Southern city” (1998: 42), to a place inescapably implicated in world affairs. Likewise the distinctly Jewish flavor of Stingo’s Flatbush neighborhood, in the light of Sophie’s narrative, can no longer be viewed as picturesque, as mere local color, but as a result of global migration brought about in large part by inexplicable persecution and suffering. Even the “unrelievedly pink” hue of Yetta’s rooming house (1998: 38) constitutes a joke on the idea of “local color”: the landlady informs Stingo upon arrival that her husband “had lucked into a fantastic bargain in the form of several hundred gallons of Navy surplus paint” used for camouflage (1998: 38). The war economy shows its influence at neighborhood level, and in surprising ways. Peter Novick, in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), argues that the deeply entrenched, future-driven thinking of American society assumed a particular importance in the years following the war: “survivors were told [. . .] that they should turn their faces forward, not backward; that it was in their interest, insofar as possible, to forget the past and build new lives” (1999: 83). Evan Hughes says much the same thing, though in language more attuned to the familiar strains of the “American Dream”: “To join the United States and New York City was to join the culture of the new, to believe in the kind of progress that was also a kind of forgetting. Besides, the war was over, and what’s more, ‘we’ had won” (2011: 194). Novels such as Sophie’s Choice, Steelwork, and Leaving Brooklyn serve as admonitions against amnesia and the blinkered embrace of the future for its own sake, of course, but the thoughts of Novick and Hughes raise some other important questions for the Brooklyn coming-of-age novel and the Brooklyn wartime novel. If Brooklyn novels and their protagonists have a tendency toward nostalgia (albeit sometimes a hard-edged version), then what are the

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limits of this sentiment? The desire to forget the experiences of the Old World occludes the fond recollection of anything further back than arrival in the New World (a kind of arbitrary origin moment) and the promise it represents: thus, an idiosyncratic temporal dimension arises, in which the characteristic mode of such novels is nostalgia for a time of perceived futurity, or nostalgia for a time when the past could be disregarded with impunity. Yet from Stingo or Audrey’s vantage point in the future, looking back on their naïve, youthful perspectives, it becomes evident that things that took place after the war, including shifting demographics and the changing uses of urban structures such as industrial buildings and brownstone houses, have to be understood partly as consequences of pre-arrival events. Even if in novels like The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, as the next chapter shows, an opposite tendency takes over and the search for OldWorld explanations becomes as extreme and debilitating as obsession with the future, the layers of perspective engendered by the temporal disjunctions acquire the same ironic force.

Three antecedents The evocation of wartime Brooklyn in Leaving Brooklyn, as well as being necessary for the semi-autobiographical aims of Schwartz’s story, also recalls the Second-World-War publication and the First-World-War setting of the most famous, and the most nostalgically future-oriented Brooklyn coming-of-age novel of all: Betty Smith’s bestselling A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), which was made into a 1945 film as well as a stage play and a ballet. As Martha Nadell says: “No other novel set in or about Brooklyn has been so inextricably linked to the borough” (2010: 114). Even if it does not closely “recapitulate the plot” of Smith’s story (Nadell, 2010: 116) like Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, or playfully reference the title like Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos and Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, it is impossible not to see Leaving Brooklyn as a response to its famous ancestor, as both an acknowledgment of its influence and a critique of its assumptions about Brooklyn (specifically, Williamsburg) as a nourishing and inspiring, old-fashioned community. Most of all, Schwartz’s metaphor of the deconstructive rogue eye responds critically to the consensus and unity after which Smith’s novel appears repeatedly to strain. My brief analysis of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is followed by references to two more important Brooklyn coming-of-age narratives—Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Jane Schwartz’s Caught (1985)—which raise the kinds of questions about

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the limits of sovereign selfhood and the role of capital in community formations that Lynne Sharon Schwartz revisits in Leaving Brooklyn. For Martha Nadell, the desire for unity seen in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is rooted in the ideology of assimilation. Citing the famous classroom scene in which Francie, the young protagonist of Irish and German descent, rejoices in the fact that being born in Brooklyn “automatically made you an American!” (Smith, 2000: 168), Nadell argues that the erasure of the vernacular linguistic diversity so evident in novels such as Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and stories such as Thomas Wolfe’s “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (1935) “trades the ethnic complexity of the borough for a more generic Brooklyn that can stand, however, for only some Americans: white ethnic ones” (2010: 115). Nadell’s criticisms are trenchant and to some extent insightful ones: the somewhat sententious speeches of Francie’s maternal grandmother affirm “the American Dream” of upward mobility and posit “land” as the idealized, future-focused unit of aspirational community: “In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise—but only to his father’s state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things” (Smith, 2000: 81). And as the classroom scene illustrates, Brooklyn acquires, at significant moments in Francie’s childhood, a generic and metonymic status: “Brooklyn,” with its diversity and its ambition, can substitute for “American,” and to be born in the Nolan neighborhood confers “Mayflower standing” upon you (2000: 168). And yet the relationship between local and national identity is actually much more complex and the limitations of the dream more consistently laid bare than Nadell’s analysis allows. If Brooklyn as conjured in the opening paragraph of the novel can only be described as “serene” (2000: 3) and the backyard tree as a unifying symbol, at least for the “poor people” it supposedly favors (2000: 4), then Francie’s education consists partly in learning not only about the divisions frequently obscured by the assimilationist dream, but also about the economic basis of those divisions and the contrasting communities they engender. Her first day at school, for example, teaches her about “the class system of a great Democracy” and the lack of class solidarity that stems from everyone’s need to succeed: “It would seem as if all the unwanted children would stick together and be one against the things that were against them. But not so. They hated each other as much as the teacher hated them” (2000: 150). Likewise, Francie’s romantic assumption that mothers are bound together by the shared pain of

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childbirth is destroyed when a local girl named Joanna is subjected to violence and abuse after having a baby out of wedlock: “It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman” (2000: 234). With this understanding of division comes the realization that opportunity is not available to all. Watching the minstrels singing in the backyards on summer evenings, Francie feels only sadness: “All they had in the world was the nerve to stand in a back yard with cap in hand and sing loudly. The sad thing was in knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were as lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over” (2000: 115). Crucially, Francie’s sagacity even extends to her father, Johnny Nolan. Though she is inspired by him, claims to like him more than her mother (2000: 33), and associates him with singing, with storytelling, with the escapist fantasies her mother has little time for, she does not fail to notice that his unblinking acceptance of the assimilationist dream of erased socioeconomic and cultural differences is just another figment of his imagination. As father and daughter watch the hansom cabs moving along Bushwick Avenue, “the high-toned avenue of old Brooklyn” (2000: 187), Johnny gets “carried away by his personal dream of Democracy,” when he observes that anyone can ride the cabs “provided [. . .] they got the money” (2000: 189). Not only is his assumption untrue, a mere “dream,” but it also humorously reveals the supplementary, indeed tautological relationship between American democracy and free market capitalism. In generic terms, it signals the beginning of a shift away from paternal authority on Francie’s part: although her love for Johnny remains undiminished until the end of the novel, and the starker narrative conflicts are reserved for her mother Katie, his naiveté constitutes an important lesson for the daughter. Katie has fantasies, but they are of an altogether more knowing and calculated kind: early in the novel, when the children have come back from selling junk for pennies and dimes in the Brooklyn streets (the money going into the family’s “tin can bank” [2000: 10]), the mother allows Francie to pour some coffee away, despite its status as a household luxury, and despite her brother Neeley’s protests. Katie says: “If it makes her feel better to throw it away rather than to drink it, all right. I think it’s good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging” (2000: 12). A similar sentiment inspires her decision extravagantly to tip the waiter in the ice-cream saloon later in the novel, after Francie’s high school graduation (2000: 353). Katie’s fantasy of excess suggests an intuitive understanding that in a burgeoning capitalist economy of individuated

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consumers, the ability to create waste acquires its own exchange value as a marker of social status. (This is an idea central to a reading of Michael Stephens’ Season at Coole, as the next chapter shows.) For Francie, unwittingly embracing the ideological terms of capital she seems to suspect in her father’s romanticized outlook, it confirms that her mother is, after all, a “somebody” (2000: 353). So if Francie’s coming of age consists partly in her formal education and her eventual move away from Brooklyn to college in Ann Arbor, it also consists in her increased awareness of the economic disparities that shape the Brooklyn she has long cherished. Moreover, the playful observation that local affiliations sometimes trump national ones, that “there wasn’t a Brooklyn boy who wouldn’t rather play on the Brooklyn’s team than be president of the United States” (2000: 19), develops into a more mature appreciation that Brooklyn is not simply a synecdoche for national identity and belonging to a monolithic America. Francie learns that “these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world” (2000: 83), nor are they the whole country; they participate in an understanding—or more properly an imagining—of the nation but retain a specificity that is in turn under pressure from historical change and the global movements of immigration. Brooklyn is apt to change, Francie realizes; she notices the emergence of spatiocultural differentiations in the form of Jewish neighborhoods and Italian neighborhoods, and she recognizes, reluctantly, that “in years to come, there would be no old neighborhood to come back to,” that the tenements she so cherishes will be replaced by projects (2000: 477). From this perspective, it will be clear that I find Martha Nadell’s analysis of the novel somewhat reductionist. Nadell also makes an error which, ironically, reveals how, at least in generic and ontological senses, her reading of Smith’s novel as homogenizing and concerned with consensus is partially correct. Contemplating her move to Ann Arbor, Francie does not, as Nadell says, hope to lose her Brooklyn accent (Nadell, 2010: 115). On the contrary, she “didn’t want to get rid of it any more than she wanted to get rid of her name. It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn’t want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that” (2000: 468). The last sentence of this quotation is particularly illuminating. Despite Francie’s perspicacity about the inequities that surround her and the divisions they generate, she is not prepared to sully the idea of a unified, continuous self, the kind of sovereign individual consciousness traditionally at the heart of the coming-of-age tale. Attendant on this assertion of immutable selfhood is an assumption that “Brooklyn,” the idea through which the self is established, is also continuous and unchanging. This

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is something the novel has already shown to be untrue, but the resistance to the notion of a discontinuous self, one that participates in any number of groupings rather than belonging to one, requires an organic view of place. Thus, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is ultimately unable to take its critiques of class, economics, and historical change far enough because while it is aware of social division, it is chiefly concerned with absolute individuation. Occasionally this concern emerges through symbolization. When Francie examines the wall behind her new apartment, we read: “Francie found that no two bricks were alike when she looked real close” (2000: 125). At other times, it is expressed through the religious mystery of quiddity, that which “God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life—the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the earth alike” (2000: 72). Either way, it points to an essential something that delimits the self. Part of the problem resides in the natural metaphors so central to the text’s imaginary. So closely does Francie identify herself and her borough with the backyard trees which open and close the novel and stand for persistence in the face of adversity that she consequently regards selfhood and place as organic, not as continually constructed and reconstructed through social and economic modalities. And in a novel which from the beginning highlights the difficulties of accumulation for the poor and the luxury of waste, the “star bank” (fashioned from an old tin can) about which Mary Rommely tells her daughter Katie is especially significant (2000: 85). Katie’s mother literally invests in a natural metaphor, and her reinvestment of the cents saved into “a beautiful piece of earth” (2000: 85) in turn romanticizes and naturalizes the metaphor in spatial terms. Through such metaphors it becomes apparent that the implied distinction in A Tree Grown in Brooklyn between economic modalities, the abstractions of capital, and those things such as family, community, flowers, trees, art, and reading which are considered natural and timeless is a false one. In fact, those qualities of Francie’s character that supposedly mark her out as “different”—her artistic sensibility, her discernment—are precisely those things cherished by a marketplace increasingly focused on the “individual.” To use a term upon which the next chapter elaborates, Smith’s classic novel should be seen not only as a coming-of-age novel and a novel about Brooklyn community, but also as a putative work of “capitalist realism.” Brown Girl, Brownstones recapitulates many of the elements of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Selina’s father, Deighton Boyce, is as romantic and feckless as Johnny Nolan; his refusal to sell his plot of land back in Barbados, his enduring dream of building a beautiful house there, and his passive immersion in religion after

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his accident (1994: 160) typify his utopian view of the future. His wife Silla best demonstrates her ruthless dedication to the prevailing economics of the present when she sells the land behind her husband’s back so that she can buy their Brooklyn building and convert it into a rooming house (1994: 111). Like Betty Smith, Marshall makes the central agon of her novel the volatile relationship between “the mother” and her daughter; at its lowest point, Selina repeatedly calls Silla “Hitler” after Deighton is deported (1994: 184). Another similarity between the two novels is apparent on the first pages: Marshall’s description of “the somnolent July afternoon” in Brooklyn (1994: 3) echoes the serenity of Smith’s opening paragraphs and, like its predecessor Marshall’s novel, as its title implies, pays close attention to architecture. In fact, the desire to own a brownstone in pre-gentrification Brooklyn, and the equation of home ownership with American assimilation are, as Kathlene McDonald says, at the heart of the action (2000: 27). At first, the revelation that the brownstones lining “the interminable Brooklyn street” are not “one house reflected through a train of mirrors” but a series of distinctive properties marked by “Gothic, Romanesque, baroque or Greek” features (1994: 3) seems to echo Francie’s revelatory moment staring at the bricks. However, Marshall’s image is much more complex and ambiguous than Smith’s and provides a premonition of the most important difference between the two novels. Despite the somewhat contrived architectural flourishes, all the houses “shared the same brown monotony. All seemed doomed by the confusion in their design” (1994: 3). This is not a picture of individuation, a metaphor for sovereign selfhood. Rather, it acts as a metaphor for a discontinuous and contested racial identity, for a community of Barbadians connected by their blackness but pulled in different directions by conflicting ideologies and economic aims. Investing the brownstones with these symbolic qualities as well as specific material characteristics is highly appropriate, because they are the material catalyst for the disagreements which erupt within the Bajan community upon the formation of the “Association of Barbadian Homeowners and Businessman,” a group Selina initially refuses to join (1994: 196), but also the symbolic cues to the strains placed upon a notion of homogeneous racial community. And as Martha Nadell observes, the interiors of the houses “suggest the complexity of writing about racial and national difference” (2010: 216) as the ghosts of previous white owners are evoked and the “odd speech” of the newly arrived West Indians “clashe[s] in the hushed rooms” (1994: 4). Unlike the early novels of gentrification I examine in Chapter 5, of which Brown Girl, Brownstones might be seen as a precursor, race and ethnicity are not reduced to stark frontier metaphors in Marshall’s

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story. Instead, they are seen to blur together and inform each other and to be historically interrelated. The effect on the protagonist is profound, and limns a character quite different to Francie Nolan, one which foreshadows the presentation of Audrey in Leaving Brooklyn. Through her battles with her mother, the mourning of her father (who dies at sea on the way back to Barbados), her romance with Clive, and her push– pull relationship with the Association, Selina comes to visualize “her mind as a faceted crystal or gem mounted on a pivot. Each facet was a single aspect of herself, each one suited to a different role” (1994: 274). Thus, Selina is the means by which “we can appreciate how Marshall exposes not so much the possibilities as the problems of establishing a unified black consciousness in a world riven by competing definitions of the self ” (Jones, 1999: 597). Her coming of age— as a woman, as a Barbadian, as a Brooklynite, and as an American—consists in understanding how a multifaceted consciousness reflects, participates in, and shapes multifaceted communities uncircumscribed by gender or race or nationality alone, but inflected by the intersections of all these factors. Jane Schwartz’s Caught, a poignantly nostalgic tale of the late 1950s, is also an important antecedent of Leaving Brooklyn. Its adoption of a first-person narrative voice—that of Louie, a ten-year-old working-class Williamsburg girl— distinguishes it from both Smith’s and Marshall’s stories of female awakening, and aligns it with Leaving Brooklyn in its interrogation, at a formal and thematic level, of how a place and its communities might be revealed through a single consciousness. As Chapter 1 suggested, the novel is capacious enough as a form to encompass complex and interpenetrative communities, and yet demands repeated acts of imagination on the part of the reader because it tends to pay attention to similar acts of imagination within a relatively small (and in Williams’ terms, more or less “knowable”) cast of characters. So the reader’s perspective is partial, as reliant on limited symbolic cues as those of the characters. In texts with naïve narrators such as Caught, this situation is exaggerated. And so a certain resistance to the protagonist’s outlook is required in this novel because the narrator makes the same category mistake as Francie Nolan—believing (at least initially) in a realm of the “natural” distinct from the realm of capital. This is, generically and ideologically, a very productive mistake, one which informs, as we shall see, the metageneric knowingness of Leaving Brooklyn. For the coming-of-age novel it prompts a questioning of just how natural or organic the lineaments of a life portrayed are, and thus the extent to which the genre follows interpellated subjects on life trajectories deemed “natural” only in the specific ideological terms of aspiration, promise, and progress.

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For Louie, who is befriended by Casey, a local man of 38, and asked to help him fly his pigeons from the roof of a Williamsburg warehouse, the flock of birds stands for all the things missing from her mundane life—magic, freedom, the joys of the natural world, a sense of personal significance, “the bright warm glow of belonging” (1985: 39). From the roof, Louie can indulge in a fantasy of all-consuming individual perception, a reduction of the troublesome real world, and an attendant inflation of the self, which, as I go on to show in subsequent chapters, is common to a number of later picturesque Brooklyn fictions: “This was the tallest building in the neighborhood. There was nothing but space in every direction. It was like being on top of the world. [. . .] From this vantage point I could see everything from the tiny figure pushing a shopping cart two blocks away to the three bridges that spanned the lower East River, joining Brooklyn to Manhattan [. . .] The tinier they seemed, the bigger I felt” (1985: 29). As the pigeons swoop above her, she believes that they are “bound together by nothing but instinct” (1985: 161) and fly “by magic as one bird” (1985: 162). In response to the warnings of her family, particularly her mother’s partner Junior, that she is spending too much time on the roof with Casey, she reacts violently and quite explicitly associates the pigeons with American ideas of self-reliance and freedom: “This was America, I said to myself. People were supposed to be free. They couldn’t make me stop flying the birds” (1985: 128). Casey is central to Louie’s maturation because he exposes her callowness in romanticizing the pigeons (as well as the supposed community of pigeon fanciers) in the various ways indicated by the quotations above. He is the catalyst through which “real life”—family commitments, conflicts, crime, and, above all, business interests—encroaches on what the girl has cherished as the sacred, symbolic space of the rooftop coop. What the pigeons do, in fact, symbolize is the emergent postwar, post-Fordist economy in Brooklyn and the naturalizing of particular metaphors of privatization, competition, and expenditure. From the opening description of the abandoned warehouse, which contrasts with the magical imagery of Louie’s rooftop description, it is clear to the reader that this urban landscape has suffered “the cataclysmic shocks of deindustrialization after the war” (Osman, 2011: 34): “There was a painted sign outside that read ‘Reliable Fabricators’. I followed him into the entryway, which was littered with candy wrappers, order forms on pink and yellow paper, and empty Coke bottles” (1985: 28–9). No longer in any sense “reliable” or viable, the factory has literally and metaphorically been topped by the private economy of the pigeons, which are routinely described as “stock” throughout the novel. The name of the

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factory is also a literary joke, of course, one which warns the reader against an unquestioning acceptance of Louie’s version of events. Pigeons are commodities, their constituent components—“each foot, the beak, and both eyes” (1985: 93)—inspected in Nicky’s pet store, where many scenes in the book take place, in a bid to gauge each bird’s potential exchange value. As Casey teaches Louie the intricacies of pigeon flying, his language, full of metaphors of speculation, accumulation, and competition, makes the links between his chosen sport and capital quite explicit. In response to Louie’s sentimental attitude to the birds he warns her: “You gotta lose birds if you want to be good. You know that, right? You’ll catch on. You just gotta work hard, though” (1985: 32). Expanding on this theme, he says: “Well, it’s like playing poker and then when the game’s over, everybody gets their money back. There’s no point to it. It’s gotta be for keeps, Louie. That’s what makes it a sport, that’s where the excitement comes in. If you’re the type of person that gets upset because someone catches one of your birds, you shouldn’t be up here” (1985: 52). Even his nostalgic claim that “[t]he sport ain’t what it used to be” (1985: 164) depends partly on his fond recollections of how fiercely the fliers, engaged in sometimes brutal competition, really hated each other (1985: 165). It also depends, however, on his recognition of real economic and demographic changes: many coops have been lost, he says, because tenements were knocked down after the war and replaced with housing projects (1985: 165). What his lessons gradually reveal to Louie is the fact that the dichotomy she has imagined between “roof ”—place of fantasy, freedom, nature, self-worth— and “street”—site of reality, boredom, restriction, oppressive institutions—is untenable. The various mysterious figures who appear on the roof, shady dealers and small-time local crooks, attest to this fact. Roof and street, fantasy and reality, nature and business are shown to bleed into and modify each other. Caught cleverly enacts this modification at a generic level, too. Though it is, on the surface, a classic coming-of-age tale, the constant background presence of figures from Brooklyn’s organized crime world and the shocking eruption of crime into Louie’s story toward the end in the form of her friend Hector’s murder by gangsters (1985: 217) show that it is also a crime story. In fact, Louie’s innocence consists partly in her ignorance of this fact. Just as the borders between different communities prove to be porous, so too do those between genres; in this way, the typical trajectory of the coming-of-age story is subjected to critique, its assumptions about the individual’s place within a community challenged. In the end, after three key events—the arrival of her period (1985: 212), Hector’s murder, and her parents’ decision to move the family out to Long Island (1985:

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224)—Louie arrives at adolescence with a more sophisticated understanding of her situation and of the neighborhood she is soon to leave. Saying goodbye to Casey, she realizes that the older man, with “too much missing from his life” already (1985: 242), is unable to countenance this new loss, whereas she can accept it, albeit reluctantly. His promises to collect her every weekend only serve to reinforce Louie’s understanding, already awakened by arguments with Junior and her mother, of the vulnerability of adults. Moreover, she appreciates the inevitability of historical change in the neighborhood, accepting that “the pigeon game was starting to disappear” (1985: 243); her childish utopian vision of “two worlds” (1985: 243), the roof and the street, also disappears at this moment. A residual romanticism does remain, however: “No matter where I lived or how old I got, I had only to look up to know that there was something more. Everything in the world might change, but the skies would always be alive” (1985: 243). On the one hand, these comments might be interpreted first as a desperate attempt to posit an unchanging realm of the natural in the face of personal and social upheavals, and secondly as an implicit naturalization and endorsement of a capitalist narrative of “reaching for the skies.” And yet for the reader the deconstruction of the various binaries that formed Louie’s childhood perspective complicates matters. After all, the world includes the skies and her unique view of the sky requires looking up from the ground; in other words, her view is shaped by her position in the street such that sky and street exist in a supplementary relation. Thus, her perspective at the end of the novel is a nuanced, indeed a split one.

Leaving Brooklyn Leaving Brooklyn, by means of its supremely complex and omnifarious metaphor—narrator Audrey’s defective right eye—makes the fractured and contested self hinted at in Brown Girl, Brownstones and Caught its central subject and implicitly rejects the drive to individuation advocated in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Indeed, part of Audrey’s coming of age involves the realization that her mother’s repeated use of the phrase “To thine own self be true” represents a bid to maintain a sense of inviolable individual authenticity and masks anxiety over the precarious sense of self in a time of viciousness and conflicting desires. By extension, the metaphor also exposes and then shatters the unspoken ideological consensus required to maintain an image of Brooklyn as a sheltering community separate from the world of war and global connections—what Audrey, as I

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mentioned earlier, calls “imaginative amnesia” (1990: 13). Early in the novel, she explains how the exciting distortions effectuated by the closing of her good eye, and the bad eye’s ability to make solid figures “jiggle and dissolve,” enable a release from narrow provinciality: “With my good eye shut I could even see a different design of leafy branches through the casement window, and different patterns of stars, maybe the stars as they were in another time and place. I could vault out of my own time and place and be somewhere else in history, in the world” (1990: 14). Unlike Louie in Caught, who sees “the skies” as timeless and organic, Audrey here evinces consciousness of the deliberate historicizing tendency of her idiosyncratic vision. These spatiotemporal transformations, though to some extent symptomatic of the childish “greed” for secret and private privileges (1990: 14), are nonetheless offered to the reader as real—“I did have the power to glimpse what was behind things” (1990: 14)—and thus as a viable means of deconstructing the naturalizing “slogans” of wartime Brooklyn, “extolling righteous endeavour, progress, and conformity, as if the pollution were illusory, only a haze veiling the reality, which was human decency” (1990: 13). By closing her left eye, Audrey shows that qualities like “human decency” are not innate or organic, but constructed and brittle, dependent on tacitly agreed systems of “mutual surveillance” (1990: 13) and denial. Unsurprisingly, though Audrey acknowledges the symbolic cues to community in her neighborhood (which she never names), she seems to regard them as secondary to the important work of probing the mysteries of individual and collective perception: “The Brooklyn of my story is not the place, a rather pretty place of tender low houses and gracious trees and regal avenues, a place lapped by salt water and rich with briny air, with innumerable earthy charms, and so this cannot be a story built with the ordinary scenery of stories, furniture and interior decoration and local color.” Rather, “[t]he Brooklyn of my story is a state of mind or perception, the shadow field on which my good and bad eyes staged their struggle. It could as readily be called Cleveland or Rouen or Johannesburg. It moves from place to place wherever opposing visions struggle, but unlike a shadow it never changes with the light. One can only live in it or flee” (1989: 16). But like many passages in Leaving Brooklyn, this turns out to be tricky and disingenuous upon closer inspection. Not only does the romantic specificity of her description risk contradicting her claims that the story could be set anywhere (and betrays a residual childish sense of wonder), but also the opposition she sets up between living and fleeing is an untenable one. Imaginatively, as the writing of the whole story testifies, Audrey continually revisits and inhabits the borough; at the end of the novel, when the youthful Audrey and the adult Audrey appear

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to coalesce, or at least the youthful Audrey is revealed as to a large extent an imaginative construction of the adult one, the opposition between living and fleeing breaks down completely. So in the passage above, the desire to stress “opposing visions” of material details and abstract perceptions is best seen as a vestigial immaturity the rest of the novel serves to undermine. For if Audrey’s wayward eye demonstrates anything, it is that binary oppositions cannot hold. Her condition privileges her in that it forces her to recognize that “common binary vision”—that is, fully functioning sight—does not have, as the term suggests, anything to do with duality but in fact with the operation of two eyes in tandem to provide a perception of the world “of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together” (1990: 4). It is, in other words, based on a kind of consensus. In contrast, her right eye’s fragmenting gaze offers a unique view of the tensions and distortions lurking behind this “seamless skin.” The following passage offers the most comprehensive picture of the eye’s unique vision and is worth quoting in full: The eye was of scant use in seeing what had to be seen in daily life in Brooklyn. It was made for another sort of vision. By legal standards it was a blind eye, yet it did see in its idiosyncratic way—shapes and colors and motion, all in their true configurations except all turned to fuzz. Its world was a Seurat painting, with the bonds hooking the molecules all severed, so that no object really cohered; the separate atoms were lined up next to one another, their union voluntary, not fated. This made the world, through my right eye, a tenuous place where the common, reasonable laws of physics did not apply, where a piece of face or the leg of a table or frame of a window might at any moment break off and drift away. I could tease and tempt the world, squinting my left eye shut and watching things disintegrate, and when I was alone my delight was to play with the visible world this way, breaking it down and putting it back together. I had secret vision and knowledge of the components of things, of the volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world. (1990: 4)

Atomization is the eye’s chief function, the disintegration of the seamless version of the world to which her parents’ Brooklyn aspires, but the important point here is that Audrey is able to break down and reassemble the world by means of squinting or closing one or another eye. In other words, the fractured and the seamless perspectives are held together in exquisite tension, just as within the

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passage there is a mix of simple sentences and complex sentences broken into many subclauses. Rather than opposing visions, then, what we have here is an image of supplementarity—a transgressive and destabilizing logic that informs and threatens to overwhelm the supposedly dominant structure of “daily life” in Brooklyn with its conventional narratives of safety, prosperity, and togetherness. Left alone, the “good” left eye would settle for the assumed parochial innocence of Brooklyn, “the principle of cohesiveness” at work. The right eye, however, allows Audrey secret insight into “the great world,” where “a naughty, mercurial principle of divisiveness, entropy and unsettling” operates (1990: 37). Thus, the eye produces a productive paradox: as “a sign of crisis or incompleteness” (Joseph, 2002: 2) it atomizes, breaks things down. Yet in so doing it opens up to “the great world” and reveals larger connections between seemingly disparate elements. It is a novelistic eye, in that it pays attention to interiorities and occlusions while at the same time wielding an expansive gaze across various knowable communities. So generative is this metaphorical vision that it demands to be interpreted in many other ways. First, one can say that as the teller of her own story, and a deeply reflexive one at that, Audrey is exercising her secret gifts not only on the world beyond her but also on herself. The version of selfhood that emerges, then, is also vulnerable to disintegration and dispersal. This is, of course, partly a generic issue. In a coming-of-age tale that itself blurs the borders between autobiography and fiction, a neatly individuated and delineated subject is an impossibility, which is why at the end of Leaving Brooklyn Audrey reflects once again on her mother’s maxim: “Does being true to one’s self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one’s self? It hardly matters by this time” (1990: 146). What is being challenged here (and such a challenge is coyly avoided in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, as we have seen) is a fixed notion of authenticity, a term of tremendous importance both for the coming-of-age tale, with its conventional concern for origins, pivotal moments, and a sheen of honesty, and for the wider treatment of the hotly contested neighborhood spaces of Brooklyn. Writers such as Sharon Zukin, in Naked City: the Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces (2010), and Suleiman Osman, in The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011), demonstrate how variant discourses of authenticity have competed in the regeneration (itself an ideologically loaded term connoting origin moments) of Brooklyn neighborhoods in the latter half of the twentieth century. I take Schwartz’s ocular metaphor as a useful means of unpicking notions of authenticity in a number of Brooklyn fictions in which such a concern is up for

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debate, especially those set in gentrifying or post-gentrification neighborhoods. Just as “Brownstone Brooklyn was neither completely real nor invented” but “a tectonic cityscape with the architectural and social imprints of multiple economic stages” (Osman, 2011: 21, 22) which became strategically legible to different socioeconomic groups seeking different ideas of authenticity at different times, so literal and idealized truths in Schwartz’s tale exist in supplementary relation, and depend on each other and on strategic selection of “authentic” elements. And just as “brownstone renovators symbolically stripped layers off the built environment to restore a seemingly authentic past” (Osman, 2011: 23), so Audrey regards memory as “revision,” adding: “I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story” (1990: 146). Her perspicacity (like renovation) is both destructive and productive: seeing round corners, breaking up the atoms of voluntary union, allows her to deconstruct the supposed authenticity of her parents’ vision of down-home Brooklyn while calling into question the authenticity of her own experience of growing up there and therefore, by extension, the ideological underpinning of the term “authenticity” itself. If the homologies I am presenting between Schwartz’s generic manipulations and the debates surrounding neighborhood transformations in Brooklyn perhaps seem contrived, it is worth noting how clearly writers like Zukin and Osman prioritize the “symbolic value” (Osman, 2011: 19) of these transformations, their status as stories that communities tell themselves, narratives of authenticity, and history. Moreover, there are fruitful parallels in ethical terms. “To thine own self be true” aphoristically implies a notion of “authenticity” which stems from an individual’s untrammelled faith in “originality,” that is, living, or more accurately performing, one’s life in a unique way (Taylor, 1991: 29). Likewise, the rhetoric of authenticity in urban redevelopment trades on ideals of inclusivity and sensitivity to historical origins, but is in fact, as Sharon Zukin trenchantly argues, a kind of “performance” of originality, individuality, and exclusivity: “Authenticity differentiates a person, a product, or a group from its competitors; it confers an aura of moral superiority, a strategic advantage that each can use to its own benefit” (2010: xii). And just as a decisive split between the mature narrator of the coming-of-age story and the younger narrated self is shown by Schwartz to be untenable, so authenticity has “a schizoid quality,” encompassing both past and present: “In reality, few groups can be authentic in the contradictory ways that we use the term: on the one hand, being primal, historically first or true to a traditional vision, and on the other hand, being unique, historically new, innovative and creative” (Zukin, 2010: xii). Anecdotally, the contradiction Zukin identifies might be revealed by the “artfully painted graffiti on a shop

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window” in a gentrified neighborhood (2010: xii), but more broadly it speaks to the complex incorporation of nostalgia in utopian visions of present and future communities. That Zukin discusses authenticity in terms of product differentiation and competition should not be ignored. For her, authenticity in the contemporary marketplace dissolves into questions of power, of which groups benefit economically from the dominance of one version of authentic living over another. If, as I have suggested, the rhetoric of authenticity (of being true to oneself) involves differentiation and the delineation of a space of uniqueness, then there are bound to be ethical and spatial consequences. This is especially true when the affirmation of individual choice as an autotelic category, leading to what Charles Taylor calls “soft relativism” (1991: 18), lacks “horizons of significance” (Taylor, 1991: 39), some more or less agreed context within which to articulate and measure choice, and which allows a variety of groups to “put down roots and remain in place” (Zukin, 2010: 246). Without these horizons, the pursuit of authenticity results not in the harmonious and open communities avowedly sought by gentrifiers and development corporations, but in the reduction of public space and the proliferation of what Steven Flusty calls “interdictory spaces” (1996: 48), enclosures designed to exclude. In literary terms, as subsequent chapters show, the drive to enclosure results in the frontier imagery of crime novels and early gentrification stories. With these ideas in mind, and remembering that Audrey’s condition gives her a critical view of the wider world as well as her locality, one is able to suggest yet another interpretation of Schwartz’s deep metaphor: it is a representation of the spatial dialectic Lenin calls “uneven development” (1939: 10). As capitalism expands geographically, it demands “the progressive abstraction and equalization of places” (Heffernan, 2000: 169), the homogenization of the conditions of production and exchange and the extension of the law of value. But at the same time it demands “the strict recomposition and recrystallisation of space into specific local, regional and national pockets of difference and inequality” (Heffernan, 2000: 169) so that surplus value can be extracted and the exploitation of margin by center effectively be continued. Critics have adopted different terms for this dialectical process: Neil Smith talks about “absolute” space and its immediate reconfiguration as “relative” space (1984: 67); Deleuze and Guattari talk about deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which create “smooth” space and “striated” space (1984: 289). In Zygmunt Bauman’s impassioned critiques of globalization, Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas become “extraterritoriality”—rootlessness, the loss of local connections among wealthy

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elites—and an attendant isolationism materialized in gated communities and other secure private spaces (1998: 21). Whatever words one uses, Audrey’s instinctive understanding of uneven development, achieved through the uneven development of her eyes and bound up in the uneven development of the young protagonist into the older writer, provides her with a sophisticated way of reading her Brooklyn as a place where values supposed to be local or private—close-knit community based on the family, individual choice—are abstractions constituted within a particular kind of exchange value. In short, her eye teaches her about ideology. One of the staples of Brooklyn fictions—encountered in novels as diverse as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Brookland—is the discovery that Manhattan is not all that special, after all. Audrey experiences this same revelation, but in the light of the observations above it is possible to read it as more than a simple reaffirmation of Brooklyn’s virtues or as a rejection of supposed Manhattanite values. For the young Audrey, Manhattan possesses all the attractive qualities woefully underrepresented by the older generation’s parochial Brooklyn. Manhattan is the place where “the big men” can be found (1990: 30); it is “mythic,” “jewelled,” and “impossibly sophisticated” (1990: 62). Manhattan offers the infinite variety and the depth young Audrey is constantly seeking. Audrey, bedazzled by its cosmopolitan style, is at first not prepared to exercise the same deconstructive gifts here that she applies to Brooklyn. However, when it becomes clear that the eye doctor she is sent to see by her mother is attracted to her, she is forced to open her mind to untenable thoughts, to a universe where human nature was not as Brooklyn conspired to portray it, progressing towards ever more expansive plateaus of decency and tolerance, but rather where people were driven chaotically by impulses, everyone wanting something from everyone else and staggering about to get it. (1990: 67–8)

In short, the visions of the seamlessly fabricated, ordered world and the entropic world compete for supremacy just as much here as they do in Brooklyn. And “human nature” as essentially decent, inspiring progressive trajectories, is shown to be a fallacy. It seems that “nature” is a dubious idea: what counts are desire and consumption (enacted in the doctor’s hunger for diverse penetrative acts), and desire is endlessly shaped and reconstructed by historical circumstances. In the surprising ease of her sexual relationship with the doctor, Audrey’s understanding of the precariousness of categories, including Brooklyn versus Manhattan, moral versus immoral behavior, maturity versus immaturity, increases. Her “bad eye,”

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she says, is “vindicated” because: “It has suspected the insidious ease with which things shaped and unshaped, constantly shifting relations so that any configuration was dissolving before the brain had seized it and locked it into a pattern of thought, sluggish brain forever lagging behind volatile world” (1990: 77). The apposite phrase here is “constantly shifting relations”: the way Audrey learns to experience herself and the world, and a model for how community should be viewed in the readings of Brooklyn fictions in this book, in contrast to the frozen categories of ideology. Through her affair with the eye doctor, Audrey learns of a tactile reality beyond the life of the mind (1990: 74), and of the “monotony” which inevitably follows the excitement of desire (1990: 91). Most of all, she learns the true value of her rogue eye. Rather than simply being a means of carrying her momentarily beyond the confines of Brooklyn and “down those broader paths” (1990: 30) into the wider world, it represents, as I have argued, the gift of an incisively literary or critical standpoint. When the writing Audrey declares, as the affair draws to an awkward close, that “[s]he was me, at that moment. She already knew what I know” (1990: 114), it is a recognition that a generic distinction is no longer acceptable between “Brooklyn” and “the world,” and indeed between “the world as it is” and “the world as people wish to see it.” After all, the eye itself embodies the contradictions: it can be both a “wayward eye” (1990: 30), constantly seeking adventure beyond the domestic, and a “lazy” eye, “an incarnation of the body’s dearest tropism, the leaning towards more somnolent forms of life” (1989: 65). Privileged by her unique perspective with its “dynamic of alternating cultural visions,” it might appear that the mature Audrey believes in her ability “to survey the fullness of the scene” (Lutz, 2004: 31) through realizing that “there [is] life in Brooklyn” (1990: 144) just as there are denial, secrets, and monotony in Manhattan, and through understanding the brittle nature of the consensuses that shape the world’s connections. However, as the previous chapter argued, it is the incompleteness and partiality of any perspective, no matter how intelligent and empathetic it might be, that is most revealing for our purposes. After all, as Richard Rorty has argued, even in a globalizing world in which new forms of cosmopolitan relations are called for, it is impossible fully to step outside the carapace of the self and one’s local affiliations (1991: 213). Narrative, as an ethical idea, delivers fragments of different perspectives and therefore demands intersubjective work; it reveals relationships of supplementarity. Schwartz shows her awareness of this in the final paragraphs. She does not allow the reader to settle unquestioningly for a split between the naïve, Brooklyn Audrey and the wise, literary adult Audrey who informs us that she did eventually leave the

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borough (1990: 145). There is no Audrey fully capable of viewing “the fullness of the scene,” in other words. The last page takes the form of a disquisition on memory, in which Audrey muses on the concatenating tendency of her literary vision and the disingenuousness in assuming a binary opposition between the two Audreys: “Perhaps I haven’t succeeded in finding the girl I was, but only in fabricating the girl I might have been, would have liked to be, looking backwards from the woman I have become” (1990: 146). In this sense, the generic boundaries of the coming-of-age narrative itself are blurred as Audrey’s selfhood is problematized: the more or less neat transition from immaturity in the provinces to full knowledge in the big world outside is shown to be retroactively fashioned, and thus the nostalgia for a sense of futurity characteristic of many Brooklyn comingof-age stories is exposed as a deliberate construct. Finally, Audrey reminds us that the storytelling impulse represents the final combination of the fragmentary and the coherent visions: By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corner of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particles, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions—what happened and what might have happened—come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. (1990: 146)

The blurring described here is, ironically, essential for a clarity of vision which can accommodate the merging of fact and fiction, real and imagined, in the portrayal of coming of age and community. “Brooklyn” has therefore become simultaneously a real place, an ideological standpoint, a testing ground for an ambiguous literary perspective, an example of uneven development, and a model of how memory works. Ultimately for Schwartz (and for the writer of this book) community, like selfhood, is an ongoing process, something worked through persistently in the act of writing and reading. As Audrey says: “I left Brooklyn. I leave still, every moment. For no matter how much I leave, it doesn’t leave me” (1990: 145). This may appear to be no more than a sophisticated articulation of the adage, “You can take the girl out of Brooklyn [. . .],” but the ceaseless interplay of staying and leaving it describes is central to the argument. Time and again in contemporary Brooklyn fictions one sees this model of urban community-as-process rehearsed, even when certain characters are inclined to view community in romantic, organic, timeless terms. In each instance, the process consists of arrivals and

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departures, exchanges (including the economic sense which this chapter has discussed)—continual movement between local and global perspectives, between urban region as material reality and imagined community, between pasts and presents, and between community as geographical specificity and heterotopic everyplace. What we should take from Leaving Brooklyn, finally, is the need to become part of the process, to read Brooklyn fictions with our own rogue eyes.

3

(Anti)mythic Community—Season at Coole and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead

Aren’t big families the loneliest communities on earth? Stephens, 1999: 22

Keeping it “real” in Brooklyn fictions Both Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies and Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994) emphasize Brooklyn’s paradoxical state of belonging and notbelonging in their depictions of particular communities within the borough. They do it, however, in very different ways and to divergent ends. According to Nathan Glass, narrator of Auster’s whimsical tale, Brooklyn is “New York and yet not New York” (2005: 48). It is a place with a personality distinct from Manhattan’s, regardless of civic and political realities, and, if one takes into account the novel’s ethical framework (of which more in the following chapter), a place with a fictionalizing consciousness in the service of fundamental human interconnectedness. It is, above all, a place of eccentricity (appropriately enough, given its location away from the metropolitan center), populated by a colorful mix of people which includes beautiful mothers, drag queens, aging writers, and art dealers. Brooklyn Follies is, of course, set in Park Slope, where the quirkiness and diversity on display are sustained, or indeed permitted, by a level of economic comfort. It may be a book about survival that ends with the collective suffering of the World Trade Center attacks, but there is rarely a suggestion that day-to-day economic survival is an issue for any of its characters. The Brooklyn Book of the Dead is set in East New York, a neighborhood notorious for consistently having the highest murder rate in New York City and with over half the population below the poverty line, and it is instructive to compare Auster’s summation

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with Stephens’: “East New York: not really New York and not east of anything. Really just the heart of Brooklyn, its heart and soul, a place without pretense or hope” (1994: 37). Here, the misappellation is neither propitious nor revealing of any valuable communal truths: they simply got the name wrong. Or more accurately, as Walter Thabit explains, the choice of “East New York” by Colonel John R. Pitkin in 1835 was a deliberate, ideological attempt to align the area with the industrial center and jettison associations with its agricultural past (2007: 10). This problematic nomenclature speaks to a deeper concern with representation and reality in Stephens’ novel, but unlike the Park Slope of Follies, whose “heart and soul” is revealed aggregatively through the amassing of stories and the playing of multiple roles, East New York is apparently defined by its lack of “pretense.” One might infer that the Coole siblings, reuniting in East New York for their father’s funeral, are too concerned with brutal material realities to find private solace or community cohesion in shared storytelling, creativity, and elaborate, playful artifice. In his hilariously polemical essay on contemporary Brooklyn novelists, Melvin Jules Bukiet describes not so much a genre as a sentimental mode of writing of which, ostensibly, Brooklyn Follies might be considered the epitome and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead the antithesis. Driven by “their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things,” writers of “Brooklyn Books of Wonder” (including, among many others, Paul Auster, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Benjamin Kunkel, and Alice Sebold) “[t]ake mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith” and produce a particular brand of self-satisfied, delusory “wondrousness” (Bukiet, 2007: 23). Although BBoWs (to use Bukiet’s abbreviation) frequently deal with dark themes and traumatic events, they are disingenuous because they “insist on finding a therapeutic lesson in their dark material” (2007: 24). Unfortunately, according to Bukiet: “it’s false to all human experience to find ‘growth’ in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering” (2007: 25). To discover wonder in the aftermath of tragedy—in a personalized “heaven,” as in Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002); in political activism, as in Kunkel’s Indecision (2005); or even in the act of writing about tragedy, as in Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)— is, following Lionel Trilling, to “mistake sincerity for authenticity” (Bukiet, 2007: 30), to think that being “true to oneself ” constitutes an adequate moral framework. Leaving aside Bukiet’s philosophical assumptions for a moment, it is worth remembering how important the concept of “authenticity” is in Brooklyn fictions. As the previous chapter showed, it is an unavoidable issue in the genres

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of memoir and coming of age, and as subsequent analysis shows, it is especially contested and politically charged in stories of crime and gentrification. Amusing though Bukiet’s assertions are, they expose themselves to critique because they imply a conception of authentic experience in literature every bit as disingenuous as that found in the Brooklyn Books of Wonder. What Bukiet craves is, essentially, a strict form of literary realism which refrains from the dilution of traumatic experience with kitsch, saccharine sentimentality or, most of all, fabulation: “The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience” (2007: 35). As “fundamentally conservative” writers presenting themselves as liberals (2007: 35), Bukiet feels that the young authors of BBoWs are unredeemed by their impressive prose styling or, in the case of Paul Auster and Dave Eggers, their self-reflexivity, because their fiction ultimately evades the malevolence of the real world. Not only is Bukiet’s an extraordinarily narrow and indeed conservative view of the novel’s capabilities, it also ignores the fact that mimetic realism is the greatest confidence trick of all, that the “true” in literature he so desires has its own complex metaphoricity. In an important respect, the novel is an extended metaphor and therefore fundamentally inauthentic. But metaphor, of course, relies on a complex interplay of compatibility and incompatibility, a supplementary relationship between likeness and unlikeness: “In order that metaphor obtain, one must continue to identify the previous incompatibility through the new compatibility. The predicative assimilation involves [. . .] a specific kind of tension [. . .] between semantic incongruence and congruence [. . .] To see the like is to see the same inspite of and through the different” (Ricoeur, 1979: 146). Crucially, this reminds us that the “human experience” Bukiet valorizes as absolutely distinct from fabulation and pretense is, in a consumer society, itself mediated, abstracted, and commodified. The question of realism is addressed throughout Brooklyn Fictions. To romanticize, as Bukiet surely does, a form of prescriptive realism dedicated to the “true,” to “human experience” regarded as natural or ontologically pure, is to make the same mistake as those who view community as organic, rooted in concreteness and use value, opposed to the abstractions of exchange value and commodity. As Miranda Joseph argues, the particularities of use value are “historically and socially determined” and “supplement the discontinuous circuit of abstract value” (2002: 15) such that supposedly concrete and timeless entities like family and community incorporate the logic of abstract capitalist social relations and are materially formed through exchange. Likewise, understandings of realism are determined by historical and social relations, and

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the play of literality and metaphoricity, concreteness and abstraction gives rise, in the domain of capitalism, to “capitalist realism.” As Richard Godden, in his astutely against-the-grain reading of Hemingway, states: “Under full capitalism all things are metaphoric: they are what they are used for but they are also what they cost” (2008: 56). Hemingway is a capitalist realist, Godden argues, partly because his prose is both literal and metaphoric, but also because his heroes inhabit a world dominated by the marketplace, where the sensory delight they derive from supposedly natural objects—trout, bulls, pebbles—cannot stand outside the market but is shaped by “fundamental economic relations” (2008: 49). Such objects “are equally, and almost interchangeably, opportunities for the creation of perfect and disembodied moments of isolate perception” (2008: 50). In other words, the acute perception of narrators and protagonists must itself be seen as a type of individualized consumption, concrete use-value in each case vying for supremacy with promissory value and the enticements of the seller. Writing, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in the 1930s, during an era Godden identifies as one of burgeoning American consumerism, Daniel Fuchs chronicles a neighborhood by means of another technique of capitalist realism. When Philip, the aspiring writer in Summer in Williamsburg (1934), asks Mr Miller about the reasons for Mr Sussman’s suicide, which begins the novel, the old man’s reply appears at first to be couched in the language of empirical, scientific naturalism: “If you would really discover the reason, you must pick Williamsburg to pieces until you have them all spread out on your table before you, a dictionary of Williamsburg. And then select. Pick and discard. Take, with intelligence you have not and with a patience that would consume a number of lifetimes, the different aspects that are pertinent. Collect and then analyze to understand the quality of each detail” (Fuchs, 2006: 11–12). Philip takes this advice to heart: “Collect, said Philip. That includes the fat woman and the little man. Even the green blouse sticking to her back and the bald-headed Jew” (2006: 14). Through such meticulous detailing a picture of a community might well emerge, and yet the dominant lexis here is actually to do with accumulation, followed by selection, consumer choice. To borrow Richard Godden’s revealing image: there is a lot on display in Williamsburg’s “shop window,” and much that has an impression of reality about it. It is up to the putative writer to choose what he wants and attribute to it a particular abstract value. Philip’s “dictionary” is also an inventory or a stock-taking, and his encompassing, accretive gaze speaks, like that of a Hemingway hero, to an individualized economy of perception with words as currency. Whereas Walt Whitman’s aggregation of elements tends to be universalizing, and tends to be aware of its own internal contradictions and

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the slippery nature of the “I,” Philip’s is privatizing: the shifting social relations of community are reduced to their abstract value as ostensible markers of a subjectivized literary “reality.” For this reason, I see Fuchs as an important ancestor of the contemporary Brooklyn consumer picturesque, as Chapter 5 illustrates, and of the “new social novel” as advocated by Tom Wolfe, the writing of which involves “cramming as much of New York City between the covers as you could” (1989: 45).

Michael Stephens’ brand of realism What has all this to do with the fiction of Michael Stephens? Insofar as they are uncompromising and bleak, presenting a “tough, unprivileged, and decidedly unpicturesque” Irish-American world “without the benefit of softening contexts” (Wall, 1999: 357), Stephens’ novels about the Coole family—Season at Coole (1972) and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994)—certainly lack the artificial “wonder” Bukiet so misprizes in many Brooklyn-inspired stories. Stephens even includes in the second novel a pointed reference to the most famous ancestor of the Brooklyn Book of Wonder when Emmett Coole reflects: “There was a book his mother talked about called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but there were no trees out on the street, only in the backyards, and he never saw her read anything” (1994: 94); the tree in their backyard had grapes “too sour to eat” (1994: 85). Very much without hope and without “pretense,” Stephens’ Coole novels can be taken together as a brutal dissection and rejection of the immigrant “American Dream” and its loose promises of economic success and freedom from the constraints of the old country. (In this respect, and in their “wrathful judging of others” [Stephens, 1986: 86], Stephens’ novels have much in common with the work of Gilbert Sorrentino. Indeed, a quotation from Sorrentino prefaces The Brooklyn Book of the Dead.) The Cooles’ story is, overwhelmingly, one of disappointment and blame that turn to crapulence and violence, of romantic dreams that shatter upon the rocks of material reality. Inspector Coole, or “The Chief ” (Stephens, 1972: 12), the father at the heart of both novels (alive in one and dead in the other), dreamed as a youth “that he would one day become the American ambassador to Ireland” (1972: 26) but ends up a disgruntled Customs Officer, a reluctant, bellicose husband, and an alcoholic father. His “nine plus” children (1972: 11), particularly the sons who resent him yet resemble him in so many ways, have suffered their own disappointments and tribulations, frequently finding a bitter kind of relief in arguing and fighting with each other. At the

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very bottom is Terence Coole, “the scourge of the clan, the homeless derelict who slept in abandoned vehicles at the edge of golf courses on Long Island” (Stephens, 1994: 12). Whatever was in the shop window the Cooles have long since realized was never for them. All of which would seem to meet the criteria of realism as understood by Bukiet: gritty, authentic human experience undiluted by utopianism or easy moral statements, insisting upon material reality rather than illusory metaphor. And yet, as we have seen, the realms of the real and the metaphorical cannot be separated so easily. In fact, because the terms of consumer aspiration and exchange have become so naturalized and typical, capitalist realism, employing sets of metaphors accepted as “real,” has become “in the narrowed context of consumerism [. . .] the new literalism [. . .] within which citizens and authors are invited to live ‘real lives’ constituted from promise and wish” (Godden, 2008: 8). For all their marginality, the Coole brothers and sisters exist within this framework and attempt to live such “real lives.” And their disappointment still presupposes wish, aspiration, and promise: far from denying the capitalist terms of the argument, it reinforces them. What I propose in this chapter is that denied the commodities that might typically mark fulfillment or success, the Cooles seek consolation by accumulating and exchanging another type of commodity— the familial legends that form the fabric of Stephens’ writing, particularly in Season at Coole. Frequently passed off by the characters as “authentic,” these tales participate in an aggressively competitive exchange economy in which value is ascribed to narratives that are believed to capture most eloquently the “essence” of what it is to be Coole, or Irish, or East New York, or all of these. The Coole storytellers, like the narrators of Hemingway’s fiction, equate heightened perception with what is natural and unchanging. Like Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies, then, community emerges from the agglomeration of stories. But unlike Auster’s story, Season at Coole and, in particular, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead do not disavow the ideological assumptions behind it. In fact, Stephens’ novels have much more in common with Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn in that they interrogate the very notions of authenticity and the consensual sharing of narrative. Family storytelling in Stephens’ novels is shown to be a method of obfuscation even as it purports to bolster authenticity, and community is anxiously constructed on mythic, factitious notions of endogamy, blood ties, and belonging. Not only do the Coole siblings (especially the brothers) tell tales that are inward looking and proscriptive, they tend not to listen to alternative stories, not even each other’s. So Stephens’ vision of the Coole family and its part of Brooklyn evidently joins

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with Miranda Joseph in militating “against the idealization of community as a utopian state of human relatedness and, more important, against the idea that communities are organic, natural, spontaneous occurrences” (2002: ix). Stephens’ writing serves as a useful companion study to Leaving Brooklyn first because it is concerned with what happens to the perception of the borough when one leaves it, the ways in which it becomes a state of mind or a specific, reductive mode of perception; and secondly because it tackles wider questions of migration, mobility, and community which are of great importance to subsequent discussions of immigrant Brooklyn novels in this study.

Keeping it in the family—Season at Coole As Eamonn Wall states: “In the world that Stephens creates, the suburb and the changed ghetto become metaphors for alienation and assimilation, representing locations where the American Dream is dismantled” (1999: 357). So to begin this analysis with a counter-intuitive statement: Season at Coole is a Brooklyn fiction set further out on suburban Long Island. It is a fiction about multiple displacements, shattered dreams, and the nostalgia for supposed ancestral homelands that accrues from displacement, and therefore a Brooklyn fiction because characters obsess so much on the borough from which they have departed. And though it cannot be classified as a contemporary novel, it is vital to give it due attention because it traces the migratory history of the Cooles before the symbolic return to Brooklyn in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. In the earlier story, the Coole family, headed up by Leland Sr., have made the melancholic journey “from someplace to no place” (McCaffrey, 1992: 177), leaving behind East New York and taking up residence, with considerable bitterness, in the suburbs. Here, 25 years after their migration, they remain “Irish beggars surrounded by the tacky elegance of newly rich, almost rich, and the rich” (1972: 14). Though “never poor enough or humble to collect welfare,” the Cooles live a squalid existence in a dilapidated house nicknamed “Bedlam,” animal metaphors such as “roosted” only emphasizing how low they have fallen (Stephens, 1972: 14). Presumably their move to the suburbs originally constituted an attempt at upward mobility, rather than simply desperation. Lawrence J. McCaffrey, in The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (first published in 1976, with a revised edition in 1997), sees Irish Catholic experience in America after World War I as, in the main, a “journey toward American prosperity and respectability”

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(1997: 171) made possible by, among other factors, the plaudits gained by Catholic soldiers during the war (1997: 171); increasingly prominent roles in national politics during the 1930s (1997: 172); and improvements in education, which “launched the Irish Catholic majority into the ranks of the American middle class” (1997: 175). As a result, “[w]ith advancing incomes and social standing, Irish Catholics migrated from inner-city neighborhoods to those on the fringes of the city; some even settled in suburbs” (McCaffrey, 1997: 171). His optimistic, assimilationist narrative (with its specific references to American prosperity) meets resistance from other historians such as Kerby Miller, who decries McCaffrey’s “ahistorical overemphasis on the ultimate suburbanization and embourgeoisement of the Irish that trivializes the immigrant and even the second generation experiences” (1988: 1394). Certainly, upon first inspection the suburban experience of the Cooles has much more of “the pain of exile; poverty, exploitation, and conflict” (Miller, 1988: 1394) than the assumed pleasure of joining the American middle class. However, the liberal narrative of assimilation, which may present itself as naturalized, as an inevitable corollary of a human aspiration to succeed, is a discontinuous one: at every stage it is open to the difference existing in supplementary relation to the sameness (at least in terms of a neutral, shared public realm) which is its goal. Therefore, whether or not the Cooles have failed to assimilate—and it is clear that on Long Island they will continue to be thought of as a “malignancy” by the local community (Stephens, 1972: 162)—their deracination and their material poverty nonetheless exist in close attendance to the abstract ideal of assimilation. Indeed, they might be considered a function of it, the perceived binary other that reinforces the sense of bourgeois community on Long Island by legitimating social hierarchies and demonizing outsiders. But the Cooles’ isolation cannot be celebrated as a deliberate attempt to “reclaim for themselves minority status” (Wall, 1999: 358), thereby exposing the ideology of assimilation in a productive way. As I have said, their marginality only serves to bolster that ideology’s terms. And their response to failure is a retreat into their own myths and metaphors which is every bit as intolerant of difference. The clue to this retreat lies in the words of the title—“season at Coole.” Elsewhere in the novel the preposition is different but the effect the same: sons Terry and Wolfe are “like other people in Coole, who never had a logical thought in their lives” (1972: 137). “Coole” is the dominant patriarchal signifier, the name of the father, but it has also become a place, the domain they have created in opposition to the bourgeoisie surrounding them: “they had to make a private shitheap within the heart of the suburban area, working as antibodies

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to the cancer around them” (1972: 162). This nomenclature makes the house a debased kind of ancestral homeland and ethnic enclave to replace the ones the family has left behind—Ireland and, as we shall see, East New York. And yet the connection to Ireland is loosened by that very name. In one of Leland Junior’s italicized, reflective passages, he ironically refers to his adolescent self as “the heir to the throne of O’Coole” but then remembers “the O vanished when they came to America, so they could get through immigration faster, alphabetically, & you thought that only happened to Zimmermans, Mr. Dylan!” (1972: 46). What this reveals is that names are brittle and to some extent arbitrary signifiers with only a metaphorical relation to identity, and yet that relation is tremendously powerful. In this case, the loss of the “O” implies that the family is no longer “of Coole” (presumably the village in County Westmeath, EIRE) but has become adjectival or analogous—“like Coole.” Even as an increasingly desperate striving for ancestral links is enacted in order that the Cooles (and “their castle, their Alamo,” the house called “Coole” [1972: 162]) be located in an Irish patrilineal tradition, the change of name speaks of deracination and loss of belonging, of global connections reduced to parochial obsessions. What is more, Leland Jr.’s reference to Bob Dylan reminds us that such transformations of exile are not limited to the Irish, despite the father’s tribalism and his insistence on “negatively ethnic” (1972: 95) stereotypes of Jews, Hispanics, and the Italian boys with which his daughter Sandra socializes (1972: 80). Unable and unwilling to assimilate—whether or not assimilation is in fact desirable or even possible—and unable to entertain the idea of American cultural pluralism, the Chief resorts to prejudice, albeit one characterized by wide-ranging targets, in an attempt to deny his own failings and to shore up a myth of ethnic homogeneity. As his daughter Sam observes: “Daddy, he likes to blame his trouble on the Italians at the dock, the Jews in the grocery store, the Irish in the bars, never on his own head” (1972: 86). The last group on this list is significant: the dream of homogeneous community excludes even other Irish, those who are not “Coole.” For him, only family can serve as sufficient unit of community even if, as Gerard Delanty makes clear, the kind of “traditional” community represented by Irish kinship structures is itself the result of economic and social changes in the nineteenth century and thus not timeless or organic at all (2003: 35). (Miranda Joseph goes further, arguing that “far from being mitigated by economic prosperity, kinship relations actively define and elaborate economic hierarchies” [2002: 159].) Both of Stephens’ novels demonstrate how family cannot survive the unchanged multiple migrations from country to country, center to suburb.

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In a book full of performances—Mickey Mack’s Beats-inspired poetry reading (1972: 44–5); the notebook writings of Leland Jr., who considers himself the better writer (1972: 33); even the nonsensical words Leland scrawls on the mirrors (1972: 47)—the most obsessively rehearsed performance of all is that of family tradition. It is not coincidental that Mickey Mack, who ran away from home aged 15 and whom the father rejects as “a dirty writer” (1972: 51), is the son who most clearly recognizes this. His outsider status and his own predilection for performance allow him, upon his return at Christmas with brothers Pat and Mike, to recognize that he is entering “the theater [. . .] there were the performers, these members of the family, froze, again for that instant like they did when Wolfe walked by with his guitar” (1972: 159). The key word here is “froze”: not only is the house a theater, it is a repository and “a museum, literally, of natural history” where memories are kept for supposedly timeless contemplation, and where “each inhabitant here made the center of his life a collection of things, the mother storing up children, the father collecting beer waste around his belly, the oldest son a collector of misanthropic dreams” (1972: 160). It is as if the Cooles have taken rather too seriously Miller’s exhortation to “collect,” as if the more cathected objects of family history are accumulated, the stronger the family’s identity will be. They are not fossilized, exactly; they are slowly decaying, which only makes the continued accumulation of things more urgent. Moreover, the word “literally” is surely ironic: there is nothing “natural” about the history on display here. This is revealed when Mickey Mack opens the bathroom closet and catalogues what he finds. The passage is worth quoting in full: The closet was filled, five feet high with empty aerosol cans, maybe a thousand of them, for some reason when any member used a deodorant spray, a room freshener spray, a shaving cream can, they threw it into this closet, instead of putting it in the waste paper basket below the sink, the cans were rusty, smiling like an oxidized snowman at Michael, in two years the pile would be his height, then they’d have to find a new closet to throw their aerosol bombs in, though there wasn’t much space left, walking into the parents’ bedroom, clothes, sheets, towels, curtains, old pants, records, magazines, piled about the room like ant hills, human insect forts, but warm, you could sink down into any heap of garbage, just pick any room, cozy fertile bins where memory never ceased, where fantasy ruled, he had come once again to wonderland. (1972: 161)

For all its dirt and degradation the Cooles’ world is, Stephens recognizes, as much prone to affectations of wonder as any of the Brooklyn novelists Bukiet satirizes.

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But the “fantasy” here is of a very specific kind. It is the ultimate capitalist fantasy of those who are apparently excluded by capitalism, the fantasy that “there is no longer anything of negligible value. Everything counts” (Léger, 1973: 65). It is a fantasy enacted by the attribution of absolute abstract value to every object of no discernible concrete value, even to waste. That these objects are hidden in closets and bedrooms rather than publicly displayed only emphasizes the almost pathologically private nature of the family economy. Everything here is interchangeable, in the sense that clothes and sheets have only the same status as used aerosol cans, and yet all this “garbage” has comforting sensual qualities (warmth, coziness) precisely because it has ceased to be simply what it is and has acquired symbolic value as an icon of family history. Mickey Mack’s inventory of trash describes how sentimental value is transmuted into “the ideological imperative to aestheticize waste” in a capitalist society that produces and consumes so much that waste itself “becomes productive” (Gooch, 2009). Interwoven throughout this passage, as they are throughout the novel, are threads of natural imagery. Piles of waste resemble “ant hills, human insect forts”: such a description suggests both that the Cooles are “human insects” and thus the lowest of the low and that these piles are a synecdoche of the “castle” which is their house, a defense against malevolent communities without. Each room is “fertile,” invested with the power to generate memories in the same way Rose the mother is a producer of children in an environment where “fertility was everything” (1972: 169). There appears to be an autobiographical connection here. In his memoir Where the Sky Ends, Stephens talks about his own mother using metaphors again drawn from nature and from economics: “No one associates words with my mother. Instead, they think of babies [. . .] My mother was the Henry Ford of maternity, the cloning machine, a human Galapagos turtle” (1999: 156–7). What is crucial in all of these metaphors is, once again, their interchangeability, which implies that the natural is every bit as commodified as the man-made. In Capital, Marx states: “As the capitalist mode of production extends, so also does the utilization of the refuse left behind by production and consumption. Under the heading of production we have the waste products of industry and agriculture, under that of consumption we have both the excrement produced by man’s natural metabolism and the form in which useful articles survive after use has been made of them” (Marx, 1981: 195). This is why excrement figures so frequently in Season at Coole. Memories of Leland Sr.’s half-sisters Quif and Quim being bundled into an ambulance in Brooklyn, “their red hair smeared in brown feces and their orangey eyes staring no place particular” (1972: 31), are followed immediately by a scene in which

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Leland Jr. “spraddles the toilet backward, watching a piece of shit in the bowl drydocked on the porcelain” (1972: 32). From father to son, the inheritance is waste, a metaphor which collapses the natural into the commodified and the past into the present and that leaves the idea of inheritance and family mythology ideologically frozen, or “drydocked” in the toilet. Leland Jr. gets progressively more obese and is unable to making anything of his life because he is crippled by this waste—“all that crap you have in your head” (1972: 33)—and by the innate knowledge that the blood which supposedly transcends all other ties is, in fact, just another waste product of the Cooles’ economic and cultural marginalization: it is “shitty Irish blood” (1972: 33). Excremental it may be, but this blood has abstract value in creating myths of family ancestry and community. Like all the other rubbish in the house and in his head, it counts. In a house dominated by the patriarchal signifier “Coole,” the supreme commodity, the reader is initially invited to see the mother, “Rose,” as the last bastion of the natural and as offering an alternative matriarchal narrative to the repressive story of the father. Even at her most degraded, clutching a vodka bottle and inspecting the “[p]oo poo stains” on the laundry while talking to the Virgin Mary (1972: 17), she sees herself as a “poet” and as a model of tolerance and liberalism: “I’m a beatnik, I am, Mary, you know this. This is a commune and I am Queen of the Communists; I used to work for a wealthy socialist family in Sands Point [. . .] We must love everyone, the Jews, the Italians on the docks, the colored, the butcher” (1972: 16). However, her claims for cultural pluralism are undermined by her evocation of the “commune,” a space every bit as isolated and utopian as “Coole.” And insofar as her main function is to produce the valued commodities that are Coole children, she cannot hope to stand outside the patriarchal system. Her multiple miscarriages constitute another kind of waste in the Coole household, and like the other forms of waste they are aestheticized and thus accumulate their own stories. In the imaginary Coole football team, for example, the lost child called Oliver is “the vanishing wing back” with his own personal mythology (1972: 168). Of huge significance for the subsequent analysis of The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, in which the children return for the father’s funeral to an East New York envisioned as an ancestral home, is the fact that Oliver, like the other miscarried children, was born outside Brooklyn, whereas all the surviving Coole siblings were born in the borough, with the exception of Mickey Mack. It is as if the idea of “Brooklyn” as homeland is sufficiently nourishing to sustain both physical life and the life of the Coole mythology. Mickey Mack only reinforces this view: born outside Brooklyn, he has remained an outsider and a rare visitor to the new home in Long Island.

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The novel’s climactic scene occurs after another miscarriage, when “[t]here were no more babies to produce in her” (1972: 169) and thus Rose’s perceived use-value is diminished. At this point, she calls on her husband to recognize her history and her abstract, symbolic value by smashing him in the face and demanding that he say her name. To “call out that word like she was his flower, not poetically” (1972: 169) would ostensibly be to acknowledge an alternative to The Chief ’s version of the family mythology, and this is precisely why, tears in his eyes as the novel ends, he is unable to carry out her wishes. For the assembled children, the name of “the flower” is synonymous with “their momma” (1972: 170), so that the evocation of “Rose” opens up the last, desperate possibility of something organic, natural, and timeless. Ultimately they, and we, are denied that possibility and, besides, the novel has already made clear that a binary contrast of the natural and the commodified, or the real and the poetic, is impossible to uphold. What the final marital confrontation becomes, then, with the children as audience, is the tragically ironic performance of a bid for authenticity and individual sovereignty. If the final scene pits two narratives—the mother’s and the father’s—in competition with each other but with both ultimately doomed to failure, then it reveals something of the way stories, art, and creativity more generally are treated in the novel. Just as Rose considers herself a beatnik, so her daughter Oona considers herself “part of an immutable triumvirate, since she and Patrick painted, that consisted of Michael, Patrick and herself, three of the Coole tribe she thought would survive the malaise, because they had their art, which wasn’t necessarily in their actual work, but more in the spiritual rhythms they had set up in their lives” (1972: 60). Whatever this “art” consists of, it provides no hope for survival or transcendence. As a book which is partly about the aestheticization of waste as an attempt to bolster a sense of community, Season at Coole too closely associates artistic production with waste for it to offer any way out. It is not just that those who consider themselves artists are constantly engaged in sibling rivalry, as evinced by Leland Jr.’s claim that he taught “hotshit Mickey Mack Coole [. . .] everything he knows about writing” (1972: 33), or even that his attempts to write rarely go beyond the invention of titles inspired by the filth around him: “The Last Journey by Leland Coole. Slush by Leland Coole. Slime by Leland Coole. Urine by Leland Coole” (1972: 39). It is that the various competing stories in Season at Coole are themselves waste material from the production of the Coole family history, which are aestheticized and assume the status of commodity. The form of the novel—a fractured narrative comprised of sections of free indirect discourse, which jumps from character to character, perspective

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to perspective—encourages competition between these perspectives, with each character seeking a deeper authenticity of experience than the others. In trying to understand what it means to be Coole and therefore to escape Coole’s confines (escape being “the major focus of their life,” as Sam says to Oona [1972: 88]), the multiple storytellers find any attempts to get out circumscribed by the house which embodies and produces those stories and also provides the title of the novel in which they are presented. All that remains is a language that cannot hope to speak to anything beyond the house, or even beyond the person who uses the language, an accumulation of words in an “incoherent English-American version of Irish” (1972: 121) that collapses in on itself. When Leland starts ripping up his books and writing words onto the mirrors, his disrupted consciousness inadvertently reveals some profound truths. His scrawls are recorded “for posterity” (1972: 47) which, in the metaphorical contexts I have been exploring, begs to be seen in relation to its etymological relative “posterior.” Moreover, his seemingly random words acquire a kind of painful sense when read, once again, against the backdrop of consumption and waste: “OTTO  PIG GOD I ARE THE ART  FART  HOMOGENIZE THEM” (1972: 47). In this Joycean outburst, the grammatical breakdown of “I are the art” presages the close association of “art” with “fart.” Yet again, art is waste product, hot air of the foulest kind. The imperative phrase which concludes this list might refer to these rhyming nouns, but in the wider context of the novel it also suggests the drive to homogenize the community of Cooles, to align all the family members with a monolithic story of Irishness, shared blood, and Brooklynite spirit. But Leland’s “perfect prosody,” ultimately, is nothing more than “the world reduced to where it reflects The Word on his face” (1972: 47); it is, to borrow Richard Godden’s phrase, just another moment of “isolate perception” commensurate with numerous other such reductionist moments attributed to his siblings. Deracinated, stranded in a self-made fortress in a hostile suburban community, the Cooles have retreated into themselves and are as atomized and isolated from each other as the words Leland scrawls on the mirrors. Consanguinity is not a basis for community in Season at Coole, only the occasion for tendentious metaphors of togetherness which fail to mask near total breakdown and incoherence. Just as it is alcoholism that connects the Stephens siblings more than ethnicity or family in Stephens’ memoir Where the Sky Ends (1999: 53), the Coole siblings are a community only by virtue of vices and shared bitterness. Many of the anecdotes which litter Stephens’ earlier novel are about the Cooles’ former life in Brooklyn. From The Chief ’s memories of Quif and

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Quim’s “nice sized house under the Williamsburg Bridge” (1972: 29) to the memory of how Leland Jr. put his brother Emmett’s hand in the hot oven when his only five years old (1972: 65), these stories are, as I have been arguing, valuable commodities because they help define oppositional identities in the present. And yet, so powerful is the lure of the Brooklyn past that it assumes a narcotic quality, fatally relaxing any capacity for change or progress: The Chief ’s life has become merely “a final hallucination of his past” (1972: 12). Likewise, brothers Pat and Mike, meeting in New York before returning to Long Island for Christmas, smoke “nostalgia grass,” conjure “the mutual image in their narcotized skulls of the wind tearing down MacDougal Street, Brooklyn,” and dream of “one good Christmas” that has never existed (1972: 113). Given that Brooklyn in Season at Coole is very much an imagined place, an assumed ancestral home with as powerful a symbolic reach as Ireland, it is surely instructive to observe the extent to which nostalgia remains a force when the Coole siblings (now numbering sixteen) return to East New York for the funeral of The Chief in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. Will the departure of the father who, as the “King Midas of Shit” (1972: 12), was chiefly responsible for inculcating in his children the principle of waste-value, the treasuring of leftovers like nostalgia, signal the rejection of a nostalgia that has only ever been isolate and divisive, rather than community-forming?

Back to Brooklyn—The Brooklyn Book of the Dead The novel opens with a stark statement of finality: “He’s dead. The old man’s dead. Poor old bastard.” East New York is then nostalgically linked to the father through further repetition of the adjective “old”: “His sons gathered in the old neighborhood. In this funeral parlor across from the shrine church of Our Lady of Lourdes [. . .] The old ghetto in Brooklyn. East New York. That mythical land between Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, between hell and Brownsville” (1994: 11). And yet, in a move characteristic of this novel, the “mythical”—the word, admittedly, is used ironically here—is immediately contrasted with material reality: “High crime, low rent, none of the buildings more than a few stories except the projects—and not a familiar face on the street” (1994: 11). This last clause is significant, hinting as it does at the widespread demographic and social changes in East New York during the 1960s and 1970s: if the second- and thirdgeneration working-class Irish perceive themselves as outsiders on Long Island, then now they are just as much on the margins here: “This neighborhood hadn’t

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seen their kind since Kennedy became president, two or three junkyard dogs’ lifetimes ago” (1994: 11). In other words, the Irish have long since left the area. Though Stephens never gives an exact date, the available evidence suggests that the funeral takes place in the 1980s, some time after East New York’s rapid ghettoization, which was precipitated by the riots of 1966. Walter Thabit, whose consulting firm was employed by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration to develop public and moderate-income housing in the neighborhood, has written eloquently of the difficulties East New York faced in his book How East New York Became a Ghetto (2003).1 Statistically, the story he tells is in many ways a typical one for American inner cities, and a clear illustration of how global factors contribute to local change: a working-class immigrant community of Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Irish, and Germans dating from the mid-nineteenth century was supplanted by new waves of postwar immigrants comprised of Puerto Ricans and African-Americans from the south of the United States. Puerto Ricans were fleeing poverty and government oppression, as well as a high cost of living and the control of local industries by American corporations (2003: 24). Blacks were leaving a south where unemployment was widespread because of mechanization and a “repressive white power structure” (2003: 24). From 85 percent white in 1960, East New York became 80 percent black and Puerto Rican by 1966 (Thabit, 2003: 1). But equally typically, statistics do not tell the whole story. According to Thabit, ghettos like East New York were “created by the apartheid policies of white society” (2003: 2). Exploiting racist fears by means of the fallacious “tipping point” theory, which argues that areas move from white to black when white tolerance for living alongside ethnic minorities is pushed beyond its limits, real estate firms in the early 1960s “worked overtime to turn East New York from white to black. ‘Ripe’ blocks were flooded with scare literature; brokers and speculators paraded black families up and down the streets to frighten whites into selling” (2003: 1). So rapid was the transformation that “old community organisations perished before new leadership could take over” (2003: 21), thereby further eroding the community cohesion already undermined by racism. A combination of “blockbusting,” the offer of cash payments to white tenants as an incentive to move to “safer” areas like the suburbs or other, gentrifying areas of New York City (2003: 45), and redlining by the banks, which meant

1

Thabit’s book provides an insider’s perspective on the economic and social phenomena described in part III of Harold X. Connolly’s 1977 work A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn.

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that “landlords could neither refinance nor sell their buildings to legitimate buyers” (2003: 44), led to higher rental charges for the new black and Puerto Rican tenants, as well as cutbacks on maintenance and services. The result, as Thabit describes in harrowing detail, was a deteriorating physical environment, vandalism and crime, and row upon row of abandoned buildings (2003: 45). As Chapter 5 argues, landscapes like this provide the metaphors of “frontier” and “wilderness” so intrinsic to the discourse of gentrification, even if East New York is yet to feel its effects in any systematic way. It is to this East New York that the Coole family comes for the funeral and wake. The Chief has specifically requested that he be “laid out, waked, and buried in the old neighborhood in Brooklyn” (1994: 15) rather than next to his wife in Florida. And yet the descriptions of the place consistently mock his adherence to the idea of the old neighborhood: Another one of his demands was that the funeral parlor where he would be laid out had to be the one across from Our Lady of Lourdes, and afterward they would wake him in the bars along Broadway underneath the elevated subway train—how was he to know that all the bars would be boarded up and replaced by crack houses and bootleggers and numbers parlors?—and then inter him in a plot across from the beloved Tromer’s Brewery (long gone but a good corner at which to buy heroin). (1994: 14)

In this passage, as in many others in the novel, a nostalgic, ahistorical assumption that the personalized markers with which an individual or family maps a neighborhood community will forever endure comes up against the fact of historical change. What is more, the heated discussion that ensues between the first five sons to gather there calls into question the extent of the father’s real allegiances to Brooklyn. Emmett and Leland believe that he was born there, and that he never arrived “from the old country” at all. Leland pushes this idea furthest, loftily asserting that “everything else he said was a lie: where he came from, who his father was, and how his mother died” (1994: 13). And yet three pages later we are told that Inspector Coole had in fact “stepped off the boat from the old country with his old man, not to live in this outermost post of civilization in Brooklyn, but on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, first in Hell’s Kitchen and later up in Irishtown in the Eighties, a rundown tenement between Broadway and Amsterdam” (1994: 16). This revelation is important for a number of reasons. Not only does it undermine certain family mythologies, it also challenges the ideological assumption that the location of birth or childhood residence dictates one’s attachment to place. The implication is that the father’s attachment

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to Brooklyn rather than the metropolitan center of Manhattan derives partly from the experiences he had whenever he lived there, but also from its status as “outermost post of civilization”; in East New York he imagines a grittiness and marginality that mirrors his own. Even his “dentalized ts,” described as “that most Brooklyn of things” (1994: 16) he appears to have developed outside the borough, suggesting that Brooklyn was for him an assumed mode of speech, an attitude, and an idea. At the end of Season at Coole, as we have seen, Inspector Coole is unable to say his wife’s name, unwilling to acknowledge an alternative story to the patriarchal one he embodies. In The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, the fluctuations of his origin story are thrown into harsher relief by the realization that Rose Moody is much more “Brooklyn” than he ever was: “Their mother, Rose Moody, was less ambiguous, having been born not too many blocks from here on Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, sprung in a birthing room of the twenty-six room house—today it was a Carmelite convent—of her lace-curtain father, William Moody of Albany and Brooklyn” (1994: 19). A “Brooklyn blueblood and Brooklomaniac,” Rose haunts the narrative supposed to be “their father’s show” and emphasizes by way of contrast the fact that “it is a mockery of the father to speak of genealogies, because the man had none to speak of ” (1994: 19). (His claims that there are “three strains of blood” in the family from various parts of Africa and Europe only expose his ideas about bloodline to more ridicule [1994: 22].) Again, there are connections with Stephens’ memoir Where the Sky Ends. His mother’s story is one of “downward mobility” (1999: 159): she was a Brooklyn blueblood, born into a house with 26 rooms, which later became a rooming house and then disappeared completely. It describes the opposite trajectory to gentrification. However, the Moody physiognomy, which all the daughters and some of the sons share, remains strongly connected to the borough: “This face, these countenances, had been a part of the Brooklyn landscape for as long as there had been a Brooklyn” (1994: 108). One of the most striking differences between Brooklyn Book of the Dead and its predecessor, in fact, is the more central role assigned to the female siblings. Not only is the long middle section called “Sisters,” but the novel ends with Terry, the most fallen of the brothers, stumbling through the neighborhood having decided that “[h]e could only like his sisters” and that all the brothers “placed too much emphasis on the father” (1994: 227). Inspector Coole, Terry concludes, is just another “long-winded, beery, insensitive lout” (1994: 227). Finally, he does what the father could not—he calls out Rose’s name (1994: 228).

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Terry’s views are to a large extent justified by the narrative. Whereas the brothers tend to be introduced in terms of the differences between them, using epithets that could easily, depending on the context, be insults—Mickey Mack is “that pretentious litterateur” and “the Manhattanite, the bon vivant, the pickled herring” (1994: 11); Patrick is “a rural gentleman of leisure” (1994: 12)—the sisters appear en masse and are initially described in terms of similarities: “The sisters were small, tough, and pretty” (1994: 105) and each one of them the “spitting image” of Rose (1994: 107). Though they are now scattered across the region from The Bronx to Philadelphia and engaged in very different activities— Mary Grace is “the gun moll of a Mafioso in Bensonhurst” and Elizabeth Ann is “a nun in a convent in Philadelphia” (1994: 105)—this “assembly of sisters” (1994: 110) functions much more effectively as a collective than the brothers. This is because having traditionally been consigned to the margins of the Coole patrilineal story, they are less psychologically handicapped by it and so less inclined to define themselves and the communities in which they participate on its discursive terms. As a result, the sisters offer “a lot more solace and comfort, put the old man in focus, if you will, better than any brothers” (1994: 105). Not only do the sisters constitute an antidote to the old man’s bitterness and divisiveness (though it should be said that they are not entirely without these negative qualities), their heightened “focus” affords a certain perspicacity when it comes to assessing the meaning of “Brooklyn.” They have a collective awareness, engendered by the tension between the maternal blood connection and the fact that none of them except the oldest, Samantha, actually spent much time there, that Brooklyn is primarily a work of fiction, a personalized projection: Brooklyn, to the younger sisters, was only a story their mother and sister and older brothers and father told, not a real place, more of a phantasmagoria, the collective nightmare of a clan, not a geography, but a locus of feelings (shame, guilt, inadequacy, low self-esteem), and yet, oddly enough, the place where each one of them had been born, so that if there was a curse of being born—and most Cooles would tell you that there was—it was Brooklyn, even if the burden of a life occurred in a more easterly place out on Long Island. (1994: 109)

More than the sons, the daughters realize that Brooklyn lends itself “more to the imagination than facts, more to feelings and drifts than actual truths” (1994: 23) that certain memories are fetishized and treasured because they are of limited historical value, not despite of it. Samantha, now known as Sky, is the sister who possesses the most sophisticated understanding of the situation. Having been born in East New York but then

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“had her suburban education, even married well and got the hell out of the city entirely,” she realizes that, in one sense, the Cooles “have nothing to do with any of this anymore” now that the borough has undergone such profound changes. They are no longer, “in a technical sense,” East New Yorkers, and yet in terms of “ghetto attitude, that ability to go from tranquillity, not into anger, but fullblown rage, in a heartbeat” they retain a connection (1994: 127). That the nature of their belonging has therefore changed is summed up in the gnomic statement, “once they belonged here, and now they almost still did” (1994: 127). Belonging to a community, it is implied, is not a simple matter: as I state elsewhere in this book, it should more accurately be termed “participation” because it is in no way unchanging or organic. It evolves over time and is historically determined; it exists in supplementary relation to other community engagements and therefore needs continual recalibration. Samantha’s reflections also evince a subtle slippage from specificity—East New York as a discrete location—to universality—“East New York” as a metonym for socioeconomic commonalities, for participation in much wider communities shaped by global forces: This is the territory of the losing side. Poverty won big. So did ignorance and self-loathing, crime and rage. So did human degradation. So did drugs. Despair. Unreasonableness. Illiteracy. Lack of education. Lack of opportunity. So did big shots off in Manhattan, guys and gals like me, only with bank accounts, careers, and prestige. People whose fathers did not have to play practical jokes on them at the eternal moment, so that they could go off, laughing drunkenly into eternity. (1994: 127)

Unlike those fictions more inclined to subscribe to an ideological opposition between center and margin, “Manhattan” here is not portrayed as irredeemably different from Brooklyn. Instead, the repeated deployment of the adverbial phrase “so did” highlights the similarity, at what might be considered the basic human level, between “big shots” in Manhattan and “guys and gals like me” while acknowledging the deep economic disparities. In its play of similarity and difference, this passage captures the spatial dialectic of uneven development, in which “the geographical expansion of capitalism” demands the homogenization and equalization of places in terms of value, but simultaneously “the strict recomposition and recrystallization of space into specific local, regional and national pockets of difference and inequality” reflecting the exploitation of peripheries by the center (Heffernan, 2000: 169). Just as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s deep metaphor of the deviant eye plays with the ideas of homogenization and

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consensus, recomposition and conflict (what Deleuze and Guattari, as we saw in the previous chapter, call deterritorialization and reterritorialization), so too do Samantha’s reflections on “opportunity” in Manhattan and East New York. Moreover, the phrase “guys and gals like me,” which might just as readily refer to Stephens as it does to Samantha, provides a clue to the way the narrative technique in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead embeds a similar dialectic. Much more than in Season at Coole, the narrative flows between free indirect discourse (FID) and omniscient narration, often using both within the same paragraph. If FID tends to, as it were, reterritorialize, to show isolated pockets of perception and difference, the omniscient narration has a deterritorializing function, showing similarity and historical continuity. Paragraphs such as the ones cited earlier, in which the reader discovers the truth about the Inspector’s childhood homes, Rose’s origins, and the lives of the sisters, are exemplary ones in this regard. At particular points Stephens strategically adopts an omniscient narrative voice that historicizes the Cooles’ experiences in contradistinction to their myth-making tendencies. Even if sections of the novel are still structured around the siblings’ competing stories, in the sons’ case invariably backed up by threats of physical violence, there are several large group scenes and the narrative perspective is, on the whole, less internalized than in Season at Coole. Where the first novel seems to take place almost entirely inside the narrow consciousnesses of the characters, its successor steps outside the museum-like house of Coole and situates the family in a broader global context of historical migration and mobility. Lawrence McCaffrey, In Textures of Irish America, suggests that Irish immigrants’ migration to the suburbs is predicated on but also exacerbates a loss of a sense of communal ethnic identity: “Those who have lost their cultural ethnicity, their sense of historical continuity, have intellectually and psychologically wandered from someplace to no place” (McCaffrey, 1992: 177). By setting the action in a Brooklyn which has undergone a radical demographic change, and forcing the characters to acknowledge that change, Stephens returns the Cooles and the Moodys to “someplace,” but it is not an enclave where an exclusive ethnic identity can be restored, nor a place where the nostalgia so pervasive in Season at Coole and still somewhat present in this novel can be reunited with the real objects of its affection. Rather, it is a place where the ongoing reality of historical, cultural, and economic change forces a reappraisal of cultural identity in relation to others, and where nostalgia’s disjunction from history is mercilessly exposed. Bearing in mind the work of Benedict Anderson, one must stress that the selfconsciousness about the imaginative construction of community one sees in The

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Brooklyn Book of the Dead is not in itself particularly radical. But what is striking about the novel is its historicization of both imagination and its close relative, memory. With the demographic shift East New York has undergone, there is an attendant transformation in the way the borough must be imagined by those who inhabit it, or who once inhabited it: “The imaginative possibilities now were all Afro ones, with a sprinkling of jibaro dreams from the Hispanic fringes of the neighborhood. In their time it was all Irish, with the Italian gangsters at their taxi stand on Rockaway Avenue” (1994: 23). The historicization of the imagination is another way in which the categories of “real” and “fantasy” collapse into each other in Stephens’ writing, and it further serves to undermine any claims to organic community. Thus, Leland Jr.’s belief that he is “the family’s bardic oral historian” (1994: 30) is subjected to the same irony as his father’s grandiose stories of bloodline; it is shown to be, in a Brooklyn that has moved on in a way the brothers have largely been unable to, just another example of “the art of the pontificating knuckleheaded know-nothing” who cannot “prove the veracity of any historical or imaginative facts” (1994: 32). For the Coole family, especially the brothers, the implications are profound. Outside the museum of the house on Long Island, where waste products are aestheticized and imbued with an abstract, memorial value, they are unable to accumulate collective memories in the same way and by so doing reinforce a feeling of family identity firmly bound to a singular conception of place. In the light of historical change, memories themselves attenuate, divide, and reveal themselves as highly subjective and selective fictions. Patrick, for example, chooses to remember Brooklyn as the breasts of “Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican” women, “full of milk and love” and romantically associated with trees “weighted down with fruit” (1994: 136–7); this is a pastoral vision profoundly at odds with material reality, but one preferable to “the knifings, the shootings, the brutalizations, the miseries” (1994: 137). As Mickey Mack leaves Manhattan to join the rest of his family for the wake in Brooklyn, we see the process of attenuation in action: “Once Mickey Mack crossed Houston Street, leaving that territory bounded by 14th Street to the north and Houston to the south, his own old memories grew weaker, then faded.” As the son who has long been considered an outsider, the one who was not actually born in Brooklyn, he understands that the Brooklyn subway stops he passes on the way—“Broadway, Myrtle, Kosciusko, Gates, Halsey, Chauncey”—are “totems more than placenames, sounds to evoke the myth of geography and forebears” (1994: 72). For him, however, the persistent rhythm of the subway train reminds him only that he is “estranged from his childhood here” and that he regards Brooklyn “as a

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foreign country” (1994: 72). Such a sentiment is familiar from a host of Brooklyn fictions, as subsequent chapters illustrate, but it is frequently used in a facile way to emphasize the borough’s essential difference from Manhattan; that is, its old-fashioned quality of rough-hewn community. Mickey Mack considers it a foreign country partly because he has since become more familiar with life in Manhattan, but more importantly because he realizes that he has been forced into inheriting patriarchal memories of Brooklyn, of the family, and of Irishness that are not, in fact, his own. What he does remember is of huge significance. The “foreign country of his childhood” is “where Grandma Coole spoke Yiddish and the Jews used Irish words and the Italians sometimes spoke of rabbis and donnybrooks; the mildew on the walls trapped the cuchifrito smells of his Spanish neighbors, and the Sunday suits on the Church of God black boys on Macdougal, their faces African black, their shirts whiter than any white boy’s like Emmett Coole with blond hair and blue eyes” (1994: 73). So heterogeneous and hybrid is this environment that the adjective “foreign” ceases, in fact, to hold any meaning. And once again it is a woman—the indomitable Grandma Coole—who provides the impetus for an alternative view of Coole identity. In another third-person, omniscient passage, it is revealed: “so many words they thought were Keltic from County Mayo, her birthplace, were really Yiddish words she picked up on the streets before she lost one of her legs and became housebound on Macdougal Street” (1994: 24). Her neighbor on the second floor, for example, she called “foockn meshuggeneh” her boss “a real schlemiel” (1994: 24). Not only is the grandmother’s vernacular a mix, but also her grandson Emmett speaks with “a black southern accent from playing with Charleston and the other black kids in the schoolyard of P.S. 73 across the street” (1994: 25). Rather than the “incoherent English-American version of Irish” that dominates Season at Coole (1972: 121), what emerges in the memories of the siblings in Brooklyn Book of the Dead is a hybridized language, including influences from the African-Americans who came to dominate the neighborhood, which suggests a degree of osmosis disavowed in the earlier novel, and a version of “authentic” Brooklyn identity at odds with the Inspector’s insular, mythical story of Irishness and family. Authenticity in this case, merging various immigrant ethnicities and inflecting the resulting concoction with Brooklynite traits, is of the kind that represents, “paradoxically, both origins and new beginnings” (Zukin, 2010: 28) and hence the persistence of change. Moreover, the type of linguistic exchange in evidence here suggests an economy qualitatively different from that of Season at Coole. Instead of the hoarding of artifacts imbued, desperately, with an abstract value but which are fixed and

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unchanging, what one sees here is genuinely dynamic exchange between disparate groups and therefore the possibility of negotiation and evolving communities. These are only words, of course, but as we have seen language is a vital tool in the construction of identity and community, a commodity in itself. And to reiterate the crucial point of this chapter, the emergence of these memories, at this time, and in this place, shows how memory and imagination, just like language, are historicized, and thus too conceptions of community. In his collection of essays, Green Dreams (1994), Michael Stephens describes his own idiomatic speech in terms strikingly similar to that of the Cooles: It is the English of my childhood in East New York, immigrant yes, but not just Irish; it consisted of words from eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. Plus Brooklyn itself. (“Hey, doozy botz! What a schlemiel! Ya no-good hooligan ya! Whattya smoking’ spliffs or somethin’?”) The language of the street, of the city, the poor, the hardworking and the lazy, gangsters and petty hoodlums, indolent teenagers with bad attitudes, and Spanish girls named Maria, Consuela, and Carmen. My English comes in immigrant waves. (Green Dreams, 1994: 18)

Describing language in terms of successive waves of immigration emphasizes its historical texture. Just as the author’s autobiographical reflections result in a conception of Irishness which is pluralized and overlaps with other immigrant groups, as well as a conception of Brooklyn which has less to do with geographical specificity than with wider class and economic affiliations, so the demographic and economic changes in the East New York to which the Cooles come for the funeral provoke a reappraisal of their identity and the family’s participation in multiple groupings. Stephens is describing neither a liberal multiculturalist ideal of assimilation, based on “the fact of diversity on the level of cultural identity and an absolute commitment to the neutrality of the shared public culture of the political domain” (Delanty, 2003: 98), nor a simple affirmation of difference as an intrinsic virtue, or as necessarily leading to harmony. (The fight that takes place between the Coole brothers and some local blacks makes this clear [1994: 103–4].) He is showing the ways categories and communities, peopled by discontinuous individuals, inevitably bleed into each other such that those categories cease to carry essential characteristics. Thus, to cite one example, “blackness” is “not indigenous to the Afro-Americans here” but is instead “a blackness of Brooklyn itself, the pitch of East New York and its rattling subway cars” (1994: 36). Blackness here refers not to immutable racial difference, but to those markers of class and economic status that connect all of East New York’s

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inhabitants, including “the black Irish of this burg, the black pigs and green niggers of Marion Street” (1994: 36). Viewed in this idiosyncratic way, the Cooles still “belong” here, even if the demographic has changed and the music they hear on the streets now is Public Enemy rather than Irish folk songs (1994: 36). Indeed, if the two Coole novels taken together can be regarded as an extended literary gloss on questions of “home” and “belonging,” then The Brooklyn Book of the Dead constitutes a move away from the narrowly circumscribed, patriarchally enforced fragile consensus of the home on Long Island, with its constitutive nostalgia for a romanticized Brooklyn, to a Brooklyn neighborhood that excites a reevaluation of what home actually means. As Samantha reflects, East New York is “home” and yet it forces her “to acknowledge this place, even when she didn’t want to recognize it at all” (1994: 121). Likewise of Lizzie, who has never even been to the neighborhood before, it is said: “This was, after all, not quite home for her, but maybe the ancestral home. And Lizzie was a Coole; and if you were a Coole, this was really the only place that was home to the Cooles, Lizzie thought, even though she had no actual memory of ever having been ‘home’ to East New York. This was still home to them” (1994: 135–6). Oona goes still further. For her, their status might better be described as “outcast [. . .] a feeling of not belonging, of always fucking up” (1994: 166). Samantha’s worldly perspicacity, Lizzie’s naiveté, and Oona’s bitterness achieve the same goals: the destabilization of the relationship between imagination, memory, and home (and between realism and fantasy) which is Stephens’ project in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. It is not that the Cooles can never escape from Brooklyn (though some may feel that way); it is more that the connection with home is more complex than blood or birth, which are concepts subject to historicization just as much as any others, and that “home” implies participation in multiple communities, rather than a strict relation of belonging to one. Participation is determined not simply through family or ethnicity, but through wider social and economic affiliations, through evolving language, through shifting locations, and through movement. In a novel that roams from perspective to perspective, across neighborhoods, boroughs, and suburbs, the sisters are now considered at home in the suburbs, while still, emotionally, at home in the ghetto. Toward the end of the novel, there is a moment of especially wry, sardonic humor: “And here the Cooles sat, a few sober, out here in Lourdes parish, where the ghosts of the Coole family were greatest, not staring each other down, but edgy and shifty, It almost as if they had really been assimilated like everyone else, that the passage from Brooklyn ghetto to the eastern suburbs had been

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accomplished; they had become part of the postwar diaspora, and everything was going to be all right” (1994: 201). Clearly, the family is too dysfunctional for everything to turn out happily (and Terry’s drunken odyssey in the final chapter confirms this), but the adjectives “edgy and shifty” connote not only their distrustful attitude to each other, but the overall importance of margins and movement to their gradually modifying conceptions of home. Assimilation, in the end, is not about homogenization, about the adoption of a blandly “American” identity and a place in a national community based on optimism and promise; it is about attaining a shared understanding of how “shifty” terms like “home,” “community,” and “family” are. Season at Coole deliberately presents, in Raymond Williams’ terms, an oppressively narrow knowable community in a house which embodies the refusal to know what lies outside. In Brooklyn Book of the Dead, the return to Brooklyn expands for characters and readers alike the knowable community by the evocation of memories which undermine a monolithic view of ethnic or family identity.

4

Divisions—Brooklyn Crime

In some neighborhoods, if there ain’t a dead body or two found on the street by sunup Saturday or Sunday, some people figure it was just a real dull weekend. They might be figuring that maybe the ‘hood might of lost some of its excitement. And that’s in the ‘good’ neighborhoods. Lovisi, 1999: 9

Walking the crimescape—crime and community As we have seen, Brooklyn fictions do not constitute a definable genre; they are much too diverse for that. However, there might be said to be dominant generic groups. In Chapter 2, we saw the importance of the coming-of-age narrative to constructions of community identity, and how that genre’s concern with origin moments, transformations, and the tension between self-fashioning and historical determination makes it an ideal vehicle for exploring how Brooklyn changes and reinvents itself. Hand in hand with the Brooklyn bildungsroman, and bedevilled by the same problems of authenticity and representation, goes the Brooklyn memoir, one of the most lauded examples of which is Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). As Martha Nadell observes, Kazin’s memoir is about “memory itself ” (Nadell, 2010: 116), and much of the book catalogues the numerous sensory triggers to memory as the writer walks and maps the Brownsville streets from which he escaped to Manhattan a decade earlier— “[t]he smell of damp out of the rotten hallways”; the “dry rattle of loose newspaper sheets around the cracked stretched skins of the ‘chiney’ oranges” (Kazin, 1979: 7); “the pushcarts [. . .] still lined on each other for blocks” on Belmont Avenue” (Kazin, 1979: 30). In the end, Brownsville remains for Kazin “a place that measured all our success by our skill in getting away from it” (1979: 12), rather like Michael Stephens’ East New York. Brooklyn is “the America of

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the nineteenth century” (Kazin, 1979: 170), Manhattan is modernity and the future. After the coming-of-age story and the memoir, the other dominant genre is Brooklyn crime fiction. All three genres share a dedication to highly individualized methods of mapping neighborhoods not only through personal experiences but also, in the manner described by Fredric Jameson in “Cognitive Mapping,” through demarcations of ethnicity and class (one thinks of Kazin’s Jewish “Brunzvil” [1979: 12] and “the Italians’ streets” closer to the middleclass brownstone areas [1979: 166]). Like coming-of-age stories and memoirs, crime fiction tends to reconstruct the past from a vantage point in the present, and tends to center on pivotal transitional moments—in traditional crime thrillers, thefts, and murders. And because the excavation of past events is so important to the reconstruction of the critical incident, crime thrillers tend to have an ambivalent attitude to the past, which makes them especially revealing in their treatments of some of this book’s key ideas: authenticity, gentrification, nostalgia, and the role of memory in community formation. As Jack Leightner, hero of Gabriel Cohen’s detective novels, says: “The essence of the job was to go back in time, to project yourself through that still eye of the storm, and to come out into another whirl of activity, the one that had put the body there in the first place” (Cohen, 2007: 86). And yet in civilian life he feels that “[t]he old times had not been such good times, so why dwell on them?” (2007: 19). The split between professional and private lives suggested by these quotations is also crucial to crime fiction. The underlying assumption in this chapter is that crime stories are particularly useful for the analysis of community formations, not just because there is often a strong evocation of place and time, but also because in many cases the processes of mapping and narrative reconstruction undergone by the characters unearth the possibility of collective culpability, even when the crime seems a highly individualistic and private act. Often the detective figure’s investigations reveal how disparate, seemingly unrelated people form an ironic kind of community through their connections with the crime. For Slavoj Žižek, in his essay “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,” it is the corpse in a traditional crime story which carries the “intersubjective” function, in that it binds the characters together centripetally by attesting to the libidinal potential of their guilt and thus, ironically, reinforces a sense of community, or at least its potential (1992: 59). Some of the crime stories examined in this chapter—Reggie Nadelson’s Disturbed Earth (2004) and Red Hook (2005), for example—have detective figures and corpses. Others do not: in fact, at first glance novels such as Brooklyn

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Follies and Sunset Park (2010) barely seem to fit the description. But crime takes many forms, and while it may be tempting to see a qualitative difference between the crimes committed in earlier, hard-edged, pre-gentrification stories such as Hubert Selby Junior’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Sol Yurick’s The Warriors (1965), and those committed in a post-gentrification text like Brooklyn Follies, it is nonetheless true that in both cases the crimes reflect the material circumstances of the people who commit them. Though Martha Nadell says that Selby Junior’s Red Hook feels “on the fringes of and isolated from the remainder of Brooklyn” in “a place and a society that resists the conventional rules of right and wrong” (2010: 188), the truth is that the crimes and misdemeanors in Last Exit—Harry Black’s sexual abuse of Joey (2000: 213); the horrific gang rape of Tralala (2000: 101–4)—emerge from desperate socioeconomic circumstances. The extended account of the strike at the assembly plant, and Harry’s exploitation of the situation, is central to the novel because it shows, rather deterministically, how an entire class of young men, when divorced for long periods from labor, will almost inevitably resort to alcoholism and violence. The crimes in Auster’s Sunset Park and Brooklyn Follies, though far less brutal, are also appropriate to the material realities of the characters. In the former, squatting is the logical choice for a group of young people seeking to survive a global recession. And in the latter, the crime of forgery reflects the concern with authenticity of a postgentrification, relatively affluent community. Capital and community, as this book argues, have a supplementary relationship. Crime, inevitably rooted in economics, therefore has to be understood not, in traditional romantic terms, as a symptom of community’s breakdown or as a threat to the very fabric of the community, but as a phenomenon that is produced by unequal social relations and hence describes communities and, indeed, helps to shape them. To offer a simple example: mobster Joey Gallo’s decision to open up “dealings with the black community” in Gabriel Cohen’s The Ninth Step (2010: 41) changes the landscape of Red Hook by encouraging interethnic criminal relationships. For this chapter, then, I employ a neologism, “crimescape,” which expresses crime’s relationship to community and place. It is derived from Tim Ingold’s term “taskscape,” which refers to the social character of a landscape as it develops through the practices of the people who have inhabited it. Landscape is “constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves” (Ingold, 1993: 152). Past practices of dwelling, work, and movement inform present activities and suggest, in turn, future practices. Thus, the taskscape has a temporal aspect in the manner of Mikhail Bakhtin’s

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chronotope—time is revealed through particular constructions of space. The “crimescape” is a special form of the taskscape: crimes—be they murders, forgeries, thefts, or squats—inform the social and economic character of the Brooklyn neighborhoods in which they occur, and the manner of their narration (and in some cases, investigation) implies a particular kind of historicity and temporality.

Forgetting where you are—Blood in Brooklyn Sometimes a material crimescape is hinted at but sidelined in favor of other concerns which are nonetheless revealing. An example of this is Gary Lovisi’s detective thriller Blood in Brooklyn (1999), the most conventionally hard-boiled of the stories analyzed here, and the one from which this chapter’s prefatory quotations are taken. The novel shares with Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead a relentless bleakness in its portrayal of Brooklyn (though it lacks the redemptive flashes of humor and Stephens’ energetic prose). Private eye Vic Powers returns to the borough in 1994 to “pick up the jagged pieces of [his] shattered personality” and find some work (1999: 6). When a job comes his way he reflects, bitterly: “The job was in Brooklyn. I should have realized it would be bad” (1999: 6). From his description of the place, it is clear that Powers suffers from the same nostalgic, myth-making impulses as the Coole brothers: Brooklyn, New York. It used to be something once. That was, when I was a kid, and even more so when our parents were kids. Now it’s just a dead-end town. Three million souls jammed into a third-rate, second-class section of New York City [. . .] Oh sure, it’s come back a bit lately, but even that won’t last. But for those who live and work in Brooklyn it is always worse, and go-nowhere for most of them. New York City, still the greatest city in the world is just across the river. It’s only half a mile or so, just a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge actually, but in a lot of ways it might as well be on another planet. (1999: 6–7)

In a familiar sentiment, the past is portrayed as a golden age. Gentrification is cursorily acknowledged here but dismissed as doomed to failure just as quickly (and it is true that the Bay Ridge area where many of the scenes take place has experienced a much more gradual transformation than neighborhoods such as Park Slope or Carroll Gardens). But Blood in Brooklyn, for all its pulp, tough-guy clichés, is interesting precisely because, unlike Michael Stephens and the writers I examine later in this chapter,

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Lovisi chooses in the end not to make distinctions between neighborhoods. As we have seen, Stephens balances the mythologizing tendencies of his characters with attention to the economic realities of an East New York in rapid decline. The novels I go on to examine in this chapter help to build an aggregate picture of Brooklyn by means of tales set in clearly defined neighborhoods; somewhat ironically, then, they celebrate diversity through the culturally diverse crimes committed in these different areas while also highlighting the limitations of a broader metropolitan vision. What they depict is a kind of uneven development: socioeconomic differentiation is enforced even as conditions of exchange and value are homogenized across local and global boundaries. In some Brooklyn crime novels, notably The Warriors, the localism is extreme, the metropolitanism deliberately occluded: the Coney Island Dominators’ territory measures just six by four blocks of their home neighborhood (1965: 173); The Bronx is 15 miles away but “it might as well be fifteen hundred” (1965: 51). Each gang is a surrogate family desperately mapping a tiny segment of the city, such that the crimescape created consists of contiguous areas interacting only through primitive moments of “parley” (1965: 82) and occasional acts of violence when a territory is perceived to have been transgressed. Lovisi and his first-person narrator Vic Powers, by contrast, use “Brooklyn” generically as shorthand for toughness, violence, and desperation. If Manhattan (which is regarded as synonymous with “New York City”) is “still the greatest city in the world,” then Brooklyn is its degraded other, festering across the water. Though this opposition ostensibly casts Brooklyn in the anti-pastoral or anti-romantic role, it nonetheless functions in the same way as the contrast of country and city explored by Raymond Williams and reinvented in Brooklyn fictions such as Brooklyn Follies and Solos, in that it has the fossilized feel of myth and ideology. Regardless of the realities of historical change, Lovisi configures Brooklyn as another type of past to Manhattan’s present or future—not a rosetinted past of face-to-face relations and community togetherness, but a brutal, pre-civilized one. When Powers finally confronts his psychopathic childhood friend Cliff, appropriately enough, on the Brooklyn Bridge, this ideological framework is made clear: “I looked out over the river that led to Manhattan. It was another world over there in the City. Here, in Brooklyn, things were different, a less civilized world, a lawless world. It was my world. The frontier. I looked up at the sky, trying to find the moon and only finding the pitch darkness of the night reflected back at me” (1999: 104–5). For Powers, the bridge recalls Frederick Jackson Turner’s “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (1999: 21). It is noteworthy that his comments, though couched in the

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hard-boiled language of the tough-guy thriller, conjure imagery not dissimilar to that presented in the early novels of gentrification examined in the next chapter. Moreover, they remind us that crime fiction frequently “explores (and thrives on) the border between good and evil, madness and sanity, war and peace, and guilt and innocence [. . .] hopelessness and redemption” (Schwartz, 2002: 13). Thus, as Richard Schwartz suggests, it dramatizes what happens when different communities come into close proximity and conflict: “It both commingles and separates the ethnic segments of our society and takes those alignments and divisions as one of its prime subjects. It takes the eternal relationships between men and women and individuals and societies and sets them in stark contrast” (2002: 13). What crime fiction can tell us about the discourse of community, then, depends on how far it is prepared to “commingle” or how resolutely it attempts to maintain frontiers and boundaries, to keep its characters within a “largely enclosed universe—a wilderness” (Schwartz, 2002: 71). In Blood in Brooklyn enclosure is everything, and the wilderness is ultimately a psychological one. Powers takes possession of Brooklyn and makes it “his world” a personal myth-symbol complex in which his obsessions—the past, childhood, the reality of evil—are reflected back at him like the darkness above the bridge. Cliff, whose very name connotes the frontier, the boundary between good and evil, is the personification of Powers’ obsessions; when Cliff comes to Brooklyn, seeking revenge on his former friend for a perceived act of betrayal when they were children living in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1960s, the scene is set for a Freudian battle between socialized ego and rebellious id, between the domesticated adult Powers now living with his wife Gayle (1999: 7), and the aggressive misfit Powers with the capacity to commit monstrous acts himself. As Powers plays out his battle with Cliff and his inner demons, the story depends on the maintenance of these and many other binaries: present and past, good and evil, self and other, and the spatialized binary that encompasses them all—Manhattan and Brooklyn. Only rarely does Powers’ first-person narration gesture outside his personal mythology to the demographic and social realities of the borough. At the beginning of his long walk from Bay Ridge to the Brooklyn Bridge, where he has been summoned by Cliff, he says: “I walked and walked, down one stinking block, one lousy street after the other. People all over the place. Tall, short, Puerto Rican Spanish, old stock Norwegian, Italian, white, black, young, old. All types. All kinds of looks” (1999: 80). But this colorful backdrop serves no illuminating picturesque function and is little more than tokenistic. In fact, it becomes an inconvenience or irritation to Powers as he struggles to complete his odyssey in time. The rules of Cliff ’s game dictate that the detective figure, who

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traditionally has an intersubjective role in linking together seemingly disparate sections of society through the act of narrative reconstruction, cannot do more than simply observe; interaction with any other person en route to the bridge is expressly forbidden. Consequently, traditional “community” values are actively repudiated and the protagonist’s isolation reinforced. An old lady asks Powers to help her cross the street and is shot by one of Cliff ’s unseen assassins (1999: 83). Soon afterwards, a Spanish-speaking homeless man asks him for change; Powers pushes him roughly to the ground, although this action unexpectedly saves his life (1999: 89). If these examples of secession from community are forced upon Powers by Cliff and can, at least in diegetic terms, be partially justified for this reason, a later scene proves much more problematic in that it reveals Powers’ instinctive prejudices. Wrongfully imprisoned for the earlier shooting of a cop, Powers is confronted in the holding cell by a black man called Ty. His response to the continued bating is to shout “[y]ou fucking piece of black shit” and to attack Ty, screaming “I’ll kill you and kill you and kill you and kill you and kill you—Cliff! I’ll kill you Cliff!” (1999: 100). Just as troubling as the eruption of racist language and the brutal punishment of the other is the facile subsumption of this racialized figure into the binary patterning of the novel—Powers versus Cliff, good versus evil. Like the anonymous members of the public whom Powers meets on the way to the bridge, Ty is merely a placeholder for Powers’ obsessions, a background element momentarily made symbolic. Powers’ reflections on this violent episode are revealing: “I thought I’d killed Ty. I thought he was Cliff. Or I wished he was. I couldn’t tell just then, and I didn’t care either. I forgot where I was for a moment, forgot what was going on” (1999: 100–1). Blood in Brooklyn is a crime thriller that frequently “forgets where it is,” for the Brooklyn in which the action occurs is a curiously empty place, divested of meaningful human life and serving merely as a stylized stage upon which an exclusive psycho-drama is played out. Despite the novel’s title, which employs a phrase repeated numerous times throughout the story, the crimes feel disconnected from where they are perpetrated; they do not arise from the economic or cultural modalities of Brooklyn, from a material crimescape, but from the private battle of Vic Powers and his nemesis, a battle which necessitates a return, both psychologically and in the novel’s narrative structure, to childhood and adolescence (Chapters 2, 4, and 7 recount events in Virginia). Although Blood in Brooklyn shares with Leaving Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead a sense of a borough ideologically transformed into a state of mind or perception, the difference lies in its disavowal of that transformation. Rather than explicitly

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acknowledging the mythological status of its location—a frontier environment defined by its primitive savagery—it attempts to pass myth off as gritty realism, couched in hard-boiled aphorisms. Only once, when Powers meets a cop called Phil Fortuno in front of the old Brooklyn General Post Office, do hints of an alternative stance emerge. The post office is “a huge and ornate granite edifice, over a hundred years old, a genuine landmark of the borough. It took up an entire block of primo real estate in the most crowded business section of Brooklyn” (1999: 22). Animating this description is a sense of historical change, and of the economic exigencies that shape neighborhoods and reconfigure communities. When Powers speculates that the building is “[h]aunted by all the postal workers who had worked there, lived there, and died there since before Brooklyn was part of New York City” (1999: 23), the possibility of a wider narrative is opened up, one containing ghosts that exist beyond the narrow confines of Vic and Cliff ’s mythological struggle. However, this possibility is quickly foreclosed when Cliff shoots Phil Fortuno and we are returned rudely to the main action. These observations on Blood in Brooklyn are instructive because the novel reveals some of the complexities of the relationship between crime fiction and place. It has, after all, become a critical commonplace to argue that setting is of particular importance to the genre. David Geherin’s 2008 book Scene of the Crime: the Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction, which devotes chapters to, among others, Georges Simenon’s Paris, Walter Mosley’s Los Angeles, and Sara Paretsky’s Chicago, makes some general observations on why this might be so. For Geherin, it is largely to do with what he regards as the dedication to realism in crime fiction: because of the “essential subject matter—crime and its consequences—realism is fundamental to the genre and realistic depiction of setting is commonplace” (2008: 8). While Blood in Brooklyn might aspire to a kind of world-weary, hard-boiled realism in which “the real world is nasty and evil and full of shit” (Lovisi, 1999: 8), it is in the end much more concerned with personal myths than realistic depictions of place. And Geherin’s assertion is, of course, highly debatable when one considers crime fiction and its multifarious subgenres more generally. One only has briefly to think of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, which advertises itself as a kind of existential crime story, to appreciate how complex the relationship between realism and fantasy, real places and imagined places, “rounded” characters and generic ciphers is. In fact, Geherin ignores the subgenre known as “antidetection” or “postmodern detection,” a subgenre in which Auster’s New York Trilogy participates. Antidetection threatens seriously to undermine Geherin’s statements on realism by forcing a reassessment of what “real” actually signifies, and showing by means of metafictional strategies that

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realism in fiction is the most devious trick an author can play and one that in many instances serves a specific ideological purpose. One might also take issue, as Gillian Tindall does, with the term “setting”: “There are indeed many writers for whom place is so important that the very word ‘setting’ carries for them a faint but distracting overtone of misunderstanding. Their novels are not just ‘set’ in Paris, Paraguay or wherever; they have grown there” (1991: 1). As the organic metaphor implies, literary texts, for Tindall, should be considered a part of the place they depict rather than arbitrarily selecting places as backdrops to action and character (in the manner of Gary Lovisi). The relationship between place and literary text, in other words, is symbiotic: place nurtures text which contributes to perceptions of place. Something of this understanding resides in Geherin’s contention that “there is often an intimate connection between crime and its milieu, which thus comes to play a prominent thematic role in such novels” (2008: 8). In the more laconic phrasing of detective Jack Leightner: “The average murder was committed within a social network” (Cohen, 2009: 146). If crime is indeed a kind of social document, then in a globalized age it is necessary to expand our understanding of the crimescape so that its localities are reconfigured within global economic and cultural relations. Fredric Jameson’s well-known engagement with the work of Kevin Lynch is useful in this regard: “The conception of cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolation of Lynch’s spatial analysis to the realm of social structure, that is to say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on a global (or should I say multinational) scale” (1988: 351). What is particularly striking about Jameson’s argument, given the concern with competing notions of authenticity which runs through this book, is his contention that an individual’s phenomenological experience of a locality or urban society cannot fully take in the constitutive global forces working on and in that locality. Thus, “the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place,” so that “[t]here comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience” (1988: 349). Not only does this serve as a neat theorization of why authenticity is such a problematic concept in Brooklyn fictions, it also implies a split selfhood—both here and elsewhere, not fully present to itself—that attains great significance in those Brooklyn novels with avowedly transnational concerns, and provides another example of how “the fullness of the scene” always proves elusive. In a way which is both terrifying and productive of new understandings, the full extent of one’s community affiliations

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is, Jameson suggests, fundamentally unknowable. The readings that follow reveal how different writers of crime stories depict crimescapes of varying scales and outlooks; some strive to acknowledge the problem Jameson describes. Others remain circumspect, mapping idiosyncratic criminal activities onto a narrow and sometimes decidedly picturesque locality in order to maintain a romantic ideal of community.

Crimescapes and inner landscapes—Paul Auster Paul Auster’s flirtations with crime fiction are well known. His only generic hard-boiled novel, the pseudonymous Squeeze Play (1982), was inspired partly by the need to make some money during a period of crippling impecuniousness, and partly by genuine admiration for the form. Of classic hard-boiled thriller specialists he says: “The best ones were humble, no-nonsense writers who not only had more to say about American life than most so-called serious writers, but often seemed to write smarter, crisper sentences as well” (Auster, 1997: 124). In The New York Trilogy, detective conventions are adopted and almost immediately corrupted: crime exists only as a potential; the detective and the putative criminal become interchangeable; and in a universe ultimately ruled by chance the desire of the detective for explanatory narratives of cause and effect is exposed as paranoia or pathology. What all this suggests is that any potential crimescapes pertaining to Auster’s fiction cannot be separated from the inner landscapes of his characters and from the existential questions they ask (and embody). If New York City is, for Daniel Quinn, protagonist of City of Glass, “the nowhere he had built around himself ” (1987: 4), it is more than simply a mirror of his isolation. It is his inner isolation, rendered in glass and concrete, both substantial yet utterly imagined. When considering the possibility of community, such anonymous and labyrinthine urban spaces pose significant problems, especially when they are considered the products of an individual troubled consciousness. What role does wider society play when the detective ends up, in fact, only searching for himself? Is there any room for material questions of class, economics, and race? For Brian Jarvis, there is precious little in City of Glass. He reads Quinn’s subjective nowhere as a symptom of global capital: “The aesthetic code of flatness then, is isomorphic with the economic code and spatial structuring of commodity capitalism. The landscapes of the ‘City of Glass’ exactly evoke the uniformity of the postmodern city, the erosion of heterogeneity and regional detail” (1998:

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88–9). Although Jarvis’ comments are at heart romantic, sharing with critics such as Zygmunt Bauman a fear of contemporary global capital’s homogenizing power, and rather ignoring the play of equalization and differentiation that characterizes uneven development, they capture something of the problem with Auster’s work. Particularly pertinent are Jarvis’ observations on the attention Quinn eventually pays to “the tramps, the down-and-outs” of New York City (Auster, 1987: 108) and his subsequent descent into homelessness. For Jarvis “[d]estitution is in fact offered implicitly as a condition which permits access to more profound states of being” (1998: 91). He is right: Quinn’s cognizance of those left behind precludes any understanding of the forces that have put them onto the streets, or of his supplementary relation to them. Becoming a vagabond is for Quinn an aesthetic project, a spiritual act of inner cleansing, and a way into productive solitude; it is, as Auster has frequently called it, an art of hunger. Moreover, “[f]rom the anti-materialist perspective of [City of Glass’] cartography, the mundane matters of class conflict and sociospatial organisation become purely secondary: for tramp, millionaire, detective and even the writer are all subject to the absurdity and absolute uninterpretability which is the essence of all geographical and historical experience” (Jarvis, 1998: 91–2). Crime in The New York Trilogy does not appear to emerge from social and economic relations: the closest thing to committing a crime is failing to stay true to a creative vision, forged in a world of meaninglessness. In two later texts—The Brooklyn Follies and Sunset Park—the author evinces a deeper interest in economics and in historical and local specificity than he does in The New York Trilogy. The former is an unalloyed celebration of Brooklyn in general and Park Slope in particular, and ends with “the smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies” drifting across from Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001 (2005: 306). Though smoke has tragic associations here, the connection with the film Smoke (1995), for which Auster wrote the screenplay, is nonetheless apt. Both texts offer a romantic vision of community as face-to-face encounters and the amassing of stories among groups of eccentric locals. And in The Brooklyn Follies, these virtuous events serve as a pre-emptive defense against the horror and hatred symbolized by the attacks on New York. Sunset Park is the first Auster novel to specify a Brooklyn neighborhood in its title; with its connotations of sadness and endings, Sunset Park is appropriate for a novel set against the backdrop of the global economic crisis. It, too, assembles disparate individuals with stories to tell—this time in an abandoned and symbolically freighted house not far from Green-Wood Cemetery. In both novels, the featured crimes—forgery in The Brooklyn Follies

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and squatting in Sunset Park—emerge more determinedly than in previous works from particular social and economic relations, while still contributing to typically Austerian existential questions: how one might move beyond the carapace of selfhood and out of isolation, the role of chance in human affairs, the impossibility of defining what is real and what is imagined. Jesús Ángel González convincingly argues that Auster’s writing, long before the explicit uchrony of Man in the Dark (2008), has offered visions of alternative Americas (such as the story called Kepler’s Blood in Moon Palace) as part of a “process of deconstruction of the myths attached to the ideology of progress” (2011: 25). Both these novels do the same. In The Brooklyn Follies Nathan Glass’ project, “The Book of Human Folly,” celebrates not progress but failure: it is, in his words, “an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act” (2005: 5) committed by Nathan, his friends, and various historical figures. The novel which very nearly shares its name also shares its outlook. Park Slope, Brooklyn becomes an alternative, utopian America where success is measured not in wealth or power, but in the richness of communal relations. (The irony the novel fails to acknowledge is, of course, Park Slope’s affluence.) In a much less bourgeois neighborhood, Sunset Park portrays the squat as an alternative America and a benign crimescape, a quasi-Socialist assembly of marginal, compassionate individuals attempting to carve out a community based not on economic individualism or exhausted notions of technological progress but on close attention to the desires of others. In these novels, then, one may productively map Auster’s existential or philosophical concerns onto spatial and economic ones. To understand that the individual does not fully coincide with himself or herself, and that identity emerges from supplementarity and in the relational spaces between individuals, is to complement a Jamesonian understanding that to map one’s position “here”— in the house, the street, the neighborhood, the borough—is necessarily to map one’s position in terms of global mobilities and economic exigencies. Thus, The Brooklyn Follies and Sunset Park are engaged, albeit in ways compromised by some distinctly romantic inflections, in developing “a politics of scale and space that would refigure our understandings of here, of who is here with us” (Joseph, 2002: 174). Auster’s explicit interest in forgery in The Brooklyn Follies is echoed in other Brooklyn fictions: Tab Hartwell, villain of Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos, starts dealing in fake artworks toward the end of the novel (2004: 230); both Eve, narrator of Thomas Rayfiel’s Parallel Play (2007), and Jenny, narrator of The Mermaid of Brooklyn (2013), earn money from making copies of designer

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clothing and selling them to other neighborhood mothers. All of these texts use fakes and forgery as a means of exploring authenticity in gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods, and all of them, with varying degrees of disingenuousness, seek authentic experience in neighborhood relationships that override capital and class concerns. Forgery is of particular interest in The Brooklyn Follies, however, because in this novel there are fakes and there are also what might be called “true fakes.” To explain the difference between the two, it is useful to recall Charles Taylor’s distinction between authenticity conceived of purely as personal choice and “horizons of significance” (2001: 39), which loosely connect people through shared expectations and behaviors, even if those expectations and behaviors are historicized and evolve over time. In The Brooklyn Follies these horizons are found neither in moral absolutes nor in one of the novel’s key imaginative spaces—The Hotel Existence, “[t]he inner refuge [. . .] a man goes to when life in the real world is no longer possible” (2005: 100)—but in lived social relations. A space like The Hotel Existence only has validity in reference to the outside world; otherwise, it becomes a myth of American pastoral, a retreat in a solipsistic or melancholic sense. After all, as Harry Brightman expresses it, existence must be “bigger than just life. It [is] everyone’s life all together” (2005: 101). And existence happens in Brooklyn; narrator Nathan Glass arrives “looking for a quiet place to die” (2005: 1) but ends up learning how to live. Brooklyn exemplifies Auster’s oxymoronic true fakes (not the empty postmodern ones encountered by Umberto Eco on his “Travels in Hyperreality” [1986: 8], those which attempt to improve on reality or make no attempt to engage with reality whatsoever). It is “New York and yet not New York” (Auster, 2005: 48), a place genuinely itself yet able to contain otherness; a place of performance yet also of fundamental sympathies. In this version of Brooklyn, which is undeniably romantic in its affection toward its eccentric characters, individuals learn who they are through their supplementarity and discontinuity, through discovering that they are “not the same as themselves” but constituted by others. In contrast, the two concrete examples of forgeries in The Brooklyn Follies—Harry Brightman’s shady past as a co-conspirator in the forgery of a deceased artist’s paintings and his scheme to forge a manuscript of The Scarlet Letter—are melancholic, in the specific sense of denying connections to the past and to others. They therefore raise philosophical and ethical questions about art which demand to be viewed as analogous to questions of community and historicity; they are, in fact, symbolic cues to community. In a novel which suggests that the performance of self is a kind of paradoxical authenticity, this analogy is appropriate.

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Forgery itself is paradoxical: only by declaring itself as forgery, with its own context, history of production, and connection to the original, does it achieve value. But in declaring itself a forgery, it can no longer be called one. Gordon Dryer’s forgeries of Alec Smith’s paintings demonstrate this paradox. It should immediately be noted that the names in this novel are loaded and relate specifically to questions of authenticity. Alec Smith, the reclusive genius whose intense, expressionistic canvases tremble “with an incandescent roar of emotion” (2005: 40), is patently a maker, a creator. Gordon Dryer embodies the aridity, lack of original productivity, and emotional detachment of one whose talents stretch only to usurpation. When Smith dies by apparent suicide, Dryer suggests to his now lover Brightman that they “continue to create Smith’s work after the artist [is] dead,” to produce forgeries of the “final paintings and drawings of the young master” (2005: 43). Dryer’s efforts are astonishing: Dryer had reinvented himself as Smith’s double, purging every shred of his own personality in order to slip into the mind and heart of a dead man. It was a remarkable turn of theater, a piece of psychological witchcraft that struck both terror and awe in poor Harry’s brain. (2005: 44)

It might initially appear that in keeping Smith alive through his work, while simultaneously reminding us of his death, Dryer is engaged in a process of prosopopeia, allowing the departed to speak through the work. Yet this superficial reading would ignore the simple fact that none of Harry and Dryer’s art world associates are supposed to know that Smith is dead. Thus, this forgery is a systematic denial of loss which aims not to find an artistic voice in a community of voices, but to steal a voice from its context. Dryer’s jettisoning of his own individuality can be read as a cynical incorporation of the required elements of Smith’s personality revealed through the work. There is nothing of dialogue in this highly skilled forgery, nothing of sympathy. Like Flower and Stone’s wall in The Music of Chance, which is nothing more than a decontextualization of an earlier structure—specifically, an Irish castle—Dryer’s work is closer to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “pastiche,” cannibalized, and depthless (1991: 25). For Auster, the encounter between the individual and the aesthetic object is, after Immanuel Kant and Martin Buber, similar to the meeting of human subjects in that it reveals a desire for the reality and the totality of the other. It is primarily affective and, as Kant describes in the Critique of Judgement (1978: 63– 80), implies the suspension of a Cartesian cognate subject in order to disarm the calculating scientific faculties which reduce artistic beauty to sets of objective or ideational properties, “a sum of qualities” in Buber’s terms (2004: 16). Dryer’s

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forgery is entirely calculating: despite the obvious technical expertise, his success lies not in sympathy with the fullness of the work, but in dissecting its characteristics, “the harsh palette-knife strokes, the dense coloration, and the random, accidental drips” (2005: 44). This last element is the most telling: how can a deliberate reproduction hope to capture the spontaneity of the accidental? It is a dilemma, of course, repeatedly faced by Auster himself in attempting to represent the effects of chance, but the key point is that the accidental drips, irreproducible, provide the most powerful insight into the personal context of the work’s creation. Though they tend to resist objectification or analysis, they are central to the affective power of the aesthetic encounter. So Dryer and Harry’s abandonment of the intricately interlinked personal and historical contexts which constitute the work, and the corruption of the aesthetic encounter, are bound up together. Any aesthetic differences between the original and the forgery are to be found not in the kind of detectivelike, microscopic empiricism detailed by Nelson Goodman (1976: 99–112) but in that unfathomable, ineffable moment of being with the work which is unrepresentable by the forgery. At stake, then, is not authorship as a substantive or hypostasized category. Nor is some kind of mystical, originary moment between artist and work, never to be repeated. Rather we are talking about an authorial subjectivity created by the work as the work is created, a reciprocal and supplementary relationship impossible to reproduce through the forger’s close and cynical observation but which nonetheless contributes to the viewer’s affective experience. What Auster attempts to show is how a truly dialogic aesthetics (like community) is historically contextualized, even if context is something which cannot be fully captured positivistically. Moments of affective splendor such as Tina Hott’s performance at Harry’s graveside achieve their power precisely by being placed against the backdrop of the “2000 election disaster” (2005: 244). When democracy fails, when political dialogue is so manifestly circumscribed, then the need to treasure these fleeting communal glimpses of beauty becomes even greater. To use Raymond Williams’ famous term, it is as if true art (even art obviously “fake” on the surface) sincerely embodies a “structure of feeling” (1977: 133–4): forgery makes no attempt to do so. When one considers Harry and Dryer’s plan to forge the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter, different issues arise. An apt place to start is Nelson Goodman’s influential but much refuted thesis in Languages of Art (1976). According to Goodman, an artwork can be called “autographic” “if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant [. . .] if even the most exact duplication

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of it does not thereby count as genuine” (1976: 113). Painting is Goodman’s primary example. Here, and Dryer’s work confirms this, the forgery’s aesthetic merits are irrelevant. “Allographic” arts are those such as music where any accurately rendered performance of a faithfully notated score, regardless of stylistic interpretation, counts as genuine. It is Goodman’s faith in notation which undermines his thesis. Arguing that “[i]nitially, perhaps, all arts are autographic” and “an art seems to be allographic just insofar as it is amenable to notation,” Goodman believes that the “transitory” nature of certain art forms, notably drama and music, requires notation “in order to transcend the limitations of time and the individual.” This is why “in the case of literature, texts have even supplanted oral performances as the primary aesthetic objects” (1976: 121). Thus, Goodman believes that “sameness of spelling” (original italics), employed here in the sense of “accuracy of transcription,” is all that is required to render faithful a copy of a literary text or manuscript. Indeed, “nothing is more the original work than is such a correct copy” (1976: 115, 16). However, a unique manuscript is surely an example of the “autographic features” all “socalled allographic arts” possess (Margolis, 1983: 170), which is precisely why it is a highly valued aesthetic object. Harry Brightman is very explicit about these features: It’s not as if you just sit down with a printed version of The Scarlet Letter and copy it out by hand. You have to know every one of Hawthorne’s private tics, the errors he made, his idiosyncratic use of hyphens, his inability to spell certain words correctly. Ceiling was always cieling; steadfast was always stedfast; subtle was always subtile. Whenever Hawthorne wrote Oh, the typesetters would change it to O. (2005: 128)

Invoking the typesetters’ activity reminds us that although to some extent authorship is being fetishized in the desire for the canonical original manuscript, the author is only one part of a complex historical, cultural, and industrial community of creativity, exchange, and indeed error. The vagaries of the printing industry help evoke Hawthorne’s context and add to both the text’s documentary interest and its aesthetic value. Thus, Goodman’s distinction between autographic (painting) and allographic (literature) falls down when one observes that autographic elements in both instances are themselves contextual, with a complex production history, and not simply productive of “patriarchal anxiety about legitimacy of descent” (Ruthven, 2001: 40). It is the production history, in fact, which overcomes “the limitations of time and the individual.”

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Against these examples of forgery are set true fakes which attain truth through their sympathetic understanding of the recipients’ context and their efforts to relate. These include Kafka’s letters to the young girl who has lost her doll (Auster, 2005: 153) and, at the end of the novel, Nathan’s decision to start a company dedicated to producing biographies of ordinary people. Whereas his previous job in life insurance reduced biography to detective work and financial recuperation, his latest project reenvisages biography as “a question of love” (2005: 302). Of course, the project is empirically dubious, in that the belief in one’s capacity “to rescue the stories and facts [. . .] and shape them into a continuous narrative” implies a faith in objectivity masking an act of subjective representation (2005: 301). In fact, this is precisely what Nathan has done in this novel—taken the “random jottings” of his collection of follies (2005: 6) and produced a concatenated version. But there is little doubt that the ethical motivations behind the publication of “books about the forgotten ones” (2005: 301) are to be endorsed. In the desire to stick to the facts and “resurrect that person in words” (2005: 302), these biographies will prove to be only creative fakes. However, in realizing that beauty, art, and significance reside in “the ordinary, the unsung, the workaday” (2005: 300–1), Nathan’s biographies participate in meaningful relations. They reconcile individuals to loss while retaining a sense of interconnecting contexts in “the smattering of impressions made on other people” (2005: 301) that they capture. Moreover, they are less a celebration of individual success or authenticity than a contribution to a sense of community and an attempt to capture a specific structure of feeling, post-9/11, in which attention to small, unique but connected individual lives increases in significance in the face of the grand narratives of religion and politics. Rufus Sprague/Tina Hott’s mimed rendition of “Can’t Stop Lovin’ Dat Man” at his lover Harry Brightman’s graveside is the most affecting set piece in the novel and the most sophisticated example of the true fake. It offers a powerful example of a person who is profoundly (and yet playfully) “not the same as himself,” and through whom a community can feel both its togetherness and its necessary strangeness and precariousness. This performance is not as narrator Nathan Glass says a “transcendent” moment in the sense of rising above reality (2005: 223), but a celebration of the fact that real lives can be fabulous. If one regards only the surface, it is the apotheosis of mimesis as falsehood. “Decked out in full widow’s regalia” (2005: 221), Rufus has paid attention to realistic details precisely in order to achieve a successful fake: the wig is “like real hair,” the breasts “like real breasts” and the legs too “long and lovely” to be a man’s (2005: 222). Yet the excessive fakery of the performance is the point. It is an honest expression of

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Rufus’ identity and permits the display of his private emotion by means of a role which is an act of generosity to the assembled party. Though the performance is both “funny and heartbreaking” (2005: 222), it perfectly encapsulates the necessary embrace of otherness in the act of mourning, while defusing the anxiety which might ensue from the witnessing of private suffering made public. What is sovereign and enduring about human subjectivity, it seems to say, is precisely its performativity and its lack of an essence. And as if to contradict Nathan’s solipsistic belief that “[a]ll men contain several men inside them and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are” (2005: 122–3), a simplistic and inward-looking interpretation of plurality often repeated in Auster’s writing, Rufus demonstrates exquisite awareness of his communal context. He chooses an appropriate performance invested with the “inner light” of sympathy (2005: 222) to provide the assembled others with a vehicle for sharing grief. In the wisest utterance of his whole narration, Nathan sums up the inclusiveness of the performance with uncharacteristic alacrity: “It was everything it was and everything it wasn’t” (2005: 222)—inauthentic and elusive and thus true. Such moments in Brooklyn fictions illustrate that discontinuous selves and the provisional communities they help engender are not merely instances of theoretical sophistry, but have affective, ethical implications. Against a backdrop of global finance that has become catastrophically illdisciplined and of “a throwaway culture spawned by the greed of profit-driven corporations” (Auster, 2010: 72), Sunset Park should be regarded as a story about a group of disparate people trying to restore discipline. In a world of broken and abandoned things, the occupants of the squat—Miles Heller, Bing Nathan, Alice Bergstrom, Ellen Brice, and, latterly, Pilar Sanchez—attempt to repair and restore order and coherence, materially and spiritually. Discipline applies to many situations in the novel. It is seen in Miles’ refusal to steal items from the repossessed houses he is “trashing out” in Florida (2010: 6); in the restrictions Pilar imposes upon sexual activity with Miles (2010: 15); in the hours of work the squatters put into making the house habitable (2010: 90); in Alice’s forensic analysis of the film The Best Years of Our Lives for her doctoral thesis (2010: 99–100); in the distribution of household chores (2010: 126); and in Miles’ sexual abstinence when he first moves into the house without Pilar. That Miles regards this enforced separation as “a six-month prison sentence” (2010: 121) is apposite: theirs is a relationship forbidden by law because Pilar is under the age of consent. And yet, like the act of squatting, it transcends questions of legality and justifies itself simply by its sympathetic power. In the Austerian universe, where love is paramount, it cannot be considered a crime at all.

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As Joseph S. Walker argues in his Foucauldian reading of Auster’s work, the oppositional practices in which Auster’s characters engage frequently involve criminality but are not defined by it. In fact, “the moment of criminality is incidental” because “crime is not the goal, but the marker of where societal discipline makes contact with the disciplined attempt to create a new world and a new self ” (2002: 392). Indeed, to consider acts such as Benjamin Sachs’ destruction of replica Statues of Liberty in Leviathan (1997) or Auggie Wren’s theft of the (already stolen) camera in “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” (1990) as “criminal” would be to bow to the terms dictated by external disciplinary forces— schools, hospitals, prisons—whose aim is the constitution of selfhood through coercion. For Walker, criminal acts invariably lead to periods of self-discipline and redefinition: “Many of Auster’s most compelling characters attempt to use rigorous self-discipline as a tool of resistance that allows them to counter the external discipline placed upon them, creating a self that exists prior to and apart from the categories and demands of the disciplinary society” (2002: 390). Auggie Wren, according to Walker, is the archetypal Auster figure; disciplined externally by economics and education and thus confined to the cigar store, his moment of transgression leads to a period of intense self-discipline—taking a photograph of the store from the same position at the same time every day. From transgressor, he chooses to reemerge as artist “for no reasons other than his own” (Walker, 2002: 416). Insightful and original though Walker’s reading is, it overplays certain aspects while missing others. In claiming that Benjamin Sachs “fully embodies the potential” for self-reinvention [. . .] of the autonomous self ” (2002: 414), Walker celebrates a sovereign individualism actually rather at odds with Auster’s insistence (which has become something of a tic in his novels) on multiple selves, liable to be transformed at any moment. Most importantly for my argument, Walker dismisses what he calls the “purely social context” of these transformations (2002: 414), as well as any political significance they might have, emphasizing only the private and the personal. For Walker, individual purgative discipline appears to inhabit a pre-social state of absolute individual authenticity, where the axiom “to thine own self be true” can be adhered to without the deconstruction to which it is subjected in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn. His reading of Auster thus assumes the opposition of internal and external, personal and social that Brian Jarvis considers a weakness in Auster’s writing. And yet Auggie Wren’s discipline should not be regarded only as self-affirmation: his photographs of the Brooklyn cigar shop also represent an opening to community. Their similarity but difference, which the bewildered

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writer Paul Benjamin at first misses, symbolizes the position of the individual within social groupings—discontinuous, demanding to be read through repeated acts of imagination in relation to multiple other perspectives. Something similar can be said about Sunset Park. Discipline provides an opening to community in the shared act of criminality. For “the champion of discontent” Bing Nathan (Auster, 2010: 71), who instigates the move to the abandoned house, the squat is a chance to expand his repertoire of minor infractions against “things-as-they-are” (2010: 71), to move beyond “his invisible, solitary attacks on the system and participate in a communal action” (2010: 71). He justifies the illegality in utilitarian terms, using the language of the crimescape: “These are desperate times for everyone, and a crumbling wooden house in a neighborhood as ragged as this one is nothing if not an open invitation to vandals and arsonists, an eyesore begging to be broken into and pillaged, a menace to the well-being of the community. By occupying that house, he and his friends are protecting the safety of the street, making life more livable for everyone around them” (2010: 77). Bing’s logic presupposes a hierarchy of crimes, some of which are antithetical to community because they reduce the quality of life, and some of which, like squatting, exemplify certain standards required for people to live together. Community, as Gerard Delanty explains, “is not an underlying reality but is constructed in actual processes of mobilization. It is a processal concept [. . .] in which community is defined and constructed in social action rather than residing in values and normative structures” (2003: 123). In Delanty’s explanation one finds a means, in relation to the minor social activism depicted in Sunset Park, of addressing the problems described by Brian Jarvis and repeated in Joseph Walker’s critique—that is, how to reconcile the personal and social in Auster’s work. What Delanty suggests, following sociologists such as Paul Lichterman (1996) and Alberto Melucci (1996), is that individualism need not be irreconcilable with or antithetical to communitarianism. Collective participation can be compatible with personal fulfillment and creativity; in fact, “what sustains many kinds of collective action is precisely strong individualism” (Delanty, 2003: 120) in the service of goals that emerge as shared through the process of community. Delanty calls this notion of selfhood, “shaped in participation in community” (2003: 129), “personalism,” and it is distinct from egotistical or acquisitive individualism. In Sunset Park each resident of the squat commits the crime for different, personal reasons: Bing because increased rents on his storefront enterprise mean that he cannot afford the rent of his Park Slope apartment

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(2010: 79); Alice because she has lost her apartment and needs a quiet space to complete her thesis (2010: 96); Ellen because she is lonely and also because she wishes to reinvigorate her art (2010: 115); and Miles because he needs to escape the wrath of Pilar’s sister (2010: 121). From these individual motives principles of communal resistance evolve and a process of community, which is locally political and at least partly based on shared artistic passions (Bing’s music, Ellen’s art, Alice’s cinema, Miles’ literature), is initiated. When the court eviction order eventually arrives, community solidarity is cemented: realizing that they have a common enemy, all the residents solemnly vow to stay (2010: 252). Though there is no declared political objective, no declared desire for wider social transformation, the very fact that the process has been started by an act of criminality, and that legally speaking none of the residents has the right to “belong” in the house, politicizes the act and suggests a model for new collectivities based on participation rather than belonging. If these claims imply a radical aspect to Sunset Park, it is one nonetheless compromised in a number of ways. First, the formal structure of the novel militates against the communitarian ideals upon which it expounds. Mark Lawson’s review astutely observes that the narrative “is divided between a number of characters whose names head their sections like name-badges at a corporate conference” (2010: 10). Though these perspectival shifts allow characters to reflect on each other in illuminating ways, and ostensibly reinforce the idea of collectivity forged through personalism (in the same way Brooklyn Follies attempts to build a community through anecdotes), the paucity of dialogue and the dispassionate, controlled distance between author and characters leave little room for shifting sympathies or irony, only for a studied neutrality in which every utterance acquires equal value. Most importantly, the persistent use of the historical present in all their sections seems to trap characters within their own troubled consciousnesses even as the narrative describes their cooperation. Like Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos (dealt with in the next chapter), Sunset Park’s employment of the historical present strains against the theme of community— as process, as necessarily historicized—by suggesting nostalgia for the present, a desire to freeze time. This is, in fact, made absolutely explicit: Bing Nathan’s shop, “The Hospital for Broken Things,” is founded on his belief “that the future is a lost cause, and if the present is all that matters now, then it must be a present imbued with the spirit of the past” (2010: 72). For that reason he spends his time “repairing objects from an era that has all but vanished [. . .] manual typewriters, fountain pens, mechanical watches” (2010: 73). Consistent with his resentment of the

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ideology of technological progress, Bing’s attention to such old-fashioned objects is commodity fetishism of the highest order, reminiscent of the Coole family’s coveting of waste in Season at Coole. That Bing regards his objects as revenants from a time “all but vanished” only emphasizes their phantasmic, fetishized qualities. Their use-value recedes as their quality of sacralized pastness acquires immense symbolic exchange value. Although Bing feels he is “fighting a war” against modern technology and capitalism (Auster, 2010: 73), his business sits very comfortably within a culture of flexible specialization and niche consumption. It also functions as local color; as such it contributes to the “toolkit of places and products” (Zukin, 2010: 121) which lends a neighborhood an ambience of authenticity, based on a kairological perception of hip modernity and antique charm fused in an aesthetically satisfying manner. Bing’s nostalgic attachment to objects is part of his general obsession with “tangibility.” In his opinion: “The world is tangible [. . .] Human beings are tangible. They are endowed with bodies, and because these bodies feel pain and suffer from disease and undergo death, human life has not altered by a single jot since the beginning of mankind” (2010: 73). In his refusal to accept that human consciousness and human sociality might be altered by technology, Bing insists on a world of timeless and natural values and experiences linked primarily to biology and the physical body. This introduces another major problem with Auster’s vision in Sunset Park. With its tendency to endorse Bing’s worldview through using repeated images of the human body, the novel posits a realm of the natural and the material supposedly in opposition to the abstract exchanges of the capitalist marketplace. Thus, the actions that excite community are frequently supposed to be romantic, sexual, face-to-face, and body-to-body encounters. And yet the way sensual bodies are described in the novel is invariably abstracted, atomizing, alienating. To rehearse Richard Godden’s evocative phrase, they are very much in the “shop window” (1990: 51). Ellen’s fantasies about passing strangers involve inventories of body parts: “the assholes of old men, the hairless pudenda of little girls, luxuriant thighs, skinny thighs, vast, quivering buttocks” (2010: 109). Drawing her own hand, she regards it as “an alien hand” and reduces it to parts: “half-moons above the cuticle, the narrow wrist with its small bump of bone” (2010: 117). Similarly, her pornographic drawings are described in dismembering and dehumanizing terms: “Fingers have entered vaginas. Mouths have encircled erect penises. Anuses have been breached” (2010: 218). When Bing poses naked for Ellen, his penis, “objectively speaking,” is “a first-rate example of male equipment” and, tellingly, “a bulky fountain pen, a substantial plug for any orifice” (2010: 222).

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His body regarded as commodity, it is appropriate that Bing’s relationship with Ellen (she draws him, and he is allowed to ejaculate in her mouth) is coolly regarded as “a perfectly fair arrangement” (2010: 223): it is business, conducted in the realm of exchange. Ultimately, Sunset Park is founded on deeply romantic notions of community which disavow the supplementary relation between material and abstract, and disavow the production of social relations under capital. The breakdown of the body into discrete parts, championed as the antidote to a money-centred culture, is consistent with the breakdown of historicity into discrete presents, enacted in the historical present narration. When the cops finally invade the squat and Miles commits yet another crime in punching one of them, his final thoughts echo those of Bing earlier in the story, and are revealing of the underlying conservatism: “he wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and from now on, he tells himself, he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever” (2010: 308). For all its radical potential, the squat turns out to be another of Auster’s retreats, like the Hotel Existence, and Sunset Park a rather schizophrenic novel, in the Jamesonian sense. In making the mistake of associating all historical development with the ideology of technological or economic process, it attempts to stave off historicity altogether, preferring instead the comforts of a romantic artistic community based on nostalgia.

Apocalyptic communities—Reggie Nadelson’s Artie Cohen novels In turning now to novels by Reggie Nadelson, I turn once again to fictions that are much more obviously crime stories in the hard-boiled tradition. But they are also, as the following observations demonstrate, transnational in outlook and more finely attuned than Auster’s work to the complexities of community in a globalized world. Nadelson, also a journalist, nonfiction and travel writer, has at the time of writing published nine novels in the successful series starring New York detective Artie Cohen, the first being Red Mercury Blues (1995). One might also include Manhattan 62 (2014), whose first-person narrator is the Irish-American New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Pat Wynne but which turns out to be a kind of pre-history of Artie Cohen and concludes with a scene in which Wynne and Cohen meet. Such intertextual

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links between Nadelson’s novels, though a familiar generic characteristic of hard-boiled detective stories with a singular hero-narrator, have a wider significance when considered in the light of the author’s preoccupations—local and global relations, community, and, most importantly, the tension between an appreciation of historical continuities and the fear of ultimate destruction, the end of New York. My argument concerns the exaggeratedly apocalyptic depiction of New York, a city still struggling to come to terms with the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Nadelson’s Disturbed Earth (2004) and Red Hook (2005), and asks whether the pervasive sense of impending destruction leading to a radical break with what has gone before is not a new phenomenon, engendered uniquely by the events of 9/11, but a consistent characteristic of New York life and of the immigrant populations who live there. Like Vic Powers, Artie Cohen regards Manhattan and Brooklyn as distinct. “Coming into Brooklyn,” he says, is “like entering a foreign country.” Its “endless interior” is “jammed with immigrants and their descendants [. . .] people vying for space, for religion, a foothold on the ladder up” (2004: 42–3). The difference, however, is the extent to which Cohen’s investigations reveal social as well as temporal continuities. Rather than reinforcing perceived divisions, Nadelson’s fiction dramatizes the cognitive disjunction between “here” and “there” by problematizing local and global affiliations. Cohen stars in Brooklyn fictions, it is true, but also in transnational ones. The main action of both Disturbed Earth and Red Hook begins with phone calls summoning detective Artie Cohen down to the water’s edge in Brooklyn. In the earlier novel, he finds himself at Coney Island, a place “haunted by relics of its old dreamscape” (2004: 7) looking at a bag of bloodied clothes, bitterly anticipating another murdered child. In Red Hook, a call from his friend Sid McKay takes him to the old industrial docklands area of Red Hook, “a weird fat lip of land cut off from the rest of the city by a couple of highways” (2005: 7) or, in Sid’s more dramatic terms, “the edge of the world” (2005: 30). Water is symbolically significant throughout the series and especially so in the novels under consideration here. Time and again the reader is reminded that New York is surrounded by water. Arriving in Sheepshead Bay, Artie says: “The boroughs, but especially Brooklyn, always spread towards water, from the Hudson River, the East River, down to the Atlantic Ocean. The seacoast of New York. Ten miles from Manhattan. Easy to remember here on the coast that the city was an archipelago, a series of islands and inlets, beaches and marshes, rivers, basins, derelict shipyards, wetlands where birds congregated, Jamaica Bay where the planes came in low like big water birds” (2004: 43–4). As the title, Disturbed

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Earth, implies, land is arbitrary and vulnerable, always under threat from the awesome power of the sea. If, as the narrator reflects, new villages such as Gerritsen Beach were formed on the Brooklyn coast by material transported from Manhattan and dumped in the marshland (2004: 45), then it is easy to conceive of a future time when the water will reclaim the land, and when the planes that imitate the birds will be usurped in turn by the birds themselves. That is partly why Artie feels there is “too much fear” in these places (2004: 45): the fear of losing material wealth through failed speculations, organized crime, or simply bad luck participates in a more primal fear of losing everything, of meeting one’s end in natural disaster. Bodies, of course, frequently end up in the water: in Disturbed Earth Ivana Galitzine, a member of the Russian community Nadelson so meticulously chronicles, runs into the ocean at Coney Island and drowns herself, depressed by the failure of the immigrant dream and her role in a child’s disappearance (2004: 329); Sid McKay is thrown into the Red Hook canal and his killer, the Russian sailor called Meler who has lived illegally for decades in Brooklyn, eventually throws himself overboard after confessing his crime to Artie in a small boat out in the storm-tossed bay. In all of these incidents, death in the water symbolizes, simultaneously, an attempt to bury the past and recognition of the failure of that attempt in the present. For example, Meler commits homicide because Sid’s research into the history of Red Hook threatened to reveal his illegal status, and suicide because he cannot contemplate the revelation of his secrets when Artie solves the case. As the detective puts it, typically laconically: “He disappeared with his history” (2005: 382). In one sense, Artie is right: Meler becomes a lost New Yorker in a city perpetually afraid of losing everything. But in another sense, he cannot be lost while his story, wrapped up in the history of immigration, gentrification, and international relations, persists in the memories of those who knew him and in the pages of the book. The repeated images of water in the Artie Cohen novels play an important part in symbolizing the fluidity of relations between past and present even as they connote for many characters the transformative edges between eras of experience. Staring out to see near Brighton Beach, Artie observes: “On the ocean at the edge of the flat, slate-colored surface of the water, lights from a ship blinked. Immigrants had once come on those ships; they had made a break, willing to leave everything they knew for a foreign place, for a better life, or for streets lined with gold. Now people came in airplanes and called home on their cell phones. The break was never sharp; they clung to the place they’d come from” (2004: 51).

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Artie’s own break has been far from sharp, despite his best efforts. Born in Russia and resident for several years in Israel, he arrived in the States intent on jettisoning his past: “When I got to New York, I worked on my English; I got rid of my accent and learned to talk like a New Yorker. Hating the Russians ate me up for years and then, after a while, I tried to let it go” (2004: 52). Ironically, it is when the past “finally fade[s]” and no strong ties to his birthplace remain that Artie is able to embrace his Russian identity again, including the language, whose sounds, he says, “insinuated themselves back into my being” (2004: 53). Now he finds himself repeatedly involved with the Russian-speaking people of New York, especially those living in coastal Brooklyn; his occasional boss Sonny Lippert enlists him in the search for the missing child at the start of Disturbed Earth because the clothes were discovered by a Russian jogger and Artie supposedly knows “the community” (2004: 19). His best friend is the monumental and loyal Tolya Sverdloff, New York property tycoon and global businessman with ties to London and Moscow; in short, Artie could not make a sharp break even if he still wanted to. And neighborhoods like Brighton Beach, he sardonically observes, assume an exaggeratedly Russian milieu and too readily become pastiche, “a kind of theme park with stuff in the shops—dresses with glitter, big furs, fancy china—you probably couldn’t even find in Moscow anymore” (2004: 52). Such places and objects, deterritorialized yet retaining traces of cultural congruity, exemplify the tension between past and present experienced by the residents. In their vulgar excess they speak of desperation, perhaps, the omnipresent fear that all connection with the past is about to be lost. This is the constitutive tension of the Artie Cohen novels—the tension between epochal breaks with the past and continuities, between true apocalypse and a persistent perception of imminent apocalypse which ironically becomes, in fact, one of the continuities of New York City’s identity, each perceived disaster leaving its imprint on the fabric of the city. This situation is mordantly summed up by Artie’s half sister, Genia: “Nothing changes [. . .] Except we become less safe, more frightened, terrorist, disease, war coming” (2004: 180). Genia’s assessment is ostensibly paradoxical, but fundamentally true: things do change, but gradually, dialectically, and over time, not in sudden apocalyptic events. She also recognizes the fear and the anticipation of loss that characterizes community formations generally, and in particular the romantic idea of community that relies on ideological conceptions of before and after. It is worth noting that the tension outlined here has exercised the minds of a number of scholars of postmodernism and what has become known as “post-postmodernism” in recent years. Fredric Jameson famously characterizes

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postmodernism as obsessively theorizing transition and change, looking for ruptures, “for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same, for the ‘When-it-all-changed,’ as William Gibson puts it” (1988: ix). As Adam Kelly notes, “‘9/11,’ the U.S. bailout scheme, and the election of Barack Obama have become the most recent and popular candidates to signify the moment ‘whenit-all-changed’” (2010: 314), and the first of these, as we shall see, is crucial to understanding Nadelson’s stories. Yet Kelly goes on to endorse the view of Andrew Hoberek, who argues that any change from one cultural dominant to another consists not of epochal (or indeed apocalyptic) “readily visible” transformations, but of “a range of uneven, tentative, local shifts” (Hoberek, 2007: 241). Hoberek’s spatialized language—the allusions to “global” and “local” processes—is, of course, consistent with a Jamesonian conception of a postmodern spatial turn, but it is also especially useful in the analysis of novels like Nadelson’s because anxieties of apocalypse are frequently bound up in questions of land, space, and community. This is revealed through the titles. Disturbed Earth connotes the uprooting that is integral to the personal histories of so many immigrant characters in the novel. It also refers to a planet that has become psychologically damaged since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and to the giant hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan, in a city “still on the edge of a nervous breakdown after all this time” (Nadelson, 2004: 20). In addition to these global, apocalyptic connotations, however, it connotes certain continuities: changing uses of space, processes of urban demolition, renewal and development which include dockside renovations, the transfer of earth from Manhattan to the Brooklyn coastline, and, of course, the redevelopment of Ground Zero. Continuing the theme of redevelopment, Red Hook focuses specifically on gentrification in the eponymous waterside neighborhood. Gentrification speaks to the tension between finality and continuity I have identified because it raises the question of whether certain kinds of redevelopment—for example, the conversion of old warehouses and industrial buildings into luxury apartments— constitute a brutal and unsentimental break with the culture of what went before or help to salvage a disappearing past through the accumulation and polishing of “authentic” architectural features and interior designs. Behind Sid McKay’s assessment of the gentrifiers’ motivations lurks a sense of impending apocalypse: “People want a piece of the city before it’s all gone, so they’re finding their way to the fringes, the old industrial city” (2005: 27). And yet his position is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, he is in favor of development because he sees the place “coming to life,” suggesting that it has previously been dead (2005: 36). On the other hand, it is his persistent desire to keep alive in photographs and

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written accounts the working-class, industrial history of the pre-gentrification neighborhood, including the story of the Russian sailor, that leads to his murder. Likewise, Artie’s descriptions reveal an area in transition and full of contradictory signals, unsure about whether signifiers of the pre-gentrification Red Hook will be lost forever, or retained in isolated pockets. On the same page we are told that “[y]ou could see Red Hook was changing: fancy little signs that hung out front of warehouses proclaimed that artists and film people had moved in,” but in a local bar “you could imagine the place as it had been. Red Hook looked ancient, suspended in time” (2005: 93). Tolya, who, as a businessman heavily invested in property development, exhibits a brutal honesty about the situation, also seems to describe a post-apocalyptic landscape: “People are fighting over industrial bones of New York, Artyom” (2005: 112). What is yet again at stake in all of these appraisals is “authenticity.” This is, as we have seen, “a tool of power” because a dominant group’s discourse of authenticity and origins can obliterate the alternative sense of authenticity of another, marginalized group (Zukin, 2010: 3). If, for example, an understanding of authenticity based on a working-class population and culture; on traditional ideas of community and on ethnic homogeneity, is supplanted by an aspirant middle-class understanding of authenticity as historic houses, period interiors, and a benign form of multiculturalism, then a significant power shift has occurred which renders one version of authenticity redundant and has the potential retroactively to erase it from history. Authenticity, then, is subjective and “achieved” through applications of power (Zukin, 2010: 23); it is socially constructed, not organic. And even as those who seek it deploy the language of origins, of befores and afters, the concept succumbs to (and therefore contributes to) the tension between apocalyptic endings and continuities so important to Nadelson’s New York City. The search for and reclamation of origins is always historicized, ideologically charged, and evolving; it is one of New York’s enduring characteristics that authenticities are constantly finding themselves embattled, lost, and found. And there is never a “sharp break” between them. So the crimes and misdemeanors that occur in Disturbed Earth and Red Hook, both actual and anticipated, are, unsurprisingly, appropriate to the concerns central to the novels that I have outlined—immigration, gentrification, authenticity, and the effects of global forces on localities. They derive, particularly in Red Hook, with its focus on gentrification, from the conflict that arises when different claims are made to spatial and temporal authenticity—that is, the authenticity of neighborhoods and competing narratives of their histories.

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In Artie Cohen’s New York, as we have seen, people picture themselves living on the edge—of the land, of reason, of disaster, of devastating loss. With this predisposition to apocalyptic thinking, it is no surprise that the crimescape of both novels at first appears, often with the aid of pathetic fallacy, excessively apocalyptic. In Red Hook, the journalist Jack Santiago exploits post-9/11 fear during a Republican convention in Manhattan to create a story about an influx of “nukes” into the city (2005: 305). (Nuclear terror is one of many intertextual connections between different Artie Cohen novels: Red Mercury Blues is named after the lethal substance that may or may not have been imported from Russia and sold out of a Brooklyn car parts store.) In Disturbed Earth, Sonny Lippert posits a new and terrifying crimescape when he argues that “the rise in child abuse, in kidnapping, was connected to the fear that was rampant everywhere” (2004: 106). The climactic scenes of Disturbed Earth, when Artie finally discovers that his autistic nephew Billy is the perpetrator of a kidnapping and murder, take place during the worst blizzard to have hit New York in years, “the kind of storm that paralyzed the city” (2004: 220). Symbolic of an imminent crossing over into nothingness, the blanket of snow might be read as a kind of tabula rasa, but more accurately it should be seen as potentially enabling a kind of amnesia, a covering over of traces. I employ the term “amnesia” in the idiosyncratic sense Jonathan Lethem repeatedly does—to signify a willed forgetting, and a refusal to recognize that communities of people different to you are nonetheless experiencing the world in similar ways. This is the significance of Artie’s somewhat clumsy assessment of Billy’s moral disconnection from his criminal acts: “A faintly puzzled look was on his face as if he slept perplexed by the fact that what he had done was wrong. He didn’t really understand what he did or why; it occurred to me that in that way he was like America” (2004: 385). Thus, Billy’s autism becomes a metaphor for a kind of insulating isolationism that refuses to acknowledge the full global implications of national decisions, or to appreciate that the crimescape is always, necessarily, a global one. By extension, Nadelson proposes a form of transnational selfhood—exemplified by Artie Cohen, however reluctantly—that refuses to adhere to boundaries and inflects every “here” with a multitude of “theres.” (More is said about such forms of selfhood in Chapter 7.) That is why the Artie Cohen novels so forcefully depict immigrant experience: focusing on the lives of Russians in Brighton Beach and Hispanics in Red Hook serves as a constant reminder that a national imaginary of renewals and clean breaks is not just factitious but morally dubious. And that is why, ultimately, the immigrant, multilingual detective, and the crimescape through which he

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travels resist apocalyptic thinking. Unless one visualizes events, no matter how catastrophic they might appear, along a historical continuum and as part of local and global interactions, then apocalypse becomes an excuse for forgetfulness, just a chance to start over and disregard the political, cultural, and social continuities that, complexly combined, brought about the catastrophe in the first place. To emphasize continuities requires a hard-headed, pragmatic determination not all of the characters possess; it can lead to the relentlessly bleak outlook of Artie’s half-sister Genia, or to the flinty-eyed optimism of Artie’s new girlfriend Maxine. She says of New York, the city she could never leave: “I loved it on September 10, I think it’s important to keep on loving it” (2005: 101).

5

Old Frontiers and New Picturesques— Fictions of Brooklyn Gentrification

Gentrification connotes mock-aristocratic elitism, and thus we cannot think about the process in neutral terms. Gumport, 2009

Brownstone dreams and neighborhood realities— the context of gentrification Such delights are promised by “The Brownstone Hunters’ Guide.”1 Published in the early 1970s by Electric Weather heating services, but presented in antique brown and embellished throughout with patterns designed to resemble Victorian cornicing, this pamphlet employs language which is part diagnostic manual, part political tract, and part interior design catalogue in order to persuade young affluent couples to participate in “the brownstone boom.” Its main rhetorical strategy is a kind of presumptive tautology. Beginning by identifying and thus discursively bringing into existence a contemporary syndrome that it calls “‘brownstone fever’ (an almost incurable urge to live in a City town house),” it then lists some of the benign symptoms: “brownstone buyers want living space, close to work and the City’s shopping and theatre life.” The capitalization betrays a number of significant assumptions: though “the City” would seem to denote Manhattan in the latter quotation (it remains a common appellation in the other boroughs), where young professionals will most likely work and spend their disposable incomes, its meaning is less

1

From Folder 1, Box 11 in The Papers of Professor Jerome Krase, “Brooklyniana” collection, Brooklyn College Library.

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geographically specific in the former. When one considers the unfortunate associations with aggressive expansionism of the term “living space,” then the precise intended meaning of “City town house” reveals itself upon reading the following claim: “the brownstone is now engulfing twenty-five neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island—and improving every area it touches.” So “the City” comes to refer to any areas which are, to use Jonathan Lethem’s expression, “Manhattanized,” including those located in the outer boroughs which have nonetheless become economically dependent territories of Manhattan through the “engulfing” wave of gentrification and associated commuting. Thus, an ideological transformation has been enacted of the kind Raymond Williams identifies: “the City” has ceased to be simply a place or a recognizable set of lived behaviors, but has instead become shorthand for a set of cosmopolitan, middle-class values. That the brownstone boom is deeply political cannot be doubted: in a 1970s New York City struggling economically and blighted by crime and urban deprivation, the producers of the pamphlet arrogate to the brownstoners not only the spirit of free enterprise, but also moral, civic, and aesthetic virtues: “the brownstone boom is an example of private citizens healing the City from within. And that’s a beautiful trend.” In the case studies, adorned with seductive photographs, that conclude the pamphlet, there is a startling elision. One photograph carries the caption: “Transformed from grim rooming houses to elegant town houses and apartments.” No mention is made of the people who might have been rooming there or what happened to them. As Neil Smith argues, the idea of the “urban pioneer” “suggests a city not yet socially inhabited: like Native Americans, the urban working class is seen as less than social, a part of the physical environment” (1996: xiv). One of this study’s chief claims is that gentrification is of central importance to the study of Brooklyn’s complex community negotiations, and such elisions, lurking behind utopian discussions of the transformations of buildings and neighborhoods, have to be addressed. To differing extents, as we shall see in this chapter, they are addressed in literary satires of gentrification such as Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970) and L. J. Davis’ A Meaningful Life (1971) and early-twenty-first century novels about gentrifying neighborhoods such as Solos by Kitty Burns Florey, My Old Man by Amy Sohn, and A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff. If “The Brownstone Hunters’ Guide” adumbrates a sense of community through the idea of “the City,” based on class and economic affiliations which transcend neighborhood boundaries, The Old-House Journal, which was first published in 1973, more explicitly participates in the romantic discourse

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of community and neighborhood regeneration. In a letter to Sue Krase,2 the editor R. A. Clem Labine describes the journal as “a new monthly publication edited for the owner (or prospective owner) of a house built prior to 1914” and goes on to outline its lofty intentions: “The ultimate aim of the Old-House journal is to foster preservation of entire old neighborhoods and communities by showing young middle-class couples an attractive alternative to suburbia.” Despite the ostensible rosy idealism of these sentiments, the last noun phrase strikes a note of urgency. It reminds the reader that this publication, for all its preoccupation with aesthetic detail in articles such as “Tips on Stripping Shutters” (Old-House Journal, September 26, 1974), responds to broader issues of class, race, economics, and the potential communities formed from their complex interactions in ways every bit as contradictory as “The Brownstone Hunters’ Guide.” For example, Labine’s espousal of the brownstone as an “alternative to suburbia” refers directly to “the Great Suburban Migration” which drained 800,000 people from New York City in the 1970s (Suarez, 1999: 7) and which is the subject of Ray Suarez’s 1999 book, The Old Neighborhood. As Suarez explains, the reasons for the shift from center to suburb were complex and various. In part, it had to do with a burgeoning sense of American identity, fashioned in urban immigrant communities, on the part of the postwar generation. Places like Brooklyn, “a mighty factory town” that “made everything” and “turned people from everywhere into Americans” (1999: 99), united immigrants in communities based on industrial production. With the supersession of manufacturing by assembly, and then by tertiary industry, the promise of a consumerist lifestyle contributed to a widespread change of outlook: “The rough edges of the immigrant ‘greenhorns’ were worn smooth, and a confident younger generation now entered a fuller, richer American life” (1999: 3). This is a concrete example of how “the rigidities of national economic regulation and mass production” (Joseph, 2002: 147) are undone, and how emergent post-Fordist modes begin to reshape community attachments. Fully “assimilated,” these babyboomers were inclined to eschew the older properties remaining in urban areas, decaying buildings redolent of their parents’ generation and of “world war and economic depression” (Suarez, 1999: 4), and seek modern housing in pristine new suburbs more concordant with their view of themselves as forward thinking, aspirant, and, indeed, new (Figure 5.1).

2

From Folder 1, Box 11 in The Papers of Professor Jerome Krase, “Brooklyniana” collection, Brooklyn College Library.

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Figure 5.1 Brownstone Brooklyn. Photograph by James Peacock.

If the inner-city immigrant enclaves these babyboomers left behind had previously been ghettos “made benign by assimilation” (Suarez, 1999: 4), then their mass departure had the effect of recalibrating and reemphasizing economic, class, ethnic, and racial divisions in those areas, leading to a more stereotypically pejorative perception of “the ghetto.” For those remaining (predominantly black and Latino families), a constellation of malignant forces conspired to reduce dramatically the quality of life. As Suarez argues: “poor city dwellers lost the political clout of their middle-class neighbors, who had held institutions like public schools to an acceptable baseline of quality” (1999: 14). In addition, during the 1970s and 1980s the evacuation of middle-class families was accompanied by the withdrawal of potentially wealth-producing individuals and businesses: “Those Americans given a leg up in the new economy—arbitrageurs and software writers, intellectual property lawyers and plastic surgeons—pulled up stakes from shared institutions, weakening them, and took their presence, influence, and money elsewhere” (1999: 15). Combine these factors with government

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subsidies for “greenfield” housing and the construction of highways to these suburban zones, plus real estate agents’ systematic devaluation and neglect of supposedly “marginal neighborhoods” (1999: 17), and you have a recipe not just for urban decay but for a more profound erosion of “shared assumptions” and “a lack of affinity and empathy for all those who couldn’t share our assumptions” (1999: 15). It is evident from this, necessarily brief, summary that Suarez’s study shares much with Walter Thabit’s forensic analysis of East New York’s decline in the 1960s and 1970s (as we saw in Chapter 3), and with Robert D. Putnam’s celebrated study of the postwar reduction in positive “social capital,” which “refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (Putnam, 2000: 19), among the babyboomer generation. Both authors focus on public institutions, from local political organizations to social gatherings and sports, including the “bowling” of Putnam’s title, and both participate to a large extent in the romantic discourse of community founded on interpersonal, face-to-face relationships. Where they differ is in their underlying attitudes to large institutions such as government and the market. Putnam, as Miranda Joseph observes, sees in communities not the opportunity for resistance to “hegemonic regimes” she craves, but rather sites of “incorporation” into such regimes (2002: 12). Thus for Putnam, stronger social capital leads to economic development and effective government, reinforcing the power of both. Suarez, on the other hand, consistently argues that “color still trumps commonality of interests” (1999: 251), problematizing the notion of “social capital” by exposing the divisions inherent in the idea of community itself, divisions, he suggests, maintained by governmental policy. Both Suarez and Putnam invest a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy in the idea of “the neighborhood” which, as I emphasized in earlier chapters, is consistently the most important unit of community in literary texts about Brooklyn. For Putnam, to offer one illustrative example, “[n]eighborhoods with high levels of social capital tend to be good places to raise children” (2000: 307). For Suarez, the negative shift from city to suburb he describes was not only a demographic one, but also a conceptual one: “white migrants left the old neighborhood behind and left the very idea of ‘neighborhoods’ behind” (1999: 2). To cease to think in terms of neighborhood, then, is to cease to think in terms of social capital, of the shared assumptions and public organizations that can help people live together harmoniously and for mutual benefit. The brownstoners’ campaign to regenerate neighborhoods and communities, declared in publications such as The Old-House Journal and The Brownstoner

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and encouraged further by courses such as New York City Community College’s “BMX 105 Interior Design: Brownstone Revival,” might appear on the surface, then, to be motivated solely by civic-mindedness. Yet when one considers the environments into which the gentrifiers flooded, characterized by class and ethnic segregation (only exacerbated by the banks’ policy of “redlining,” which is analyzed in detail by Gregory D. Squires in From Redlining to Reinvestment [1992]), poor living conditions, and associated social problems, it is not difficult to imagine that their arrival prompted neither an immediate improvement in lifestyle nor a rediversification and reintegration of the population, but instead an atmosphere of mistrust and conflict. In this atmosphere differences were exaggerated, and found themselves expressed, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes quite deliberately, in metaphors of the frontier and, in more myopic accounts, manifest destiny. For example, Ruth Rejnis, writing about the brownstoner movement for New York magazine, says: “Most prospective buyers [. . .] think first of Brooklyn with its many revival neighborhoods, lower-thanManhattan prices, and pioneer community spirit” (1977: 36). Besides evoking myths of westward expansion and homesteading at the frontier, the collocation of “pioneer community spirit” in this context implies that a spirit of togetherness arises only after the arrival of the brownstone pioneers. Such metaphors are deployed by Ray Suarez, but without the underlying boosterism. As he reflects on his tour of American cities including New York, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, all of which have suffered prolonged periods of suburban flight followed by shorter periods of gentrification, he writes of “the middle-class frontier,” of those “living on the other side of the economic divide” and of “the tense, watchful years during which both sides observed, and failed to understand, the other” (1999: 61). Neil Smith, in The New Urban Frontier, goes much further. Proceeding from the laudable observation that the term “urban pioneer” is “arrogant” because “it suggests a city not yet socially inhabited” (1996: xiv), he goes on forcefully to argue that the frontier discourse of gentrification movements, just as it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “serves to rationalize and legitimate a process of conquest” (1996: xv). Overall, he sees gentrification as ideologically motivated revanchism, “a desperate defense of a challenged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values and neighborhood security” (1996: 211). Smith’s case studies—of The Lower East Side, Harlem, and of Amsterdam, Budapest, and Paris—are meticulously researched and fascinating. Ultimately, however, his argument is too polemical, too coy about its own ideological assumptions, and not as nuanced as, for example, that of Suleiman Osman who, while also using

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frontier language in his analysis of Brooklyn gentrification, understands that the “new localism” of the brownstoner movement was “neither exclusively right nor left” (2011: 238) and led to surprising coalitions across classes and ethnicities. As he states: “Rather than simply aiming to displace the poor, brownstoning both shaped and was influenced by the ‘neighborhood movements’ of the urban working class and poor” (2011: 238). Nonetheless, it is notable that contemporary newspaper articles tend to affirm the more agonistic view. As part of its series, “The Battle for New York’s Neighborhoods,” the Daily News published an article in 1982 called “In B’klyn, Gardens too Green,” which focused on hostilities erupting between the older Italian-American inhabitants of Carroll Gardens and the brownstoners moving into the area. Part of the struggle, as “retired cab driver” Ernest Ferrante explains, is simple nomenclature (though it is never, of course, a simple matter in practice): “South Brooklyn is now ‘Carroll Gardens’. At least, that’s what they call it. But I still call it South Brooklyn” (1982: 5). Just as “Boerum Hill,” which draws on the name of a prominent Dutch colonial family, is preferred to “Gowanus” (a preference deconstructed in Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude), so “Carroll Gardens,” which takes the name of the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence, invests the neighborhood with a sense of historical continuity and importance “South Brooklyn,” with its perfunctory geographical reference, does not. Moreover, the change of name permanently severs the area from working-class Red Hook, of which it was considered a part prior to the advent of gentrification in the 1960s and the bisection of the area by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Although in class terms the writer of the article tends to treat “[y]oung professionals and upper middle-class families” and “Italian-Americans” as mutually exclusive (1982: 5), it is important to remember Miranda Joseph’s approach to the creation of community groupings: “The deconstructive critique of binary oppositions suggested that the self-other oppositions on which notions of purity depend are in fact constitutive and that therefore the self is never pure but always already incorporates the other” (2002: xxv). In the context of the Carroll Gardens debate, we see tacit acknowledgment of this in the writer’s recognition that the relationship between the two groups does not entail the wholesale usurpation of one set of values by another, but is dialectical in nature: the young professionals “have sought out the neighborhood for all the qualities that the Italian-Americans fostered” (1982: 5). What these qualities are is never explicitly revealed: presumably, they have partly to do with material attractions such as authentic ethnic cooking, small, family-run shops, and the

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neighborhood’s famed front gardens, and partly to do with abstract virtues like neighborliness. Yet the Carroll Gardens Association’s advertising of the neighborhood as a destination for gentrifiers attracts opposition precisely because it is believed to accelerate an undermining of neighborly feeling. Celia Cacace, labeled the “staunchest opponent” of Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto, president of the Carroll Gardens Association, goes as far as to accuse the new settlers of “genocide because they’re killing off neighborhoods” (1982: 40). Whether the brownstoners genuinely feel they are seeking out “Italian” qualities or are intent on destroying them, it is evident that “neighborhood” is a contestable term, subject to multiple ascriptions. At the heart of the Carroll Gardens/South Brooklyn debate are what appear to be fundamentally different conceptions of neighborhood (though a deconstructive approach would again show them to be constitutive of each other): for Cacace, as the quotation above suggests, it signifies people—specifically, in this instance, an ethnically homogeneous group of people with a shared history dating back to the nineteenth century. For the newcomers, the neighborhood may include perceived ethnic Italian elements as part of an updated cosmopolitan vision encompassing a mix of people, as well as the aesthetic and lifestyle benefits associated with striking architecture, leafy streets, and proximity to other areas of the city. In light of these observations, what is especially striking about this somewhat sensationalist case study is the way these supposedly incompatible visions eventually dissolve into caricatures built mainly around aesthetic signifiers of identity, designed to reinforce difference: No wonder tension has increased. It has become question of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ ‘They’ are the newcomers who look down on ‘us,’ make fun of ‘us,’ dress fancy, don’t hang curtains on windows, rip linoleum off the floors, sleep on beds on the floor, strip walls down to the brick, never say hello. To newcomers, the old-timers are people who paint the facades of the beautiful brownstones, put saints in their front yards, use words like ‘stoop’ and ‘terlet,’ don’t appreciate the architecture of this neighborhood, treat us ‘like we don’t belong here.’ (1982: 40)

In both paragraphs, the excessive use of scare quotes suggests sardonic humor or exasperation, though the omission of these punctuation marks from “us” in the second paragraph betrays the writer’s allegiances to the newcomers. My main concern, however, is the microscopic fascination with the specifics of interior and exterior design, with markers of taste, with differences in attitude to history and supposed authenticity revealed through aesthetic choices. Here, these differences exacerbate the mutual distrust of the two communities: in recent Brooklyn

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fictions they frequently become ideologically assimilated into a sentimental, sometimes hipsterish, cosmopolitan vision I shall call, with reference to the work of Carrie Tirado Bramen, “picturesque.” For Bramen, the urban picturesque mode in nineteenth-century American fiction was the “aesthetic expression” of the change from “homogeneity to heterogeneity” (2000: 157) and an ideological impulse, a way of “transforming immigrants from social threats to cultural resources” (2000: 158). In Brooklyn fictions of gentrification Bramen’s arguments still pertain but with one important change: a narrowly circumscribed, sanitized vision of heterogeneity is the starting point, and it is this vision that is perceived as under threat from Manhattanization, the homogenization of global capital. But first, it is instructive to examine how two classic satires of the brownstoner movement position themselves, at an earlier stage of the process, in relation to the uneasy diversity engendered by gentrification.

(Im)perfect materials—Desperate Characters and A Meaningful Life As the reader enters the Bentwood dining room in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970), the “strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade,” that falls upon the dining table, invites close scrutiny of their “repast” (1999: 3). This careful attention to the details of their lifestyle is demonstrated, self-consciously, by the husband: “Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop” (1999: 3). If the meal and the patient, detached way Fox chooses to describe it, communicate a studied cosmopolitanism achieved through signifiers of consumption (signifiers especially important to contemporary forms of the picturesque), so too do the elements of interior design. Indeed, the “fluorescent tube over a stainless steel sink” suggests a surgical, antiseptic atmosphere at odds with the intended warmth and period comfort of “the old cedar planks of the floor,” the “Victorian secretary,” and the “bookcase which held, among other volumes, the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets” (1999: 3). Fox presents a picture of careful middle-class accumulation and sophistication, in which Otto, as if aware of his role both in the life he and Sophie have constructed and in the novel Desperate Characters, unfolds “a large linen napkin with deliberation” (1999: 3). However, the author also chooses to mention “[t]he old sliding doors

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that had once separated the two first-floor rooms” and have “long since been removed” (1999: 3). Even in their absence, reference to these doors (presumably “inauthentic” additions to the Victorian interior) reminds the reader of the house’s history prior to the Bentwoods’ arrival, and of tastes different to theirs. Sliding doors can be removed and thus mentally consigned to the past, but the imperturbable cat that becomes so central to both the narrative and the symbolic framework of the novel certainly cannot be. With its “massive” head, “jowled and unprincipled and grotesque” and “its scruffy, half-starved body” (1999: 4), it arrives on the stoop as an emissary from “the slum street” behind the Bentwoods’ house (1999: 4) and is thus a reminder that the couple lives on a socioeconomic frontier. Despite the underlying irony of his statements, Otto’s references to “the locals” (1999: 4) and his description of one of the newcomers to the “slum street” as “[a] brave pioneer from Wall Street” (1999: 5) indicate awareness of the frontier environment and the Bentwoods’ status as outsiders. Sophie at least recognizes the economic reality of their situation when she retorts: “It doesn’t take courage. It takes cash” (1999: 5). It is for precisely this reason that she feeds the cat, out of a sense of guilt and displaced responsibility to the poorer neighbors whom the animal symbolizes for her. As Elizabeth Gumport says: “As fixated as they are on the appearance of their houses, characters in early gentrification novels recognize that there are consequences to their labor. The newcomers are not immune to guilt” (Gumport, 2009). Yet in the short-circuiting imagery and logic of the novel, Sophie’s apparently generous act is itself dismissed by Otto as “self-indulgence” (1999: 5). The cat, famously, bites her on the hand, drawing blood and thus casting Sophie as a gentrifying Lady Macbeth. It is tempting to see the bite as symbolic of the locals’ revenge on the presumptive and selfisolating gentrifiers. And yet this would be far too simplistic; it would fall into the trap Fox very deliberately lays for the reader—that of subscribing to Sophie’s personal symbolic system, and her desire to sublimate her guilt and prejudices through the symbolically charged and cathected animal. Moreover, when the sudden arrival of a black man in their home later in the novel lays bare their prejudices, his exasperated description of his white neighbors as “inhospitable cats” (1999: 98) inverts the symbolism and complicates the relationship between self and other. So the bite, the accompanying pain, and the blood are better understood as representing a sudden, violent invasion of the material into an exquisitely constructed interior full of fetishized commodities, which is so artful as to be absolutely abstracted. The cat bite stands, then, for the inevitable failure of Sophie’s symbolic system. If, as Sophie’s friend Leon says, civilization occurs when “[y]ou take raw material and you transform it” (1999: 84), then the bite is

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the moment when the abstract carapace of the gentrifiers’ self-regarding interior is transformed back into crude raw materials, the smooth surface of skin into ragged flesh. Throughout the novel, as Sophie and Otto’s relationship deteriorates, they are constantly being reminded of the material circumstances upon which their aesthetic utopian vision is based but which they frequently try to disavow. At a kitchen shop called Bazaar Provençal, Sophie desires a particular omelette pan; her description of it highlights vividly this tense play of abstraction and materiality: “it sat, substantial as its own metal, in a hazy domestic dream: a middle-aged couple sitting together over their omelette aux fines herbes, two glasses of white wine, one half of a grape cheese, two pears in a milk glass bowl . . .” (1999: 74). When the elderly shopkeeper informs Sophie that another pan is “made better,” thus drawing attention to the labor involved in producing the object (1999: 74), she panics and leaves instead with an entirely useless (but typically symbolic) egg-timer. In Desperate Characters the frontier upon which the Bentwoods and other gentrifiers live is not simply the one that separates slum street from gentrified block, black from white, rich from poor, though this is clearly important; it is also the frontier between concrete materiality and the abstraction required to turn commodities into a utopian aesthetic vision. Each rude interruption of their lives—the stone thrown through the window of Mike Holstein’s house (1999: 23); the return of the cat (1999: 27); the green plastic aeroplane in the hands of a near-naked black man stumbling down their street (1999: 65); the undermining of Otto by his former business partner Charlie Russell (1999: 106–7); and the ransacking of their Long Island farmhouse (1999: 130)—reminds them how porous the frontier is, how supplementary the relationship between materiality and abstraction. And because they are at a very early stage of gentrification and therefore still in a socioeconomic minority in the neighborhood, they are unable to assimilate these intrusive elements into a picturesque vision of variety. For that assimilation to become possible, they will have to wait for the completion of black flight and for the “engulfing” wave of change heralded by the brownstoner marketing materials discussed earlier. Jonathan Franzen, in his introduction to the 1999 edition of the novel, calls Desperate Characters “a novel in revolt against its own perfection” (1999: xiv). With its exquisitely crafted sentences and accumulation of closely observed details, its words are assembled to resemble nothing more than a renovated brownstone interior, and the sense of bewildering significance in every word to which Franzen refers re-enacts for the reader the crippling self-consciousness of the Bentwoods, people “all too well equipped to read themselves as literary texts

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dense with overlapping meanings” (1999: xiii). Fox’s triumph lies in her refusal to let the aesthetic perfection of her writing stand outside its own materiality: when Otto grabs the ink bottle and throws it violently against the wall at the close of the novel (1999: 156), the running of black ink down the walls reminds us of the physical substance of the words we have been reading, and by association the labor that went into their creation. Like Paula Fox, but with a deliberate vagueness more befitting a protagonist who never understands what his priorities are, L. J. Davis in A Meaningful Life repeatedly suggests the characteristics of people and their relationships through domestic spaces. For example, after Lowell Lake (whose name hints at his literary aspirations, recalls the Thoreauvian wilderness existence for which he once longed [2009: 20], and sounds more like a place than a person) graduates from Stanford, gets married, and moves to Manhattan with his wife, their banal life is laid bare in the following passage: Lowell and his wife had a good time living with each other and they seldom quarreled. Their apartment was spacious and basically comfortable despite being strangely designed, and except on weekends they were never in it during the day, when you could see the place in the living-room ceiling where the plaster was badly patched and it became evident that pale green was not the color for the bathroom. (2009: 36)

From the underwhelming “seldom” and “basically” through “strangely” to “badly” and “never,” the adverbial progression mimics the eventual deterioration of the marriage and of Lowell’s mental health. The inexpertly applied plasterwork appears to contradict Lowell’s sense that his life, rather than “breaking up,” suffers instead from a lack of “the smallest fissure in its bland and seamless surface” (2009: 84). Thus, his subsequent dismantling of the rooms in his Brooklyn brownstone symbolizes an attempt to disrupt the perceived blandness, to shatter middle-class consensus in the same way as Audrey’s rogue eye in Leaving Brooklyn. That his attempt fails is shown by the “freshly plastered wall” he faces on the last page of the novel, mocking him with its “blank and seamless” whiteness (2009: 214). What he achieves is nothing more than a reaffirmation of bourgeois values that permit no threatening difference; a plastering over of cracks both material and metaphorical. A Meaningful Life, like Desperate Characters, forces the reader to accept the productive aporia which Lowell is singularly incapable of accepting: that the details of architecture and interior design both do and do not reflect the inner life. They do inasmuch as they provide clues to character through an individual’s

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attitude to commodities and material surroundings; for example, Lowell’s evident disgust at his in laws’ apartment, where everything is “either made of plastic or covered in plastic” and where sitting comfortably is impossible (2009: 39), reveals something of his taste and his innate desire for “authenticity.” But they do not inasmuch as the very clues they provide constitute a kind of confidence trick, by attempting to substitute interior details for a character fully embedded in and cognizant of social relations. Lowell’s dream of gentrification in order to attain the “meaningful life” of the title (2009: 35) enacts most dramatically this substitution. Instead of, as he grandiosely imagines, participating in a community and “coming firmly to grips with poverty and municipal corruption” (2009: 87) through his renovation of the Collingwood townhouse, he detaches himself from all connections and focuses only on material details with no sense of how to participate in familial, class, or ethnic relations. These details become a dangerous distraction. Lowell’s decline, culminating in his murder of an unknown intruder in the brownstone’s entrance hall (2009: 199), is precipitated by his propensity to see everything but these details as distractions. Walking to the real estate agents in Brooklyn, Lowell reflects on his tendency to view the street upon which he grew up “the way a child sees things.” “It was the same way,” we are told, “distracted by his wife and Negroes, that he was seeing things now, as ambience instead of objects, interspersed with brief, vivid glimpses of things he really wanted to see, like bark and brickwork and turrets with sharp, conical roofs” (2009: 94–5). Lowell’s desire to atomize the landscape into discrete signifiers predicts the imaginative work of the picturesque in novels such as Solos, but the difference at this early, frontier stage of gentrification is the lingering presence of the blacks who inhabit the rooming houses on Washington Avenue. As the majority residents in this neighborhood, they cannot be, as it were, plastered over and reduced to mere signifying details and are a constant reminder of the urban frontier and the Lakes’ immigrant status. As one of the locals says to Lowell when he and his wife first visit the neighborhood: “Better watch yourself, man [. . .] You a long way from home” (2009: 93). Though Lowell Lake is the novel’s central figure, A Meaningful Life shifts the reader’s identification to the blacks he tries so hard to eject from his building and his consciousness. It does this by having them watch his actions like us. Throughout the novel the locals bear witness, to the extent that: “there was almost no place you could look without finding someone looking incuriously back at you from it. It was kind of eerie” (2009: 99). The lack of curiosity is important. Not only does it have a deflationary function, serving to mock, without ever appearing to mock, the self-importance of Lowell’s project, it also

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stands in contrast to the studied and ultimately rather desperate gaze of the Bentwoods. Their’s is the gentrifying look, one might say—the look that strives to ensure that all external aesthetic details are correct and that the individual’s face is registering, in turn, precisely the correct mood and emotions at any given moment. When Otto first sees Sophie’s bite, for example, this look is evoked perfectly by the phrase “his face showed solicitude” (1999: 9), which by no means denotes genuine sympathy. Lowell’s look, which cannot distinguish between the black men on his street (2009: 137), is of the same order as Otto and Sophie’s when applied to the period features of the Collingwood house. In contrast, the eerie inscrutability of the blacks’ gazes in A Meaningful Life undermines Lowell through its apparent indifference to him, his work, and, most importantly, to any notion of value in what he is doing. If the reader is encouraged to adopt the same kind of look (and thus, with an irony not dissimilar to that of Desperate Characters, to devalue the words of the book itself), it is a look which is nonetheless compromised by our knowledge that the working-class black populations of neighborhoods like the Lakes’ were, in real life, eventually pushed out. At the close of the novel, as Lowell disappointedly acknowledges that “the one great act of his life,” the murder, “would never be certified by the public realities of arrest and trial” (2009: 214), the reader is left to consider that the historical facts of economic and demographic change are the only meaningful ones, whatever meaning or value Lowell has ascribed to his pretensions.

The consumer picturesque—Solos By the time Emily Lime, protagonist of Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos, arrives in Williamsburg, Brownstone Brooklyn has been gentrifying for many years and the influx of white settlers is no longer a new or surprising phenomenon. Florey has described in interview her own reasons for moving into the borough: “It was 1995. I had just got divorced the first time and my then-boyfriend-soonto-be-husband and I decided to move to New York for absolutely no reason but that a really good friend of mine lived in a loft in Williamsburg on North Third Street. She’d been there for twenty years, maybe. She was an original. When she moved in there was nothing.” Her wording is significant, and is, as we shall see, echoed in Solos: to describe her friend as “an original” reveals the ideology of authenticity, and to state that prior to her friend’s arrival in the late 1970s “there was nothing” reveals the ideology of the wilderness and

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the urban frontier. Such an ideology depends on the elision of Williamsburg’s industrial past, signified by the warehouses that came to be occupied by artists in the late 1970s and the 1980s, or at least, as Sharon Zukin describes, its assimilation into a vision of authenticity encapsulated by the epithet “gritty.” Where the adjective once referred to urban blight, crime, and poverty, it came to represent a kind of cool urban aesthetic and demonstrated “the symbolic economy’s ability to synthesize dirt and danger into new cultural commodities” (Zukin, 2010: 51). The “slum street” behind the Bentwoods’ house and the street on which the Lakes’ brownstone sits are “gritty” in the earlier sense. Florey’s Williamsburg can be regarded as “gritty” in the later, picturesque sense because the wave of bohemian immigration has gathered such momentum, and because the economic conditions, supported by the extensive media coverage Zukin so meticulously chronicles, are already conducive to the reappropriation of the term to make it more fitting for a Williamsburg now regarded as “the epicenter of cool” (Noah Baumbach, qtd. in Zukin 2010: 42). Such semantic and ideological distinctions are important. To favor a softened and aestheticized idea of grittiness is to favor “variety” over its more minatory relative heterogeneity. As Carrie Tirado Bramen argues, in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century America variety was “a more restrained concept connected to a larger cultural politics of moderation,” an “antidote” to the widening disparities of the Gilded Age “that fused nineteenth-century liberalism with twentieth-century modernity” (2000: 21). Variety describes something manageable and appealing which bypasses “the extremes of heterogeneity and uniformity by finding a middle ground where cultural variety creates a sense of relative stability without monotony” (2000: 23). In Solos’ Williamsburg, a similar middle ground is described: certain signifiers of variety are cherished, including those elements of the industrial past deemed nonthreatening or appropriate to a new urban aesthetic. Extremes of postmodern pluralism and ethnic difference are avoided, but uniformity through the workings of global capital is also seen as a potential threat, and one closely associated with Manhattan. What is at work, in other words, is a kind of flexible specialization or uneven development at the level of aesthetics which results in a stable-enough community of like-minded individuals just eccentric enough to add the requisite flavor. The borough represented in Solos, in keeping with many of the Brooklyn crime novels looked at in the previous chapter, is a place of immigration. Rather than Russian or working-class Irish immigrants, however, Florey’s Williamsburg is populated by an eccentric set of artists, writers, and dog lovers who have moved

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in from the suburbs or from other sections of the city for cheaper rents and a bohemian ambience: Emily moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn because that’s where her friend Gene Rae Foster went to be with her boyfriend Kurt. It was only one subway stop across the river from Manhattan, and Gene Rae said the neighborhood was cheap and eccentric and full of artists and other interesting people. So it proved to be: Williamsburg was an urban wilderness of warehouses and factories, desolate streets, and crumbling, asphalt-fronted row houses you could see had been pretty once, with grand cornices and intricate iron fences, but were now ratty little boxes. The streets were almost bare of the delights of nature and the amenities of civilization. There was the occasional ailanthus, some sycamores, a few linden trees with their starry spring blossoms, and the vast but barren park. There were two delis, a dubious natural foods store, a Polish restaurant and a Polish bakery, a café near the subway entrance, two stores catering to the neighborhood pigeon flyers, and rumors that an art gallery was planning to open on North Ninth. Someday. You wouldn’t know you were in New York City if the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan hadn’t glittered just across the river. (2004: 51–2, italics added)

This passage deserves closer scrutiny, for in many ways it is representative both of Florey’s style and of the ideology her style reflects. The narrator is a struggling photographer with a palindromic name, Emily Lime. As she describes the initial pull of Williamsburg, one might call the descriptive mode here (and elsewhere in the novel) “aggregative,” in that the texture of the neighborhood is evoked largely through lists of loosely associated elements—trees, shops and houses—from which the protagonist and reader are bound to construct something resembling a community. It is a technique also employed by Paul Auster in The Brooklyn Follies: “Now, as we took our walks up and down Seventh Avenue, passing the dry cleaner, the grocery store, the bakery, the beauty parlor, the newsstand, the coffee shop, she was assaulted by a plethora of different tongues. She heard Spanish and Korean. Russian and Chinese, Arabic and Greek. Japanese, German and French [. . .]” (2005: 229). Evidently, the presiding spirit in both passages is the Brooklyn Bard, Walt Whitman. Yet what is missing from the Florey extract is the avowedly federative impulse centered on the all-encompassing gaze of Whitman’s plural “I.” Instead, Florey offers an omniscient narrator who is, nonetheless, close to Emily’s point of view. Of course, this is in some ways a more accurate representation of the individual’s relationship with the mass urban environment than Whitman’s.

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For, as James Kyung-Jin Lee makes clear, one cannot hope to perceive the whole of the city; objects appear and disappear rapidly and hence a Whitmanian “urban vision of American Romantic correspondence” is untenable (2003: 145). Fragmentation is the texture of one’s urban experience, and it has two significant consequences. First, it persistently threatens alienation and dictates that one actively strives for a sense of community. Secondly, it encourages a concern with things, with the material and signifying elements which help to compose the environment. Such a concern is laudable when it ensures attention to the material reality of a place and to how that reality shapes the collective consciousness and class relations. But the attendant danger is that the concern with things becomes an obsession which leads not to a striving for society but rather to an atomization of the environment itself. Moreover, the need to locate significance in these things may inspire not a communal consciousness but an individual signifying consciousness which treats objects and other people as participants in a predevised symbolic system. There is evidence of such an incorporative strategy in the narrator’s thoughts on Emily’s Williamsburg. It is revealed through a lacuna in the passage which betrays a distinctly colonial mindset. Emily’s initial attraction to Williamsburg is its cheapness, as well as the “artists and other interesting people.” Yet the following phrase, “So it proved to be,” is followed by a lengthy description not of this supposed artistic community, but of the area’s desolation, of its almost total lack of “civilization.” Walt Whitman is careful to include poverty and degradation as part of the rich spectrum of human experience, but, notably, Florey’s portrait is distinctly lacking in human content, apart from desultory mention of the “neighborhood pigeon flyers” (a homage to Jane Schwartz’s Caught). What is presented here is a wilderness space cleared for bohemian settlement, such that “So it proved to be” refers forward to a mythical “someday” when Emily and Gene Rae’s predetermined vision of a culturally eclectic Williamsburg can be fulfilled. There is something familiar and mythical occurring here: a dream of a wild empty frontier space fit for colonization and civilization. The colon adumbrates the semantic elision in the text, reflecting the subjective vision of a cultural gap to be filled. In the following quotation one can see what the wilderness comes to be filled with—signs: They pass the sushi place, the Mexican restaurant, the video store, the Syrian deli, the Polish bakery (whose BREAD sign Emily has photographed a dozen times), the new baby shop that has a pair of studded black leather booties in the window, and Marta’s Beauty Salon, whose faded pink-and-green sign has probably not

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been retouched since 1966. They pass Mr. Suarez, with his Chihuahua, Eddie, in his pocket and a shopping basket full of soda cans. They pass the Pink Pony Thrift Shop with the WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND sign on the door. (2004: 2–3)

This is very much a city of words, and Solos is a novel which, despite its professed love of human community, operates systematically at the level of signifier. Emily is a photographer whose chief subject matter is signs: “it was words she wanted to photograph,” we are told (2004: 52). In addition, her friend Marcus moved to Williamsburg on the strength of its palindromic zip code, 11211 (2004: 8). For Emily, the neighborhood is structured around an aggregate of familiar signs, and her fear is that these will eventually be replaced by signs epitomizing the globalizing, homogenizing tendency associated with Manhattan, an example of which are the “LUXURY LOFTS” signs surrounding the villain Tab Hartwell’s apartment block (2004: 221). What Emily fails to acknowledge is that her framing of the community is predicated on a wholly subjective myth-symbol complex which reduces it to a chosen cache of signs, and that the changes Emily so fears—indicative of what Sharon Zukin calls “supergentrification,” the shift, broadly, from independent establishments to the proliferation of global brands such as Starbucks (2010: 9)—are themselves precipitated by the increasing affluence brought about by the arrival of the “original” boho immigrants. It is no coincidence that the signs Emily admires, and many of the telling details she records (the shopping basket full of soda cans, the booties in the window) are connected with shopping. The aestheticization of consumption connoted here is not, in fact, a million miles from the converted, Manhattanized apartments in Emily’s block which she finds “banal, boring, pretentious, untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg in particular” (2004: 23). In other words, she unwittingly apes the Manhattanized consumerist, capitalist ethic she purports to resist. Florey here resorts to a mode one might label “consumer picturesque”: diversity exists solely at the point of consumption, and the sometimes harsh economic realities of labor and production are elided. As Carrie Tirado Bramen notes, the facile celebration of ethnic food as metonym of cultural diversity is a recurring example of this elision, even in academic accounts of cosmopolitanism (2000: 6–7). Emily’s preoccupation with bakeries, cafés, and soda cans is indicative of the same mystifying impulses. The Brooklynites provides yet more evidence. It ends with “a simple list of some of the food and beverages consumed on this journey” (2007: 156–7), including sushi, Thai cuisine, pizza,

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and falafel. This is a taxonomy clearly designed to stand as a metonym of ethnic diversity. Though the consumer picturesque is a form of “cognitive mapping,” it is a form which makes no attempt to resist the commodification of experience, but rather provides the individual with a sense of local and global belonging explicitly through commodity consumption. Moreover, in Solos repeated employment of the historical present tense combines in reflective moments with the listing of signs to produce the novel’s characteristic wistful tone: Before the noon light bleaches everything out, she should get out on the streets, to photograph them for her new project, “Disappearing Brooklyn,” the memorialization of the neighborhood before it dies. Death is on the way, she knows. There will come a day when the Polish meat markets and the Hispanic delis will be replaced by fast food outlets. When bookshops won’t be called ksiegarnias, when trilingual signs like DRUGSTORE/FARMACIA/APTEKA will be taken down, and garish plastic DRUGMARTCO signs raised in their places. (2004: 200)

Suffused with a sense of imminent obsolescence, and an entropic turn toward Manhattan-style sameness, the mood is one of nostalgia for the present which, ironically, dehistoricizes the present. This pre-lapsarian present can only be believed in through a sense of historical ruptures rather than historical continuities or community as process; through strict denial of any previous “civilization” (as the first passage indicates); and through the careful selection of ethnic elements to create the desired effect of variety. And it is a mood directly attributable to the taxonomic impulses of the characters—that is, the obsessive recording of things about to be lost—and to the novel’s style. It is as if, in the romantic view of community, the neighborhood must be under threat to exist at all, and that its imminent disappearance is the draw. But as one character is perceptive enough to point out, “‘Things change, Em. They have to. And sometimes it’s okay’” (2004: 268). If, overall, it seems far from “okay” in Solos, it is because apparent authorial identification with the protagonist obstructs a more balanced perspective which might refuse unequivocally to come down on the side of local color. In the end, the novel fails to fulfill the promise offered by its palindromic title and the various palindromes within the narrative. Instead of seeing in neighborhood community a variety of mutually enriching pasts and presents, replacing nostalgia with a transitivity born of difference, the novel attempts to arrest change, to retain its absolutely particular version of variety. The palindrome becomes a conservative

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figure: whichever way you look at it, the neighborhood must remain the same, just as one has mythologized it.

The sexual picturesque—My Old Man Written by the author of New York magazine’s “Naked City” column, Amy Sohn’s My Old Man is part Jewish family saga, part sub-Rothian sexual outrage. Narrator Rachel Block, whose name connotes not only her occasional obtuseness when it comes to sexual and familial relationships but also her allegiance to her locality, gets a bar job in her parents’ neighborhood of Cobble Hill after a disastrous stint at rabbinical school. (Trying to offer spiritual solace to a dying man in hospital, she realizes that her rabbinical skills are severely limited when the man dies prematurely, spluttering out his last words: “You are the worst . . . rabbi . . . I ever . . . met” [2004: 6].) Back in Cobble Hill, Rachel lives in an apartment one floor below Liz Kaminsky, the neighborhood nymphomaniac and “Jewish Mae West” (2004: 21), who has a series of spectacular and raucous sexual liaisons in the room upstairs before embarking, to Rachel’s horror, on an affair with Rachel’s father, Richard. Rachel herself has a strange, slightly masochistic relationship with Hank Powell, a charismatic, arrogant screenwriter and, as the jacket blurb gleefully informs the reader, “a gentile!” Though he is capable of creating powerful “ethnic fireplug women” in his work, Rachel is disappointed to find him “on the arm of a shiksa” at their first encounter (2004: 30). As this brief synopsis suggests, My Old Man explores diversity and changing demographics through its comedy of (bad) manners and its exploration of the dilemmas faced by “holdovers” like Rachel, “that small breed of brownstone Brooklyn seventies kids who were born into a neighborhood that twenty years later happens to be experiencing a hipster influx” (2004: 13). Thus, the protagonist’s “quarterlife crisis” (2004: 18) is a synecdoche for a neighborhood and borough undergoing profound changes; her “job flux” (2004: 18) corresponds to changing uses of an “eclectically nonFordist” (Osman, 2011: 36) urban space and new professional opportunities in the “restaurants, yoga centers, craft shops, and clothing boutiques” (Sohn, 2004: 14) establishing themselves in Cobble Hill. And yet like so many Brooklyn novels, including Solos, Amy Sohn’s My Old Man is partly concerned with the fear of homogenization. In narrator Rachel Block’s neighborhood there is no Puerto Rican “posse left to be down with,” the Hispanic residents having “long ago sold their religious article shops and hightailed it back to the island” (2004: 14). Cobble Hill in the late 1990s is

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experiencing the familiar phenomena of gentrification, including an invasion of bourgeois, white, affluent “Ubermoms, on a tear to make mothering seem like some glorious grand achievement, when all you had to do to become one was lie on your back” (2004: 52). (These Ubermoms become the protagonists of Sohn’s later novels.) My Old Man is an unashamedly salacious novel and yet also a nostalgic one in which the consumer picturesque mode is reconfigured as “the sexual picturesque”: as rapid gentrification threatens to turn Cobble Hill into a predominantly white, middle-class professional neighborhood, sexual relationships with representatives of different ethnic groups provide a comforting fantasy of a diverse community through possession of the racially or ethnically inscribed body. Rachel and, in particular, Liz, practice their own form of flexible specialization in their choices of sexual partners and positions. As Rachel says of her friend: “One other cause Liz worked very hard for was minority men. The whole two months I’d known her, every guy I’d seen coming or going from her apartment was Arab, Latin, or black” (2004: 25). When we first encounter Liz, she has been sleeping with a Lebanese man—“Christian. The good kind, not the bad” (2004: 22). Judging by this flippant joke, there are limits to variety, despite her evident voraciousness. Her next partner is a black man, known as Gordon Thompson III: “They’d met at the Brooklyn Inn Bar. She’d been drinking alone when he galloped up on horseback with some buddies and parked his horse outside. He was a member of the Black Cowboy Federation of America, this group of unbelievably sexy black men who put on Stetsons and rode shiny horses throughout Brownstone Brooklyn at night to call attention to the history of cowboys of color” (2004: 25–6). However noble the Black Cowboy Federation of America’s cause might be, in this context it becomes a parody of the gentrification movement and its rhetoric of pioneering, blacks now being something of a novelty in the neighborhood. And when Gordon spots a racist advertisement featuring a blackface character on the wall of the bar, Liz calls it “adorable” (2004: 26), revealing her deeper ignorance and promptly putting an end to their relationship. In fact, Liz is only too ready to trade in stereotypes, to talk in terms of racial groupings rather than individuals: “She also enjoyed having her own asshole violated, and said the reason she loved black guys was because they were more open to doing so” (2004: 43). The relish with which the play of violation and consumption in Liz’s partnerships is depicted in all its variety strongly suggests that the sexual picturesque is a type of acquisitive consumerism, expressed in generalizing terms; thus, the romantic attempt to hold on to Cobble Hill’s variety is undermined by the commodification of the racial other’s body, by the consumption of various

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exotic “minority” figures we tend to hear only briefly through bedroom doors on the edges of the text. Those not involved with Liz are resigned to the street, like Gordon after their argument in the bar, and like the “Pacific Street Bum [. . .] an enormous bearded Middle Eastern guy with a huge Buddhalike belly who lay on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot across from my apartment”—a fallen millionaire now consigned to the margins of the neighborhood and the text, and whose description constitutes a curious mixture of ethnic signifiers (2004: 86). Our navigational aid through the story is, appropriately enough, Liz’s posterior. Just before the major twist in the tale is revealed, Rachel follows Liz as she maps out the various zones, gentrified and pre-gentrified, of Cobble Hill: When she was halfway down Pacific, I followed, keeping my eyes on her round perfect ass like it was a compass. She walked down Pacific to Hoyt past the community garden, which in a lifetime growing up in Cobble Hill I had never seen open. At Atlantic Avenue she turned right toward the Williamsburg Savings Bank. As we kept walking the neighborhood started to get blacker; the antique shops and women’s clothing stores, high-end furniture places and galleries started to shift into seedy bodegas and charity clothing shops”. (2004: 205)

Less cognitive mapping than somatic mapping, the ass as compass is the fetish at the heart of My Old Man, one associated with both consumption in terms of Liz’s sexual practices and expulsion in terms of bodily waste and the ethnic groupings gradually being driven out of the affluent parts of Cobble Hill. After following Liz for several blocks, Rachel discovers that her friend’s latest boyfriend is Richard Block, her father (2004: 2008). At this point, the novel’s conservatism reveals itself. The insatiable craving for sexual diversity, one discovers, goes beyond the pale when it encroaches on the protagonist’s family unit. As Rachel and Hank’s relationship develops—in the sense of becoming more sexually experimental and outrageous—in parallel with Liz and Richard’s, the sexual picturesque becomes a familial drama with an Electra complex at its heart (complete with penis envy, revealed in Rachel’s jealousy of Liz’s ability to “fuck like a guy” [2004: 298]). The culmination is a “postmodern primal” scene in which Rachel ejaculates downstairs while upstairs her father has an orgasm in Liz’s room. Hank, with relish, explains to her: “Your dad’s having sex with a surrogate you while you’re down here with a surrogate him! [. . .] It’s the truth that’s going to catapult you into adulthood” (2004: 250–1). Punning on “comingof-age,” this scene precipitates the rejection of paternal authority seen in other Brooklyn bildungsromans such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, culminating with Rachel’s dismissal of her father as a “two-timing lying asshole” and her smashing

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of a tennis ball into his eye (2004: 273). And yet if Richard and Liz’s relationship poses a threat to generational separation, and a threat to the clear separation between neighborhood imagined in familial terms and imagined in terms of friendship groupings and diverse sexual experiences, then this threat is rapidly defused and order restored. Liz ends the relationship (2004: 286) and enters therapy: her sexuality is thus pathologized and neutralized: “I’m trying really hard to process it right now with Dr Fromberg. She says I violate boundaries because I’m afraid no one will like me if I don’t relate to them sexually” (2004: 297). In other words, the sexual picturesque, taken too far, is an illness and boundaries must be maintained. Furthermore, Rachel’s father, having been rejected by Liz, tries to regain his wife’s affections and is duly rejected because she has found solace and support with “her groups” (2004: 292), the various micro-communities, or bunds (e.g., reading groups) in which she has participated throughout the story. At the end of the novel it is only the mother, in many respects a minor character, who holds out the possibility of mobile and tactical community groupings outside families and (hetero)sexual relationships. In contrast, any vestigial threat of paternal transgression is destroyed when Richard decides to become a rabbi, further cementing the parallels with his daughter and eliciting a cathartic rush of love from her (2004: 312). These parallels extend to the final scene, in which Rachel looks approvingly on the bar where she works, ready once again to face life. Everyone is ordering drinks and food; indeed, one character is nicknamed “Stoli Cran” after her drink of choice (2004: 318). Rachel regards herself as “a rabbi at Congregation Inebriation” (2004: 319) and the novel ends with the humming of the room, which sounds to her “like a chant” (2004: 320). My Old Man thus ends with a vision of community as group consumption elevated to the status of spiritual connection. It is a vision adorned with superficial markers of variety such as the “Chinese rice-picker hat” on the head of a customer (2004: 318), rather than diversity at the level of relationships. Ultimately My Old Man, in Rachel’s remarkably prescient words, has “too many boundaries and too few” (2004: 278): it entertains the possibility of radical regroupings through sexual promiscuity, but ends up reinscribing strict boundaries between private and public, familial and social. It fantasizes racial and ethnic diversity through the sexual picturesque mode, then dismisses it as merely a symptom of a deeper psychological malaise. (After Gordon the AfricanAmerican cowboy and Bashir the Lebanese Christian, Liz dates, in the novel’s most ridiculous contrivance, the decidedly WASPish Bill Clinton [2004: 313].) If at its heart, and despite its ribaldry, it has a romantic longing for face-to-face

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relationships unencumbered by the need to perform, and for “a sexuality that can exist in private” (2004: 278), it nonetheless fulfills that longing, as the final scene suggests, in public spaces where brand names are joyously consumed and difference is no longer a challenge, more an irrelevance.

Testing the limits of diversity—the Brooklyn motherhood novel If Solos explores, as its title suggests, the lives of bohemian early gentrifiers, largely unencumbered by domestic duties and the demands of children, and My Old Man the lives of the sexually promiscuous, then it is worth noting the existence of an increasingly prominent subgenre of Brooklyn gentrification fictions—what I call the novel of Brooklyn motherhood (and which shares many characteristics with “Mommy Lit” [Arosteguy, 2010: 409]). Recent examples include Thomas Rayfiel’s Parallel Play (2007), Amy Sohn’s Prospect Park West (2009) and Motherland (2012), and Amy Shearn’s The Mermaid of Brooklyn (2013). These are “matrifocal” texts: according to Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, a matrifocal text is one “in which a mother plays a role of cultural and social significance, and in which motherhood is thematically elaborated and valued, and structurally central to the plot” (2010: 3). Matrifocality does not necessarily entail a first-person narrative perspective, though that is a formal characteristic many of these novels share; nor does it celebrate unequivocally motherhood as an essential, inevitable, or inherently estimable state. Far from it: the matrifocal text aims “to unmask motherhood by unmasking the lived reality of mothering” (2010: 3), to expose the ideal of the “Good Mother” as an invidious cultural construct, and to stress that maternity, as a biological process, is distinct from motherhood, which is a socially produced category. Most of all, it treats the mother as a signifying subject: such a treatment “is critical to fighting against the dread and the devaluation of women” (Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, 1994: 2). Rayfiel, Sohn, and Shearn all use protagonists who are mothers to confront and interrogate expectations placed upon motherhood and to describe in sometimes excruciating detail the banal realities and “the intense anxiety” (Arosteguy, 2010: 409) of their sometimes extremely competitive lives. That they do so in well-heeled neighborhoods of Brooklyn (often Park Slope) is crucial: these matrifocal texts are also gentrification novels, and it is the intersecting modalities of motherhood and economics in rapidly transforming localities that is of particular interest. Put very simply, mothers can be seen as

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Figure 5.2 P.S. 321, Park Slope. Photograph by James Peacock.

constituting a particular kind of community around a unique set of symbolic cues – including those aspects of their lives consistently satirized in these novels, such as expensive buggies, playgrounds, and mom-dominated cafes – and with a particularly urgent set of social and economic priorities. Of these, choosing a school is the most anxiety-inducing because it is in the schoolyard and the classroom that issues of race, class, and economic status are most amplified. In the most extreme example, Karen Bryan Shapiro, one of the harassed mums in Prospect Park West, is prepared to spend up to $100,000 more on an apartment in the P.S. 321 school zone because “that was a small price to pay if it meant your kid went to a school that was 62 percent white instead of only 43” (2009: 14) (Figure 5.2). Karen, like all the other mother characters, desires the “authentic” experience crucial to the healthy development of her children. As this book has shown, there are multiple, conflicting authenticities. Motherhood tends to exacerbate the conflicts. Karen’s authenticity is in direct contrast, for example, to Rachel Ebdus’ in The Fortress of Solitude (examined in the next chapter). Because “[s]he had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan” (Lethem, 2003: 13), Rachel is determined to send her son to P.S. 38 so he can experience

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the “real,” black neighborhood. Karen’s authenticity, however, stems from an exaggeratedly, offensively gentrified sensibility—white, wealthy, middle-class, and resistant to the presence of black kids in the playground and schoolyard. It encompasses the Brooklyn of the Prospect Park Food Coop with its “pro-family policies” and ethical sourcing (Sohn, 2009: 14) but not the P.S. 107 zone and the less affluent areas toward Prospect Heights. Another of Sohn’s mothers, Lizzie O’ Donnell, who lives in Prospect Heights, has a less strict and clearly delineated sense of authenticity, partly because her son Mance (short for “emancipation”) has a black father. Though having a dual-heritage child forces her to question her own prejudices, Lizzie’s idea of being authentic partly involves agonistic or confrontational impulses, a need to “shake up all these settled Slopers” (2009: 39) by, for example, ostentatiously nursing her black baby in public and thereby reminding others of the racial diversity the rampant gentrification of the area has all but erased. As a further contrast, Jenny Lipkin, protagonist of The Mermaid of Brooklyn, adheres to a pastoral vision of Park Slope centered on Prospect Park, “our shared backyard, our landscaped Garden of Eden” (2013: 32). For her, authenticity consists in allowing her children to experience nature within the city, to turn Brooklyn into an idyll. Additionally, it means traditional face-toface communication, whoever that might involve: “I loved how, whenever I left my house, I was bound to meet some mother of small children, how there was this community of parents—a sometimes bitchy, competitive community, sure, but a real community” (2013: 35). With this passion for authenticity and community, it is notable that two of the first-person protagonists of motherhood novels—Eve in Parallel Play and Jenny in The Mermaid of Brooklyn—make money from producing copies of designer clothing and selling them to other Park Slope mothers. Whereas forgery in The Brooklyn Follies is egregious because it threatens to expose the play of real and abstract, authentic and fake that underpins community values, the mothers’ “fashion knockoffs” (Rayfiel, 2007: 35) are portrayed as benign because they supposedly challenge the avarice of the corporations producing designer brands by offering a “local” alternative that reinforces the sense of community between cash-strapped mothers who still want to look good. As these examples suggest, to be a mother in contemporary Brooklyn fictions is to worry about matters of authenticity and diversity and how these matters affect the health and happiness of mother and child. These novels not only explore the lived reality of motherhood but also employ the fretful mother as a metaphor for the limits of diversity and multiculturalism in established gentrified neighborhoods like Park Slope. The chapter so far has traced the

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development of gentrification novels from tales of pioneers on the frontier, faced with an inscrutable and malevolent other, to picturesque tales in which anxieties about difference are defused by means of pleasing images of variety, local color, and consumption. Like Sadie, one of the characters in Joanna Smith Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age (2009), the mothers in novels by Rayfiel, Sohn, and Shearn find themselves at a stage of late gentrification or commodification, at the mercy of post-Fordist capital and “the whole mommy industry” (Rakoff, 2009: 352) and at risk of losing their individuality, of becoming representative figures, members of target markets, or clichés. Thus, the Brooklyn motherhood novel represents another type of ironic coming-of-age tale when gentrification itself “grows up,” sheds its youthful exuberances and hipsterish affectations, and concentrates on more conventional concerns—making money, homebuilding, cementing families. The economic and social pressures on the mother to conform to the expectations of motherhood— to buy certain products, to live in certain locations, to send children to certain schools, and to socialize with mothers of similar socioeconomic status—can encourage a kind of inwardness and endogamy unsympathetic to an appreciation of cultural pluralism. Motherhood is thus where the limits of diversity are tested, and where ideas of flexible specialization, uneven development, and the communities such ideas imply find articulation in everyday concerns. In attempting to describe the everyday lived consequences of gentrification in Brooklyn, Judith N. DeSena argues that residents of Greenpoint in Brooklyn “arrive at a level of accommodation in which they are able to live together” despite class disparities (2012: 67). “Much accommodation,” she says, “takes place around children” (2012: 68) as gentry and working-class mothers swap information in the street about preschools as well as the various extracurricular activities in which their children are enrolled. Ostensibly, these interactions would appear to demonstrate that mothering can “transcend social class” (2012: 69). However, they are only ever fleeting and provisional, and for DeSena they exemplify a metaphor for urban living which is itself derived from parenting and is of huge significance for this chapter (and for the next). DeSena borrows the term “parallel play” from sociologist Daniel Monti: Kindergarten teachers call it “parallel play” [. . .] Parallel play operates in a similar way in cities where different and sometimes quarrelsome groups must stumble into a state of mutual regard [. . .] When one set of them puts together groups of their own or watches how other persons do it, this is how they learn about each other. It is also how they come to see the possibility and necessity

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of working together at least part of the time [. . .] Cities are really big parallel playpens. (Monti, 1999: 206)

The title of Rayfiel’s novel thus becomes a useful metaphor for the relationship between different groups in all the Brooklyn motherhood novels. For DeSena, parallel play—the way people “operate individually in unison” (2012: 66) in crowded city spaces—is neither static nor benign. While it might begin as a process of mutual observation and education, “a way that neighbors who are different from each other learn about each other, learn from each other, and become somewhat like each other” (2012: 66), the end result is “dominance and the eventual colonization of the neighborhood by the gentry class” (2012: 67). In other words, one way of “playing” eventually wins out because its players have greater economic power and thus more means to shape the community in accordance with their own interests. In Greenpoint, DeSena argues, parallel play means “segregation by social class” which “serves to perpetuate social inequality” (2012: 67). DeSena’s analysis shares with Neil Smith’s a pejorative view of gentrification not as accommodation, acculturation, or assimilation, but as something almost recreant, a disingenuous “tool of global capitalism” (DeSena, 2012: 67). Observation of the behavior of less affluent populations takes place only in order eventually to marginalize and destroy them, but not before the most aesthetically appealing aspects of their lives have been cherry picked to decorate new bars and cafes. As I have suggested, this is not a view I wholeheartedly endorse: the demographic and socioeconomic changes that have taken place in urban neighborhoods in the last four decades can hardly be denied, but there is little understanding to be gained from studies that demonize a particular group. And from a practical perspective, DeSena’s conclusions would clearly make an uncomfortable fit for the analysis of Brooklyn motherhood novels written almost exclusively from the perspective of the gentrifiers themselves. What interests me more about the metaphor of parallel play is its applicability to a study of urban communities as, in part, sets of uneasy juxtapositions and contiguities. It does reveal inequality and incompatibility, as theorists like DeSena claim. However, parallel play, precisely because it shows the limitations and falsehoods of a picturesque idea of urban transformation, at least forces characters in these novels to engage in selfexamination, to ask themselves questions about their relationships with others, the communities in which they participate (as well as those in which they feel they do not), and how they might reassess those relationships in order to address segregation and prejudice. This is not to say that mothers in Brooklyn fictions

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always “come of age,” find enlightenment, or learn to embrace cultural pluralism. Eve, the protagonist of Parallel Play, who begins the novel in a “closed-off little world” of anxious motherhood (Rayfiel, 2007: 4), distanced from her daughter and her husband and more enchanted with the unreality of the film crew in Prospect Park than her real life (2007: 16), at least ends up opening her heart to her family and to the diverse Brooklyn neighborhoods she walks through at the end of the novel (2007: 244). But many mothers finish their stories as selfabsorbed as they started, especially in Amy Sohn’s work. Whatever character arcs they describe, the stories invariably invoke common assumptions—about motherhood, about gentrification, about the lived experience of community—in order to reveal their ideological basis and challenge them. Most of all, nonthreatening variety of the picturesque kind is replaced by a heterogeneity that threatens to breach the delicate skin of the bubble the middle-class mothers have built around them. Given the sociological metaphor of parallel play, it is no surprise that the threat often manifests itself in playgrounds and schools. In The Mermaid of Brooklyn, for example, when one of the neighborhood children breaks her arm in the local playground, Jenny remarks on the presence of boys from the poorer side of the neighborhood: “It was one of those unspoken, awful things about life in the city. The boys were obviously from the other side of the park, where the playgrounds were scruffier and the dogs meaner and the kids louder and significantly less white, and we knew it and they knew it, and we would never have admitted to noticing, but then when one of the girls fell, we [. . .] blamed them, as if they themselves had imported free-floating violence over from the projects, like a flu virus” (2013: 40). In Motherland, Karen laments the fact that, because of an unexpected school rezoning, “most of [her son] Darby’s classmates had turned out to be black children of single mothers” (Sohn, 2012: 22). Prospect Park West connects similar anxieties with the ethics of consumerism. When the troubled film actress Melora Leigh impulsively steals a wallet while shopping in the Food Coop (the perfect example of a local institution where global concerns are manifested at the level of commodity, and where a global conscience is affordable only at a certain level of economic comfort), it is the “broad-shouldered Rasta” standing nearby who automatically gets the blame (Sohn, 2009: 35). Chapter 6 explores race in more detail, but what is evident from these examples is that in motherhood novels, the picturesque mode is largely eschewed and the frontiers of class and race that characterized early gentrification novels are reinscribed. Liberal multiculturalism is shown to be at best tentative and brittle, at worst impossible when gentrification’s economic stratifications make difference so

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visible and when the exigencies of child-rearing make broader perspectives so difficult. In formal terms, the first-person perspectives of Rayfiel and Shearn allow the reader privileged access to the mothers’ concerns while reinforcing the feeling of entrapment in an alienated consciousness. Sohn’s motherhood novels have third-person chapters written from the point of view of the major characters, interspersed with italicized interchapters focusing on minor neighborhood figures such as Helene Buzzi, the long-term Park Slope resident who has taken to stealing expensive strollers out of righteous anger at the ubermoms’ selfish behavior and their lack of “consciousness of a greater society” (2013: 83). On the one hand, these interpolations provide, as Sohn has said in interview, “a richer tone to the neighborhood” by giving voice to the marginalized, including ethnic minorities and working-class characters. On the other hand, the separation of chapters and the employment of different fonts serve to reinforce boundaries, even if the lives of the marginal figures have a tangential influence on the main characters’ stories. Ultimately, all these Brooklyn motherhood novels, written by white writers with white protagonists, “end up encouraging complicity with dominant ideologies of motherhood” (Arosteguy, 2009: 411) which take the white, affluent, middle-class mother in a gentrified neighborhood as normative. They depict resistance to the expectations of “new momism” (Arosteguy, 2009: 412) only to remove it by narrative’s end.

Historicizing gentrification—A Fortunate Age The last novel under scrutiny is Joanna Smith Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age. According to Elizabeth Gumport, Rakoff is one of the “third generation of gentrification novelists” who tend to be “savvy postgrads accustomed to anthropologizing their friends and attuned to the possibility of ironizing New Yorker’s compulsive quest for authenticity, rather than competing in the contest themselves” (Gumport 2009). On the surface, Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age (2009) shares many of the tropes found in other novels of Brooklyn gentrification and to subscribe to many of the same values. Following the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates from the dotcom boom of the 1990s, through 9/11 and onto the global financial collapse, it centers, like Solos, on Williamsburg. Like a fictional version of Sharon Zukin’s Naked City, Rakoff uses the neighborhood as a case study for different stages of urban change. First, in the early 1990s, there are the stirrings of hipster migration, spurred on by the media: “The Times and the Voice and Time Out and New York

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had all declared Lil and Tuck’s neighborhood—a section of Williamsburg east of the BQE and generally referred to as Graham Avenue, for the L stop that serviced it—the next spot for artists and writers, which meant, of course, that it would really be the next spot for whoever could afford the newly inflated rents and newly opened bistros” (2009: 17). At this stage, as Lil and Tuck’s friend Beth suggests, the area might still be designated “gritty,” in that it strikes her as “bleak: low, off-kilter houses covered in vinyl or roofing tile, with no sign of people living behind their facades but the glare of the television” (2009: 25). Toward the end of the century, the bleakness is all but gone. Gentrification has reached “warp speed” as “Latino families” are pushed out and developers add “granite counters and steel appliances” to every new apartment (2009: 121). Williamsburg is now overrun by affluent young professionals, so that when Emily and Sadie, two more members of “the group” (2009: 386), meet on Bedford Avenue, it seems that everyone is “younger and in pursuit of a level of hipness that made Emily feel deeply anxious” (2009: 269). Hipness has become a commodity or brand like the “Pumas, Nikes, Adidas” on their feet (2009: 269); they have become merely “consumers of culture” (2009: 273). Inevitably, supergentrification takes over. Tuck’s magazine, Boom Time, is bought up by a conglomerate (2009: 63) and the same happens to Dave and Curtis’ independent record label (2009: 249). Hipsters are superseded by “hedge fund managers and suchlike [. . .] trust-fund kids and lawyers,” whimsical independent coffee houses by Starbucks (2009: 354). As global brands usurp supposedly local institutions, Sadie’s friend Caitlin can declare, despite her evident pretensions, that “[i]t used to be a real neighborhood. Everyone was an artist” (2009: 354), and harbor no fear of contradiction. This much is familiar. So too is the disparagement of contemporary motherhood, “the mommy group culture” (2009: 351) that lacks solidarity or a sense of community because of selfish protectionist instincts exaggerated by economic imperatives, the need to buy “a four-hundred-dollar diaper bag” (2009: 352). And so is the obsession with authenticity, which here manifests itself in a fervent desire on the part of every character to avoid becoming clichéd. Williamsburg, for example, makes Sadie “feel conscious of being a type—all these girls, these women, dressed just like she, wandering the streets carrying yoga mats” (2009: 121). Another member of “the group,” Dave, regards his father’s love of wine as “clichéd” (2009: 1972). Crippled by the desire for authenticity, the group succumbs to what Beth early on identifies as a syndrome typical of academics: “to view even the most harmless phrases as dangerous clichés” (2009: 36). What the members of the group fail to realize is that a cliché’s egregiousness is not necessarily derived from its hand-me-down nature: language and

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behaviors are, after all, learned from others and therefore a cliché at least implies empathy, community, and, to recapitulate Charles Taylor’s phrase, “horizons of significance.” The real problem emerges when a cliché is regarded as timeless and repeated without regard for shifting social and economic contexts. It is precisely the historical span of A Fortunate Age that makes it a more insightful critique and satire of gentrification than the other novels in this chapter. By following its close-knit group of characters through various stages of urban change over a period of at least a decade, it is able to demonstrate that the clichés so feared by these characters are themselves produced by economics and subject to historical change, and that the characters’ attitudes to these clichés are likewise historicized. To bemoan the absorption of small, independent firms into global corporations is to fall prey to yet another cliché—the nostalgia for a better, golden age, evoked in Caitlin’s surname, “Gold-Green.” Moreover, the broader historical sweep allows Rakoff room to satirize “the creation of micro-epochs [. . .] which are as fiercely contested as the boundaries of certain neighborhoods” (Gumport 2009). Many of the characters succumb to the temptation to create such epochs. Caitlin, for example, tells Sadie that she has lived in her Brooklyn apartment “about a year. Which makes us old-timers in the neighborhood” (2009: 121). When gentrification moves so rapidly, authenticity is conferred upon those who entered the neighborhood first, even if precedence is measured only in months or weeks. Caitlin thinks small in temporal terms as well as in spatial terms; her vision of authentic urban experience refuses to understand the supplementarity of local and global and the larger historical movements behind her present situation. Characters in other gentrification novels think small in spatial terms—Emily Lime and Rachel Block among them—but the restricted timescales of these novels, the tendency not to view their respective moments as historical, make it harder to disentangle the relationships of sympathy between authors and protagonists and thus to take a more objective view on their limited perspectives. Elizabeth Gumport, in her desire to conduct a comprehensive critique of contemporary Brooklyn gentrification stories, disregards this important aspect of Rakoff ’s contribution. Gumport argues: “Ultimately, the novel fails to explore class and the way young men and women form and are formed by the city’s economic realities. It is simply a portrait of college graduates who are, for the most part, privileged enough to ignore them” (Gumport, 2009). Necessarily, then, her interpretation of the title is harsh: “Dave’s grandmother leaves him money he uses to buy a place in Boerum Hill and Sadie inherits a Lower East Side apartment from her great-aunt [. . .] A fortunate age apparently is whatever age

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you are when an elderly relative dies and leaves you property” (Gumport, 2009). However, like A Meaningful Life, the title is best regarded as nuanced and ironic. “Fortune” denotes both wealth and luck, of course, but the connection applies not only to Dave and Sadie’s inheritances: it subtly undermines a strict capitalist realist assumption of meritocratic success. Moreover, the noun “age” satirizes the formation of mini-epochs and thus the tendencies of the characters myopically to narrow their temporal perspectives in order to immerse themselves in their self-absorbed present. In Sadie’s reflections toward the end of the novel lies a creeping realization that a view of life as discrete ages and epochs must accede to a view of life as more chaotic, more provisional, more demanding of dialectical revision and reassessment—in short, more historical: “her life—contrary to her adolescent expectations—had been a series of accumulated moments, of knowing bits and pieces at different times and hoping they would add up to some knowledge that would be useful to her, and feeling different conflicting things” (2009: 362). As she and her companions struggle to find the cemetery where her friend Lily’s funeral is to take place, the suburban landscape expands upon her sentiments: “they [. . .] found themselves on a bare stretch of asphalt, fields of new grass extending as far as they could see on either side of them. This area must have been clear-cut by the developers, Sadie thought, who’d run out of money. Or tenants. [. . .] The road here stretched endlessly, infinitely into the distance, a thread of inky black, with the lush sheen of new tar” (2009: 397). Though it might be considered clichéd (a cardinal sin, as we know), the image of the road stretching into the distance and symbolizing the unknown future is vital for emphasizing continuities and forcing characters to think historically. The “fields of new grass,” far from suggesting a strain of pastoralism, are directly linked to economic decline—to evicted tenants or failed property developments—and thus death and life, fortune and misfortune, are shown to be supplementary. Just as Sadie comes to realize that her experience is characterized, to a large extent, by contradiction, so the landscape encapsulates dialectical tension. There is a subtle pun in operation here, too: the failure of property “development” implies the undermining of a singular trajectory of aspirational character growth or “development,” reminding Sadie that her life is indissolubly connected to others beyond “the group” and that events proceed in fits and starts rather than clearly demarcated ages. The contemporary gentrification novels in this chapter often fail to exercise the deviant mode of looking portrayed in Leaving Brooklyn, preferring a selective spatial and temporal myopia. Although space disallows a detailed discussion of

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9/11, the attractions of a retreat into local color should be obvious. In the face of malevolent grand narratives, such a retreat is easier and preferable to a head-on confrontation with the bigger issues. Ironically, the reduction of the community into signifying details, sexual partners, or playgroups is in its own way a destructive act. It is akin to looking too closely at a canvas, deliberately aiming to miss the whole picture. As Theo Perowne says in another post-9/11 novel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, “the bigger you think, the crappier it looks” (2005: 34). A novel like Solos thinks small and yet for a contemporary reader is perhaps still haunted by the specter of bigger questions, just as Brooklyn is still overlooked by “the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan” (Florey, 2004: 52). Moments like the ones described above in A Fortunate Age indicate a wider, more complex vision beyond the narrow clichés and consensus of small, privileged groups. It is not quite “the fullness of the scene” but at least the budding of awareness that any local social scene is predicated on global economic concerns. And yet Rakoff ’s novel shies away from one vital factor in community formation and gentrification more than Solos and much more than My Old Man and the motherhood novels, which, albeit simplistically, recognize it as a “problem” for certain characters. That factor is race, and the following chapter examines novels which place it at the heart of the action.

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Still keeping it real—race and urban transformations Suleiman Osman explains that ethnicity was one of the many “spatial categories” that helped residents negotiate Brooklyn’s messy landscape during the twentieth century (2011: 40). With neighborhood boundaries lacking clear definition, ethnic identity was both a means of orientation and a determinant of historical authenticity. Prior to World War II, and thus before gentrification, “Brownstone Brooklyn’s numerous ethnic enclaves allowed multiple groups to seek historic and ethnic authenticity in the same urban space. Suburban-raised white ethnics, second-generation Latinos, and middle-class African Americans could all look toward the same Brownstone Brooklyn brownstones as an imagined site of ethnogenesis” (Osman, 2011: 40). With the Second Great Migration of AfricanAmericans from the south during and after World War II, areas such as BedfordStuyvesant saw a huge increase in the black population (from 24 percent in 1940 to 66 percent in 1957). Poorer migrants found themselves squeezed into tenements and subdivided brownstones because discrimination prevented them from moving elsewhere, and “a racialized and highly segregated ghetto took form.” So in postwar Brooklyn, according to Osman, “race began to replace ethnicity as a spatial category by which Brooklynites oriented themselves” (2011: 43). In earlier fictions of gentrification like A Meaningful Life, as the previous chapter argued, this spatial categorization is explicitly acknowledged. At the end of that chapter I observed that later gentrification novels are inclined to be coy about race, either to treat it as a “problem” or as a picturesque sexual fantasy, or in some cases to elide it completely. In contrast, Spike Lee’s impassioned rant about gentrification from February 2014 foregrounds the racial aspects of urban renewal. Denouncing “Christopher

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Columbus Syndrome,” the mistaken belief that a neighborhood has been “discovered” when white people move in, he says that it has taken “an influx of white New Yorkers [. . .] for the facilities to get better” and that “reverse migration” is now taking place. Black people, he claims, are seeing their traditional lifestyles marginalized, are being priced out of the city, and are moving down south or, in some cases, back to Puerto Rico (Michael and Bramley, 2014). Why, he asks, have schools and policing improved only since whites have settled in areas like Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy? And why is wealth creation among African-Americans cited as a benefit of gentrification when it applies to such a small minority? Liam Kennedy, while acknowledging that discussions of race have been “focused in urban centres in the last twenty years, and more specifically within the postindustrial ghetto” (2000: 2), also recognizes that race must be considered integral to “discourses of regeneration.” He continues: “The reenchantment with urban cores signified by gentrification and redevelopment of central cities posits an urbanism—of lifestyles in liveable spaces—which is thoroughly, if rarely explicitly, racialised. This revalorisation of urban cultural capital promotes an ersatz celebration of urbanity as a highly regulated and commodified experience of community” (2000: 5). Wrapped up in discourses of “neotraditionalism, environmentalism and communitarianism,” the goal of producing “safe” or “liveable” urban spaces compounds “nostalgia, insecurity and paranoia in the relations between race and space” (2000: 5). Such insecurity and paranoia characterizes Gabriel Cohen’s Boombox (2007): a response to the idealism of Mayor Dinkins’ “urban mosaic” (2007: 10), the story unfolds in a racially diverse, gentrified Boerum Hill street only a block away from the Wysocki projects, and hence a “fringe neighbourhood” (2007: 45). Jamel Wilson’s boombox, blasting out rap music, tests the limits of his neighbors’ tolerance, and the resulting escalation of complaints and anger leads to a questioning of whether Jamel’s behavior and the reactions of the other residents constitute “a racial thing” (2007: 170) or simply a collective “failure of imagination” (2007: 163). One also sees something of these discourses as they are lived out in Amy Sohn’s fiction. They are revealed in the euphemistic expression of anxieties about which are the “best” neighborhood schools, for example. In Sohn’s Prospect Park West it is Lizzie O’Donnell who displays the most acute awareness of the racial transformations and segregations attendant on Brooklyn’s gentrification. It is she who comments on Prospect Heights’ rapid swing from a majority black to a majority white population since the 1960s (2009: 36) and she who notices everyday instances of racism—the depictions of exaggeratedly black facial features on the wanted posters (2009: 37); the expressions of shock when

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she nurses her mixed-race baby in public (2009: 44). As the wife of a black man, she is more attuned than the other characters to the subtle iterations of prejudice, to the normative expectations of the white bourgeoisie around her, and to her own racist assumptions. For this reason, Sohn employs Lizzie as a vehicle for contravening any number of middle-class behavioral rules: racial, sexual, parental. As she breastfeeds Mance in the park, kisses Rebecca Rose, and attends clandestine swingers parties, Lizzie repeatedly exposes the hypocrisies of Park Slope life and shows that a specific discourse of community authenticity— finding “a great place to bring up your kids”—depends on scission, exclusion, and neuroses about perceived outsiders (the working class, ethnic minorities). Though she is to be applauded for attempting to tackle, in both My Old Man and Prospect Park West, a vital aspect of gentrification that is frequently treated only with extreme delicacy in Brooklyn mommy lit, Sohn’s decision to use Lizzie as a catch-all transgressive figure is problematic. There is in these stories some testing of the limits of cultural pluralism, some soul-searching about the tolerance of liberal New Yorker mothers like Lizzie, but there are definite limits on their self-consciousness, and a sense that from within the dominant culture they are not fully able to recognize themselves as interpellated subjects or as discontinuous individuals in supplementary relation to those against which they define themselves. After all, Lizzie, who is white, is invested with “[t]he power of looking” and naming in Prospect Park West (Morrison, 1992: 73). We know her whiteness mainly through her ambivalence toward blackness; it is never explicitly defined, and is thus, in Toni Morrison’s famous formulation, “an unmarked racial category” (qtd. in Aanerud, 1997: 37). Moreover, her portrayal as a rebellious figure relies first on the assumption that her actions are deviations from a norm—of whiteness, heterosexuality, gentrified politesse, and “good” motherhood—and secondly on analogy, whereby race and sexuality are treated as equivalent, in differential relation to the norm (a different position from intersectionality, which looks at material structural connections between, say, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity). As Miranda Joseph says, analogy is problematic because it presumes the “internal continuity and external discreteness” of the things being compared (2002: 158). In the specific case of Lizzie O’ Donnell, race relations and sexuality are similar markers of her difference from other Park Slope mothers, but the implied analogy separates them even as it suggests similarities, and “elides their connections with each other” (Joseph, 2002: 157). Stripped of their concrete structural connections, made internally homogeneous, these categories cease to be a genuine challenge to the social formations of gentrification: instead, they serve to naturalize and legitimate those formations.

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Miranda Joseph’s critique of analogy is extensive, encompassing sexuality and race, but also analogies between different historical moments, different localities, and different nations. Underlying all of these analogies is the same assumption of a recognizable and exploitable particularity crucial to flexible specialization: “In the articulation of a proliferating series of comparable—analogous—social formations, each location is rendered not only independent of historical processes but also of its present interactions with other locations.” This paves the way for each social formation to be regarded “as a site of production and consumption” (2002: 156). Joseph’s work, with its commitment to the exploration of community formations in supplementary relation to capital, has connections with James Kyung-Jin Lee’s 2004 book Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (which also shares much with Liam Kennedy’s work). If Lee argues that the 1980s was “a particular high point of a particular kind of multiculturalism into which cultural workers located their work,” he also argues that part of the reason for this was, in fact, a profound disjunction between “idea and experience, promise and nightmare” (2004: xix). In other words, the dream of a flowering multiculturalism was not matched by the reality. Even as inner cities were hailed as the spaces where social transformation could take place, they were being abandoned by successive neoconservative administrations. What links Lee to Joseph, who is writing about some of the outcomes of the ideologies and policies Lee analyzes, but on a global scale, is attention to the political economy and its effect on communities and discursive practices of race, ethnicity, and class. The Reaganite free market ideology Lee critiques promises fluidity and diverse urban communities premised on aspiration and equal opportunities for economic success among different groups, but leads to “racial realignment” and “racial anxiety” (Lee, 2004: xx) of the type seen in discussions of gentrification. Thus, Lee, like Joseph, is interested in the way ideas of tolerance and community feed into and legitimate social hierarchies. In this chapter, I look at three authors who take racial identity, race relations, and racial anxiety as central themes, and who in differing ways confront the perception of blackness as “a site of production and consumption.” Two of the texts—Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) and Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down (2007)—examine race in the context of gentrification, and the others—Sister Souljah’s bestselling “street lit” novels The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) and Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008)—take place in the Brooklyn projects, with occasional, reluctant trips to other boroughs or to the suburbs. In all of these texts, both “production” and “consumption” must be understood in pluralistic terms and in accordance with the play of materiality

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and abstraction which has underpinned the arguments made throughout this study. A sense of belonging to a racially defined community depends not only on the consumption of certain commodities but also on the production and consumption of subcultural behaviors and styles which are in turn commodified and, in some cases, co-opted by the dominant but anxious white community. (This co-option is the subject of Greg Tate’s Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture [2003] and Michael F. Szalay’s Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party [2012].) Moreover, these commodities, in the discontinuous chain of abstraction, become associated with authenticity or “keeping it real.” This is most explicitly expressed, as we shall see, by Winter Santiaga, protagonist of The Coldest Winter Ever, with her evocation of “Brooklyn-style.” However, drawing on the work of Miranda Joseph and on previous ideas in this book, I would suggest that “realness” is the problem because it operates by analogy and is ideologically inscribed. To talk in terms of black realness or authenticity is to perform a double trick of reification: it is to fetishize the “gritty” and appropriate its surface signifiers for white, middle-class culture (Zukin, 2010: 20) and in so doing to consign blackness to a realm where social progress is inhibited precisely because it is regarded as the unassailable reality of the situation, an essential characteristic. Following Lindon Barrett, one might call this “seeing double.” Though the phrase “implies a state of impaired, unreliable, or faulty perception,” it is, paradoxically, absolutely accurate in describing the way race is bound up in notions of value (Barrett, 1999: 1). Like Miranda Joseph, Barrett employs a deconstructive approach in his analysis of race and value in American culture. Value, as “a configuration of privilege” (1999: 1), is ascribed to the dominant white culture, but this culture exists in supplementary relation to the blackness it marginalizes (and thus simultaneously valorizes). Thus, value, like community and like commodity, “struggles to appear a hypostasized, singular, fixed, centered phenomenon” (Barrett, 1999: 12) but is, in fact, “fundamentally relational” (1999: 17). Barrett looks at writing by Billie Holiday and novelist Ann Petry and shows how an “African American expressive presence” (1999: 3) emerges most vividly when policed boundaries between dominant and marginal cultures—codified in binaries between, for example, “the academy” and “the street,” “civic” and “criminal”—are transgressed and their interdependence and relational value revealed. Complex negotiations of value and authenticity, and the blurring of boundaries formerly seen as clearly delineated, are carried out in the novels discussed in this chapter. They can be seen in The Fortress of Solitude in Dylan

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Ebdus’ coveting of his friend Mingus’ signifiers of urban acceptability (graffiti and hip-hop) and the tragedy of Mingus’ eventual imprisonment. They are seen in the desperate efforts of Man Gone Down’s protagonist to find money to pay his rent and his children’s school fees and in his ruminations on education, class, race, and urban regeneration. The Coldest Winter Ever traces protagonist Winter Santiaga’s emergent understanding of the global, political forces that shape her desired “Brooklyn style,” and the prequel Midnight: a Gangster Love Story negotiates conflicting notions of blackness along transnational lines, albeit in a severely circumscribed way. The novels in this chapter ask important questions about the supposed reality of an integrated Brooklyn and an integrated America, test the limitations of seeing community in terms of race understood as a social or political category or as a marker of value, and thus explore the flexibility and even viability of race as a criterion for community.

Mixed media—graffiti and coming of age in The Fortress of Solitude The Fortress of Solitude is yet another Brooklyn coming-of-age story. What distinguishes it is the explicit parallel between protagonist Dylan Ebdus’ maturation and the highly ambiguous “coming-of-age” of his neighborhood: as Dylan grows up, Gowanus is gentrified and transformed into Boerum Hill. Lethem’s approach in this novel is to tackle questions of gentrification, race, and community by counterposing three distinct forms of writing: graffiti tagging, properly known as “writing” (Rahn, 2002: 5) and the dominant influence over Dylan and his friend Mingus Rude’s youth; music journalism (Dylan’s eventual career); and the novel which includes both—Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. To these three forms one can add the comics that lend the novel its title (the Fortress of Solitude being Superman’s hideaway) and to which Dylan is first exposed at the house of Isabel Vendle, the woman depicted as the prime mover of Gowanus’ gentrification (2003: 39–41). Studying the complex relationships between these forms of writing allows us to see how Dylan maps and negotiates precious childhood experiences in adulthood and at least attempts, in deeply ambiguous ways, to move on from them. Of all these symbolic cues, it is graffiti writing that exerts the strongest emotional pull on Dylan and thus poses the greatest obstacle to his maturation and his attempts to write his youth out of his system. Moreover, it is the form most closely associated with race, and thus it distils the anxieties Dylan feels about black

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authenticity and its figuration in the pre-gentrification history of Gowanus. Graffiti’s importance is revealed in the title of the first part: “Underberg’s” is the name of the shop “on the other side of Flatbush [. . .] a region of lack” (2003: 186) where the precious Garvey Formula XT-70 Violet industrial ink can be purchased, and where neophyte taggers like Dylan can spot real writers. And the fact that the cover of the 2005 Faber edition is adorned with tags surrounding the name of the novel and its author suggests that there is a complex relationship between literary authorship and the more subterranean power of the name in graffiti writing. Graffiti, more than the other cultural phenomena in Fortress, seems to promise the “authentic” (i.e., black) experience bohemian types like Dylan so crave. Yet so often they end up not immersed in that experience, but only in anxious “proximity” to it (Greenwald, 2010)—trapped in a form of parallel play. Fortress, like Dylan’s “Liner Note” on the music of Mingus’ father, Barrett Rude, is an attempt to remediate childhood experience by extensively employing ekphrasis—commonly defined as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan, 1993: 7) but applicable to the narrativizaton of other art forms—in its fascination with graffiti, in particular. But if one accepts Bolter and Grusin’s analysis of remediation—that the more a medium claims to offer “a more immediate or authentic experience” than its predecessors (2000: 19), the more it reveals its own status as representational—then these attempts cannot help but can be fraught with paradox. Even as they describe in gorgeous detail the intense visual experiences of 1970s Brooklyn, they highlight yet again the inescapability of language (a constant worry in Lethem’s work). Moreover, remediation’s play of immediacy and opacity means that no matter how sincere an engagement with the past acts of remediation might appear to be, they are always exposed as means of hiding in plain sight—a simultaneous celebration and displacement of the past. In Dylan’s case this is intimately bound up in guilt over his rejection of Mingus and the attendant racial anxiety he feels—“the guilt of Dylan’s whiteness” (2003: 86)—an anxiety also intrinsic to gentrification. Thus, remediation is another way of articulating (but also obscuring) the traumatic loss at the heart of Lethem’s writing, and it is racially inflected throughout this novel. Indeed, one of the most pressing questions arising from Lethem’s treatment of Dylan and Mingus, and the forms of writing with which they are respectively associated, is whether the author “risks being an apologist for a white America that let Dylan successfully slip out of a bad upbringing but tightened its nets for Mingus and placed him in jail” (Picone, 2004: 29). From the outset, Dylan’s Brooklyn is characterized by two recurring motifs, color and spatial division, which anticipate the racial anxieties at the heart of the

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novel. The very first image positively pulses with color: “Like a match struck in a darkened room: / Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July” (2003: 3). Their “sky-pink hair streaming” behind them in “the orange-pink summer dusk” (2003: 3), these new arrivals to the predominantly black neighborhood play in front of Dylan, himself a part of the white bohemian influx, and some slightly bewildered Puerto Rican men, remnants of the old Gowanus soon to be transformed. Dreamy and literally rose-tinted, the opening scene of the novel, which finishes bathetically with the line “white people were returning to Dean Street. A few” (2003: 4), carries all of the ironies and ambiguities associated with gentrification and nostalgia. For the rollerskating girls may be “the new thing, spotlit to start the show” (2003: 4), but they also signify a return, a looking back to an earlier time when white people did indeed populate Dean Street. Rather than an idyllic vision of a childhood utopian community, then, the moment ostensibly being romanticized in technicolor reminds us of nothing more than the perpetuity of change. As Samuel Cohen says, Fortress “[sees] the past as ever-changing” (2009: 181) so that the nostalgic tone of the opening scene immediately undermines itself: if nostalgia attempts to freeze a utopian past moment, the moment itself always seems to evade capture. Soon after the girls’ appearance, when Dylan’s mother Rachel encourages him to play out front with Marilla, an older black girl, Dylan recognizes the “setup,” the way his mother is “working the block,” trying idealistically to encourage interracial friendships (2003: 5). By the simple expedient of a piece of chalk, Marilla shows Dylan how untenable the friendship is, and how the spatial demarcations of childhood gaming index racial divisions in wider society: “Marilla had a hoop and some chalk. The walk in front of Marilla’s gate—her share of the irregular slate path was her zone—marked. This was Dylan’s first knowledge of the system that organized the space of the block. He would never step into Marilla’s house, though he didn’t know that now. The slate was her parlor” (2003: 5). Time and time again in “Underberg” one sees these spatial, racial, and cultural divisions redrawn, often literally. So what Dylan calls the “second world” of the block (the first being his troubled home life) is “an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses—pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath— those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones” (2003: 13). The implication is clear: the

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Figure 6.1 Wildstyle graffiti, Clinton Hill. Photograph by James Peacock.

zones of childhood space, just like the factitious demarcations of urban space undergoing gentrification, are indexes of discrete communities, versions of the mini-utopias into which Lethem’s characters are prone to shutting themselves. As Dylan, “one of three white children in the whole school” (2003: 24), progresses through P.S. 38, the divisions are only exacerbated and more explicitly racialized. In fifth grade, for example: “The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind. Through the Cyclone fence someone had brushed the word FLAMBOYAN in white paint on the stone wall” (2003: 63) (Figure 6.1). “FLAMBOYAN” signals the graffiti that will become increasingly important to Dylan’s Brooklyn identity, and it also connotes the “exploding bomb of possibilities” (2003: 56) that is Mingus Rude, whom Dylan meets for the first time in fifth grade. It is almost inevitable that Dylan becomes immersed in graffiti culture after meeting Mingus because he already interprets his world in visual terms, as a drawn environment that needs in some way to be claimed by him and the subcultures to which he aspires. But more than this, “Underberg” insists on seeing and describing people pictorially. In seventh grade Dylan sees “[b]odies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was

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scribbling in flesh” (2003: 118). Mingus’ limping gait is “a cartoon squiggle” (2003: 124); the groups that meet at Underberg’s to boost paints are “like a form of human scribbling” (2003: 188). The eyes of Robert Woolfolk, the ghetto kid who routinely menaces Dylan, have “that same scribbled quality” (2003: 64). Significantly, it tends to be the black, or in Mingus’ case dual heritage, characters who are presented in these terms, showing how Dylan, craving the “real” of black identity, simultaneously recognizes its unreality from the outside, its represented or caricatured quality. When Dylan goes to college and describes himself as “a cartoon of Mingus,” he is referring only to his fake Brooklyn schtick, his pretense at blackness, and his “self-loathing” (2003: 389). In graffiti terms, he’s still a “toy,” not a writer (having never had a tag of his own), just as Arthur Lomb, the other white kid with whom Dylan shares a love of comic books and an outsider’s yearning, turns himself into “a Mingus-puppet” (2003: 190). There are a number of reasons why these images are both curious and problematic. First, it is clear that by rendering each literary character as “character,” in the sense of drawn figure, the narrator is attempting the imbrication of style and selfhood essential to the graffiti tag and, as Douglas Wolk argues, equally essential to the expressiveness of “art comics” (2007: 30). Secondly, the tendency to describe people and places as graffiti or cartoons, the incessant meshing of word and image, is symptomatic of a narrative expressly about the desire to remediate childhood experience which is itself always-already remediated. For if one accepts that “Underberg,” though written in the third person, is largely from Dylan’s perspective, one also has to acknowledge the chronological displacement at work. A story of Dylan’s youthful discovery of graffiti, comics, and abstract visual art is told in terms he could not possibly have fully understood at the time of his discovery; they are retroactively ascribed, seen through the distorting prism of adulthood (as all memories are, of course). Conversely, this speaks of an adult life “overwhelmed” by childhood obsessions (2003: 319). On the one hand, such a move militates against nostalgia; it shows that the authenticity Dylan craves in Dean Street, the elusive “real,” was never there, or was at least always a construction. On the other hand, it implies a continuing resistance to the realities of racial separation and economic change, a desire to reduce such matters to pop representations, to appreciate their style, their form, without their political urgency. This is made most apparent, as we shall see, in the section of “Prisonaires” which fills in the details of Mingus’ story after the shooting. A scene in the middle of the novel best exemplifies the centrality of graffiti to the novel’s treatment of race. One February afternoon in 1981 Dylan is trudging along Atlantic Avenue. As he passes Smith Street, he comes across a

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man pointing at the Brooklyn House of Detention, the tallest structure in the borough. This man’s mouth is “hung open in some kind of look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane gesture of astonishment” (2003: 274). Dylan looks up, and what he sees blows him away: there on the jail tower is “a brazen impossibility, the biggest tag in the history of tagging [. . .] Four letters: D, O, S, E” (2003: 274). This “masterpiece” acquires an air of almost religious mystery through its sheer magnitude, aiming “to shock the viewer’s brain with the obvious question: How the fuck DID it get up there?” Moreover, Dylan’s desire for exegesis, “[p]uzzling the message in the four letters. Puzzling whether it was a message” (2003: 274), is intensified by his feelings of complicity and guilt. After all, he has been allowed in the past to piggy-back on the more confident Rude’s identity by replicating the “DOSE” tag himself, thereby “losing his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom” (2003: 138). There is a different kind of guilt at work here, too. For most of all, graffiti is racially inscribed for Dylan. He realizes that Mingus has used their magic ring to spray the House of Detention. Racked with guilt at his own imminent departure to college, and with jealousy of his friend’s confidence and success with the magic ring, Dylan/the narrator muses: “Someone’s betrayed someone but you can’t say who./Someone’s flying and it isn’t you” (2003: 274). His anxieties about race, difference, and social acceptance in Gowanus are all laid bare and intensified in the brazen image of the giant tag in which he has played no part. Despite their earlier close friendship and symbolic sharing of the DOSE tag, the supersize writing on the prison wall announces the moment of separation between biologically dual heritage but culturally “black” Mingus and white Dylan, a separation confirmed a few pages later when Dylan goes to Mingus’ house to ask for the ring back, and is yoked by his friend. At this point, the narrator numbly declares: “Mingus had let him hear it: their difference, finally” (2003: 286). For a short while, the magic ring gave Dylan hope of integration and acceptance. After he survives unhassled at a block party, for example, the narrator muses: “Maybe the ring has made him black. Who can say?” (2003: 168). But the yoking at the hands of Mingus puts an end to such fantasies of integration, as do the endless yokings in the street: “Dylan was sick of it, the racial rehearsal. He’d been identified as a whiteboy a thousand times and there was nothing more to learn” (2003: 241). Mingus is “DOSE” and “Aeroman”; Dylan is still just “Whiteboy.” Evidently, there is much to detain the reader here (the pun being absolutely intentional). In fact, the giant tag on the jailhouse wall is precisely an image of graffiti’s potential, within the literary text and in Dylan’s adolescent world, to detain the reader, to arrest his or her attention, to leave him or her staring at

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the sky, open-mouthed, as if expecting Superman, and, ultimately, to disrupt the literary text itself. But the giant tag is also a sad prophecy, given that Mingus ends up drifting between various jails after shooting his grandfather. Graffiti’s history has long involved the interplay of artistic expression and (perceived) criminality: Joe Austin argues that anti-graffiti media campaigns participated in racist constructions of problem youths as responsible for New York City’s social ills (2001: 36). Jeff Ferrell argues that a clean, blank wall represents order and is a key element of what he dubs the “aesthetics of authority” (1996: 178). What is curious about the House of Detention scene is that despite graffiti’s transgressive capabilities, the reclamation of the very hegemonic spaces in which and by which it is proscribed, it serves as the simultaneous reinscription and identification of criminality in DOSE the perpetrator. With a minatory sense of predestination, the tag indelibly marks Mingus’ identity with the inevitability of incarceration. Thus, “to tag” is both to assert oppositional identity in public spaces and, in the end, to be held to account for that assertion (Figure 6.2). At the precise moment Mingus/DOSE gets a name (a street value) and becomes a writer, he is doomed to estrangement from his childhood friend and from mainstream society (and thus devalued). The ekphrasis operative in

Figure 6.2 Brooklyn Superhero Supply, Park Slope. Photograph by James Peacock.

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the description of the giant DOSE tag is traumatic: it betokens loss, division, betrayal, and social injustice. But the trauma belongs to Mingus, even if, in fact precisely because, the narrative construction of Fortress is supposed to follow Dylan’s coming of age (as Gowanus gentrifies and becomes Boerum Hill) and his inability fully to come to terms with and move beyond his adolescence. Many critics have bemoaned Lethem’s decision to leave behind the dreamy magic of Dylan’s childhood for the bitterness and dysfunction of his adult relationships. What these reviewers fail to appreciate, and what Samuel Cohen does understand, is that the unsympathetic adult Dylan is a necessary evil; his immaturity, his bitterness, even, stem from his refusal to deal with his past, “resulting in the present’s seeming always less real, less present, paradoxically, than the past” (Cohen, 2009: 179). As he admits to his girlfriend Abby, his adult life has been “overwhelmed” by his childhood (2003: 319). The fact that “Underberg” seems to overwhelm the rest of the novel is an appropriate enactment of Dylan’s dilemma. But in the transition from “Underberg” to “Liner Note” and then “Prisonaires” Dylan has at last acquired a name, one which gives him a certain amount of control over the “rude” and unruly elements of the past that haunt him. Looking at the title of “Liner Note” is revealing: “BOTHERED BLUE ONCE MORE: The Barrett Rude Jr. and the Distinctions Story / Notes by D. Ebdus” (2003: 295). Whether or not it eventually proves therapeutic, Dylan’s redaction of “the story” is a devious act of remediation and appropriation. His name, now officially sanctioned, allows him to re-author Barrett Rude and, by association, Mingus, Court Street, and the “authentic” Gowanus of his youth. When he writes “[t]he voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your neighborhood. To the street where you live” (2003: 306), he is filtering all his anxieties and jealousies through music journalism, the form of writing which gives him a recognizable name. It is an integral part of his attempt “to hide in books, Manhattanize, depart” (2003: 431). What is more, Lethem lets him take over the narration of Fortress of Solitude so that he is given privileged access to another form of writing, and therefore doubly empowered. This is why I maintain the real trauma belongs to Mingus. Dylan narrates his time at Camden College, his move to California, his return to Brooklyn, and his search for his lost mother in the first person. Mingus, on the other hand, has no such privilege. The aftermath of the shooting, the years of drifting between prisons and crack houses, is narrated in a kind of free indirect discourse in chapters thirteen and fourteen. It is as if Lethem cannot quite bring himself to foster the same level of identification with Mingus as he does with

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Dylan. Moreover, Mingus is referred to as “Dose” throughout these chapters, as if the graffiti tag on the House of Detention has marked him for life, as if the secret identity that made him special in the fantasy world of childhood has forever marginalized him in the shabbier real world of adulthood. Given that Mingus is destined to remain as “Dose” when Dylan matures into “D. Ebdus,” it is appropriate that graffiti continues to act as symbolic marker of the differences between them in the second part of the novel. It undoubtedly continues to hold a unique and discomfiting status for Dylan. The second part can be seen as a chronicle of his futile attempts to remediate his youthful obsessions through journalism and first-person narration of the novel. He believes that cluttering his world with language might distract him from direct consideration of his problems and culpabilities. But graffiti is always a sticking point for him; it is the most powerful representation of his childhood, and yet the one that resists his attempts at remediation, partly because he has never really had the skill or the courage to come up with a distinctive tag of his own, and partly because it symbolizes the world he abandoned to go to white, liberal Camden College. Instead, it continues to exist at the margins of his life, a kind of ghost, an image just under the surface of things, like the “phantom DOSE” that remains even after the House of Detention wall is scrubbed (2003: 274). As he says upon returning to Dean Street after his spell in California: “I saw meanings encoded everywhere on these streets, like the DMD and FMD tags still visible where they’d been sprayed twenty years before” (2003: 429). This is Brooklyn as palimpsest—the symbols of past communities still visible despite attempts to erase them. As an adult, it is graffiti that continues to stand for racial difference in Dylan’s eyes. The opening scene of his first-person narration takes place in his California apartment, where he is having an argument with his black girlfriend, Abby. Tellingly, Dylan declares: “I loved having a black girlfriend, and I loved Abby” (Lethem, 2003: 312). The imagery he evokes during their argument takes him all the way back to Brooklyn, which is precisely one of Abby’s grievances—Dylan’s obsession with his past: “I said to myself, Abby, this man is collecting you for the color of your skin. That was okay, I was willing to be collected. I liked being your nigger, Dylan.” Ouch. The word throbbed between us, permitting no reply from me. I could visualize it in cartoonish or graffiti-style font, glowing with garish decorations, lightning, stars, halos. [. . .] I could appreciate the form. (2003: 319)

He visualizes racial difference as graffiti and, once again, reduces it to a matter of style. Later still, when he goes to visit Mingus in jail, Dylan comments:

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“There, we were sealed from one another by a Plexiglas window covered with minute scratchiti, and allowed to converse on telephones” (2003: 442). Yet again, the invisible barrier between Dylan the white boy and Mingus the black boy is inscribed with graffiti markings, returning again to mark difference. Races, the scene implies, are never transparent, never comprehensible, and never compatible. Dylan and Mingus are separated by their race, by Mingus’ criminality, by cultural referents they have attempted but failed to share. The distance appears insurmountable. So what if, as Jacob Siegel contests, “Lethem espouses a vision of essentialist racial difference?” Can the novel “be read as the account of a white heart breaking when it learns that a qualitative difference in humanity separates it by an unbridgeable gap from its black love?” (Siegel, 2005). The unequal distribution of narrative authority seems to support such a reading. Similarly, the fact that Mingus once again becomes “Dose” in jail might reinforce the idea of graffiti, and blackness, as criminality. However, the situation is more complex. While it would be simplistic to argue that Lethem is just “telling it like it is,” enacting at the level of narrative voice the unequal opportunities afforded to whites and blacks in the United States, the choices Lethem makes in the second half of Fortress constitute a brave rejection of the desire to fabricate mini-utopias because they resist the construction of blackness itself as a utopia, a construction that tends to ignore social realities. Blackness, and predominantly black culture such as graffiti and hip-hop, is for Dylan one of the “middle spaces” of utopian arrested time and community (Lethem, 2003: 510) yearned for by Dylan, his parents, and, for a while at least, by Mingus. These middle spaces derive from dreams of endless summers in “a place where Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs” (2003: 510). A novel that acknowledges the nostalgic desire to romanticize communities of the past is, ultimately, far from romantic. It keeps things real by recognizing that dreams are always destroyed by, among other things, the economic and racial modalities of gentrification and, of course, by simply growing up.

The us and the them—Man Gone Down The unnamed narrator of Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down is, as Kenneth W. Warren notes, “a troubled but multitalented man” (2011: 128)—a writer, musician and craftsman who, despite his assertion that there should be no “ironies when you narrate to yourself, no secret distances or disconnects, prophecies or deep levels of interiority” (Thomas, 2007: 96), offers a deeply thoughtful, reflective but

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also ambivalent narrative on his own struggles and on the “collateral damage of the diaspora” affecting all American blacks (2007: 9). In fact, his brand of highly articulate literary introspection is appropriate for a novel very much concerned with insides and outsides, with the borders between the spaces inhabited by the dominant culture and those occupied by the people “born to lose” (2007: 208). Though it treats many of the same themes as The Fortress of Solitude— Brooklyn’s gentrification and the attendant transformation of the post-Fordist urban landscape, explicit and implicit racism, liberal white guilt, the ghostly traces of a past thought long ago erased—Man Gone Down treats them, as it were, from the other pole of a binary the narrator feels has been stubbornly maintained. On the one hand, the change to a black perspective allows for wry inversions of the picturesque mode: for example, running through Brooklyn, the narrator’s cataloguing of the diverse commodities on offer ends on a note of playful bathos: “and then back south down Clinton to Atlantic Ave, the divide between old and new, with the North African and Middle Eastern stores, in which there are jugs of olive oil; bins of grain, coffee, and dried fruit; spices and dried herbs; olive-filled buckets; and in the afternoon, especially Saturdays, white people” (2007: 100). Objectified, rendered strange and exotic, white people are in this passage divested of their authority even as, in the eyes of the narrator, they colonize what was previously a predominantly black neighborhood. Another racially inflected inversion, this time of the received wisdom on globalization and supergentrification, occurs when the narrator picks up a coffee on his way to a construction job: “It surprises some people that I go to a chain store for my coffee, but I won’t support the incompetent mom-and-pop operations that keep springing up around the neighborhood, subsidize half-wit entrepreneurial fantasies by agreeing to their criminal markups. Besides, black girls work in the Starbucks” (2007: 118). This is at once a damning indictment of the economic modalities of an “authentic” post-Fordist business landscape, a comic nod to racial solidarity, and an indication of the narrator’s libidinous inclinations. On the other hand, gentrification is a synecdoche for a broader, supposedly integrationist “social experiment” far removed from the one conceived of by “visionaries with sight of the end” such as W. E. B. DuBois, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King (2007: 99). The new “social experiment redux—an ahistorical one at that” partakes of the picturesque by incorporating blackness as local color: “Now, however, there is at least one brown kid per class instead of per grade. It’s another disaster. Brown kids as cultural experiences for the white ones” (2007: 248). (One hears in the last sentence echoes of Rachel Ebdus’

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aspirations for her son, Dylan.) Similarly, gentrification encourages, indeed requires as a form of validation and legitimation, the tokenistic presence of African-Americans in affluent, bohemian neighborhoods. At a time prior to the telling of Man Gone Down, when the narrator married Claire, his Caucasian wife, he became one of the accepted: “Somehow they let us in—they let me in. And although I don’t think that I changed a bit, we became a part of the ‘us’, that seemingly abstract and arbitrary grouping that is able to specifically manifest itself: the right school, the right playground, the right stores and eateries, the right strollers” (2007: 122). It may well be, as Kenneth W. Warren argues, that the narrator’s chief “grievance” is “with a social order structured to glorify whiteness despite its apparent openness to diversity” (2007: 132), but his reflections on the social experiment, on the status of the “us,” evince awareness of a sophisticated intersectionalism in which race, class, gender, discourses of parenthood, and, most importantly, economics conspire in the construction of communities or cliques. As the narrator observes: “Yes, there were subdivisions of the us, but the only relevant divide was those who could afford to pay and those who could not—an us and a them” (2007: 122). And with the comfort of knowing their ideals are “constantly validated,” the “us” have parochialized the world city, creating strips of independent businesses celebrating “the local, the mundane. The good. Liberal, spending, complacent.” Now that he feels outside the “us” again, a status he ascribes not purely to racism, but to his unsanctioned cultural choices (2007: 123), he is in a position to cast a critical eye over the whole experiment and its underlying assumptions and prejudices. Thus, the narrator has a deconstructive function. In Lindon Barrett’s words he is an example of “a great negative resource of the ‘positive structure’” and acquires, ironically, “a ‘proper’ identity, and value within the U.S. landscape” (1999: 23). Both within and without the dominant bourgeois milieu—he likes “olive oil and the bargain prices on Bulgarian feta” (2007: 101) but is also fully aware of the absurdity of these particularized desires—his thoughts on Brooklyn’s current inequities are necessarily “dichotomized” (2007: 244). On a quest for the $140,000 per year that Claire has calculated he needs to earn to support the family, he is invested in the “new” communities of aspirational Brooklyn, while evincing something like nostalgia for the industrialized past, the Brooklyn now remembered only through the idle cranes and the tankers that never dock, the Brooklyn of “dead trade” (2007: 50). He frequently refers to these markers of Brooklyn’s pre-gentrified past, and to the marginalized residents he passes on his peregrinations, as “ghosts,” and it is evident that he also considers himself “[a] phantom who leaves no legacy” (2007: 54), haunting the margins of a world

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to which he is materially connected but from which he feels culturally and racially alienated. And yet the narrator’s position is a proliferation of paradoxes. His signifying centrality to Man Gone Down qua narrator, considered alongside his feelings of ghostly marginality in contemporary middle-class society, reproduces something like the “social contradiction” identified by James Kyung-Jin Lee—the possibility of multiculturalism in cultural representations set against the material reality of racial antagonism (2004: xix)—while also, in contrast, providing an expressive black voice capable of challenging social and political demarcations. Moreover, these contradictions are enacted materially by the narrator as he seeks employment to pay for his kids’ school fees. On a number of occasions, he takes demolition and construction work on buildings undergoing renovation in Brooklyn and Manhattan (2007: 128–37, 306–24). Just as it is in A Meaningful Life, the emphasis in these scenes is on demystification, on the exposure of the labor that has gone into the veneer of gentrification. But they also show how— whatever the economic exigencies under which he is acting—the narrator is active in the very creation of the symbolic cues (facades and interiors) that signify bourgeois communities in the borough. Put another way, his attitude to gentrification, as it is to many things, is both deconstructive and constructive, both participatory and marginal. Finally, the tensions and contradictions extend to the portrayal of race. Thoroughly an individual, the narrator is nonetheless aware that others see him in representative and indexical terms, as a model of the black community’s progress and integration. That he understands this assumption in spatial terms lends weight to the sense that gentrified Brooklyn likewise functions, in another layer of complexity, in a representative manner: “There’s a limited amount of space for people, any people, anywhere. And on the inside of any powerful institution, especially for people of color, that space gets smaller and stranger. Most white folks believe the reason you’ve come in is to lift up your people. But you can’t bring your people inside, except compressed into a familiar story that’s already been sanctioned. And you wouldn’t be there in the first place unless you were a recognizable type: the noble savage, Uncle Tom, the Afro-Centric, the Oreo, the fool” (2007: 147). The narrator attempts in Man Gone Down to tell an unfamiliar story, to step outside the recognizable types, but in one scene toward the end of the novel he succumbs to the hegemonic expectations and, while on an excruciating golf trip with some white friends, feels that the fate and reputation of African-Americans depend on his hitting a good tee shot. When he does, tears fill his eyes and he reflects: “My people were on that ball” (2007: 367).

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Kenneth W. Warren notes the “absurdity” of the scene and regards it, disparagingly, as the “hyperbolic recrudescence” (2011: 137, 139) of Michael Dawson’s notion of “linked fate” among members of the black community. In his keenness to argue the post-Civil Rights redundancy of instrumental and indexical conceptions of black cultural achievements, Warren actually misses the point of the scene, which is that the absurdity is precisely the point. In a novel which has consistently (albeit with the internal tensions discussed above) questioned the sufficiency of race alone as a marker of identity and community participation, and which explicitly critiques the inclination of others to make it all about race, the comic failure of the narrator not to make it all about race in this scene only reinforces the intersectionalism of the novel taken as a whole. Though the term “postrace” begs to be used, as Ramón Saldívar says, “under erasure and with full ironic force” (2013: 2), Man Gone Down can be regarded as postrace because it depicts race not as essential or as a bounded category, but rather as profoundly “mutable” (Gilroy, 2000: 27) and “as a complex set of personal and social actions, a structure of doing, by which race is enacted” (Saldívar, 2013: 2), one that “creates social structures and discourses that articulate a dialogical narrative of American social life based on multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference” (2013: 3). The narrator’s role in the production of Brooklyn, the ways in which he does Brooklyn, ensures that it occupies an uneasy position between a recognizably real physical space and a representative space. But unlike certain nostalgic coming-of-age novels or picturesque gentrification fictions, what it represents is not timeless community values but the very conflicted, dialogical nature of American urban society, where race is only one of many intersecting discourses producing warring selves, where “the stuff of blackness is part and parcel of the world that beckons—literally sometimes—at our feet” (Holland, 2011: 584).

Ghetto values—the Brooklyn novels of Sister Souljah If the narrator of Man Gone Down, as someone “preselected for failure” (Thomas, 2007: 77), feels outside the community, like a ghost haunting the margins of the gentrified Brooklyn in which he has found himself, the narrators of the last two novels under consideration, both by writer and social activist Sister Souljah, have no engagement whatsoever with the Brooklyn of renovated brownstones and overpriced baby buggies. Both novels situate themselves, for the most part, in the ghetto and participate in a thriving genre dedicated to

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black ghetto experience. The Coldest Winter Ever is only the most high-profile and successful novel to have emerged from a hugely successful contemporary genre known variously as “street lit,” “hip-hop literature,” “ghetto fiction,” and “urban stories.” Other practitioners of the genre include Teri Woods (author of the 1998 bestseller True to the Game), Shannon Holmes, and K’Wan. As Judith Rosen says, The Coldest Winter Ever is “credited as being the book that sparked renewed interest in the ghetto realism of the 1970s—and the writings of Donald Goines and Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim)” (2004: 31) and has led to a huge upsurge in sales for the genre. The genre’s wider popularity can be attributed partly to the established pre-eminence of hip-hop culture, partly to reduced production costs for softcover novels, and partly, according to New Jersey-based publisher of African-American writing Earl Cox, to an expanding population of budding authors and potential readers in prisons: “In the ’80s and ’90s, a lot of folks got locked up and wanted to write about it” (Cox, qtd. in Rosen, 2004: 31). If ghetto fiction is thus understood to reflect real-life experience (and the first niche publisher of such books, Holloway House, labeled the genre “black experience” fiction), this realism is emphasized in the blurb. On the cover of the 1999 special collector’s edition of The Coldest Winter Ever, there is a single quotation from Booklist: “REAL and RAW.” Inside the covers, many reviews pursue the same line: Walter Mosley calls it “a naturalist novel of a world without redemption [. . .] an unflinching eye at the truth”; Publishers Weekly calls it “a realistic coming-of-age story.” For Rick Altman, genre is a complex process of development along different paths which is at least partly driven by the “capitalist need for product differentiation” (Altman, 1999: 64) and flexible specialization. In street lit, the process is especially complex and revealing because racial, spatial, and economic discourses converge around the genre label. Blackness is associated with “the street” and with a particular kind of exotic but gritty realism. Even if, as Justin Gifford observes, mainstream publishers such as Ballantine Books and Simon and Schuster “have begun offering six-figure, multiple-book deals” to some of the biggest-selling street lit writers (2013: 216), there remains the sense of ghettoization within the publishing industry itself. Street lit, and thus by association black urban experience and blackness itself, are considered separate, distinct, bounded categories, and their incorporation by mainstream publishers does not necessarily constitute an acceptance into the academy; rather, it represents recognition that the distinct themes and voices of this literature have considerable economic value when marketed for a readership likewise perceived as distinct from the mainstream.

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With reference to the twentieth-century dominance of New Criticism, with its “enabling designation of an outside (the extraliterary) and an inside (the literary)” (Barrett, 1999: 134), Lindon Barrett argues that “the street” as a signifier of black production and experience is consigned to the outside and is devalued in relation to its perceived opposites: the white suburb and the literary academy. In his thinking, therefore, the commercial success of street lit would only exemplify the fact that “borders are carefully contrived, carefully managed, and profitable enterprises whether they happen to separate allAmerican suburbs from African American communities or the literary from the extraliterary (or, indeed, the literary from African American communities and all-American suburbs from African American literature” (1999: 135). Participating in this separation is the insistence on the “reality” of the street and of the street-lit novel—a constructed state which attempts to mask its construction as essential, and from which transition is not likely or desirable. In the context of my wider discussion of community spaces, one might also suggest that the street is differently coded from the neighborhood, as romanticized in the picturesque tradition of Brooklyn fictions. Connoting crime and conflict, and the need for Darwinian survival strategies, the street carries a different valence from the neighborhood, associated with traditional community virtues— face-to-face relations, mutual understanding, commonalities. And yet, using Barrett’s deconstructive logic, the success of a novel like The Coldest Winter Ever threatens to collapse all these boundaries by exposing their discontinuity and the supplementarity of perceived opposites. The street, after all, cannot be extracted from the neighborhood, and neighborhoods cannot exist without streets. What Sister Souljah does so effectively in The Coldest Winter Ever is to deploy a metafictional trope in her gritty realist text (one more commonly associated with high postmodernist texts such as Auster’s The New York Trilogy), thereby calling into question that realism, transgressing the border between inside (literary, fictional) and outside (extraliterary, social), between “high” and “low” culture, and by extension the boundary separating the black ghetto from the spaces and ideologies of the dominant global culture by which it is devalued and proscribed. In this sense, the novel can be seen as being “in critical dialogue with the aesthetics of postmodernism” and therefore part of a “postrace” aesthetic (Saldívar, 2013: 4, italics in original). The central agon of the novel is the relationship between the narrator and protagonist Winter Santiaga, daughter of Brooklyn drug overlord Ricky Santiaga, and “Sister Souljah,” a social activist devoted to educating black youth about the need for altered priorities. At stake

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in this clash of worldviews is reality itself: if Winter’s idea of “keeping it real” is in fact an alienated, mystified one, dependent on the desire for commodities, then Sister Souljah’s1 is a demystifying one, revealing the larger political and racial truths behind Winter’s blinkered understanding of her ghetto community. Like the competing visions of Audrey’s eyes, and like the shifts in narrative perspective of The Fortress of Solitude, the conflict between Winter and Sister Souljah opens up a discursive space in which the reader is encouraged to evaluate the evidence and reach a nuanced understanding of local and global economic and racial issues. The novel is therefore, very explicitly, an argument, and the terms are established on the first page: I never liked Sister Souljah, straight up. She was the type of female I’d like to cut in the face with my razor. Before I get heated just talking about her, let me make it clear who I am and where I stand. Don’t go jumping to any conclusions either. All of y’all are too quick to jump to her defense without knowing what somebody up close and personal thinks. When it comes right down to it, those are the ones who really count, the people who was there, who seen it all. Hell, you can’t smell nobody’s breath through a camera. You almost can’t even see their pimples. So you know that TV shit ain’t real. Don’t run ahead of me. Let me take my time and tell my story. (1999: 1)

Importantly, the italicized passage is proleptic: it is the voice of an older Winter looking back, and never fully reconciled to Sister Souljah’s views. Winter’s emphasis, predictably, is on insider knowledge—being there, being “up close and personal,” and therefore understanding the material reality of the ghetto. And yet her understanding of material reality is that of the drug dealer’s pampered daughter and cannot entertain the possibility of deprivation: “Brooklyn-born I don’t have no sob stories for you about rats and roaches and pissy-pew hallways” (1999: 1). There is evidence of metageneric awareness here, an immediate undermining of readerly expectation, but the total elision of poverty, the assumption that being “Brooklyn-born” precludes such “sob stories,” reveals an alienated consciousness completely molded by the material comforts to which it has long been accustomed. “I came busting out of my momma’s big coochie on January 28, 1977, during one of New York’s worst snowstorms. So my mother named me Winter. My father, Ricky Santiaga, was so proud of his new baby girl

1

Hereafter I shall refrain from placing quotation marks around the name. The reader should assume that the character to whom I refer is not conterminous with the author.

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that he had a limo waiting to pick my moms up from the hospital. The same night I got home my pops gave me a diamond ring set in 24-karat gold. [. . .] It was important for me to know I deserved the best, no slum jewelry, cheap shoes, or knock-off designer stuff, only the real thing” (1999: 1–2). Though “that TV shit” is not real, in her eyes, these commodities are. In a narrative liberally punctuated with references to designer brand names, “Brooklyn-style” is a form of community based around the shared display of expensive commodities among ghetto residents, a display that is both racialized and sexualized, the erotics of the body closely linked to the seductions of the brand. The following is typical: “My legs were shapely, big, and beautiful. There was no sense in hiding them. [. . .] So what it if was cold. I wasn’t walking. I was toasty in the red Benz. I threw on my diamond necklace and my diamond tennis bracelet. My soft red leather jacket made it all perfect. [. . .] Tonight was the night for raw Brooklyn-style fun and live niggas” (1999: 81). On that same night, in a hotel room, Winter and her friends have “a good old Brooklyn-style good time” while having “buffalo wings, French fries, and lemonade” (1999: 86). Outside the context of gentrification, this nonetheless reveals another instance of the consumer picturesque: “Brooklyn style” is about gratuitous accumulation and consumption which is, as Winter’s phraseology suggests, somehow childlike, “old,” and associated with down-home family values. Spatially the novel plays out, in condensed form, the distinction between center and suburb seen in Season at Coole. His empire coming under threat, Santiaga moves his family to suburban Long Island to “switch up, keep ‘em guessing” (1999: 15). Immediately, in Winter’s imagining, Brooklyn becomes a longed-for ancestral home, invested with qualities of community and authenticity: “It wasn’t like people was walking outside on the streets like in Brooklyn. Here I could put on a Chanel suit, stand on the corner, and meet nothing but the wind [. . .] there was just nothing live about it” (1999: 21). After her mother is shot (1999: 47), her father is arrested (1999: 89), and her younger siblings are taken into care (1999: 103), Winter is left to fend for herself. A request from her father written in a letter (1999: 212) forces Winter to make contact with Midnight, Ricky’s overseer, and to return to New York. Refusing her advances (1999: 55), Midnight becomes a tormentor, but also a protector and an educator: most significantly, it is through him that Winter becomes aware of Sister Souljah’s work. (In fact, she learns, with bitterness, that Midnight and Souljah were once in a relationship.) Ending up at Souljah’s “House of Success” in Harlem, she finds herself participating in women’s discussion groups—in her words, “for the laughs” (1999: 286)—where she initially dismisses the other girls for having “no style” (1999: 286), Souljah

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as a “control freak” (1999: 319) and her advice as nothing more than a “hustle” (1999: 287). Souljah’s awareness-raising workshops focus explicitly on community. Like Winter, most of the girls in the group fail to see beyond immediate family and have no conception of the rhizomatic connections between kinship and the wider social sphere, and therefore no conception of the wider repercussions of their venality. In response to one of the girls who refuses to care about her school, Souljah responds: “But the school is in your community. Even if your sister isn’t in that school, your sister still has to live in that neighborhood. She will be affected by whatever happens to those other children. If they don’t get a proper education maybe one of them will bust a cap in your sister’s ass. Then what?” (1999: 317). Though it proceeds from the assumption that “[w]e are all connected” (1999: 317), Souljah’s concept of community does not dissolve into the romance of “traditional,” pre-capitalist face-to-face encounters. Rather, it proposes constellated communities based on mutual trust and knowledge in which “[m]oney is important” (1999: 287) but constructive only when fungibility and accumulation derive from collective endeavor. As she says to her students: “If everybody in here received a thousand dollars each and we believed in unity, we could have fifty thousand to buy a piece of property or put a down payment on a house, or we could open up a business and all become shareholders” (1999: 289). In other words, Souljah rejects extreme economic individualism and internecine fighting within urban black communities and between black women, but she in no way rejects the foundational terms of a capitalist economy or the ways in which they contribute to community formation. However, as Winter discovers when she reads a series of letters between Souljah and Midnight, Souljah’s fiercest criticism is reserved for the drugs economy in which Winter’s and many other girls’ families are involved: “The money is in your blood. The money is your God. It’s all about the Benjamins. So call it what it is. In life people make choices. We pay for every little choice we make. You traded everyone else’s life for yours. I traded my life for everyone else’s. We don’t belong together. / Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say ‘This time you did it to yourself.’” (1999: 354). Emphasizing once again the importance of money (and showing awareness of the play of materiality and abstraction, natural and man-made by locating it in the blood), Souljah expands her critique beyond localities to national politics and, via the reference to slavery, the

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global economy. The vague pronoun “they” refers to the dominant culture, to political and cultural institutions that insist on the continued marginalization and negative evaluation of the black population. As readers, we understand that the narrow localized values of “Brooklyn-style,” with its hedonism and materialism, depend on the global drug trade and thus help sustain systems of ghettoization and marginalization. “Brooklyn,” as a territory narrowly demarcated around the immediate pleasures and material demands of friends and family, has to be reconfigured as a place which exists within a complex global network of political, social, economic, and racial negotiations. Winter’s Brooklyn is a closed economy of showing out and being flash, whereas Sister Souljah’s is part of the world and is constructed as a site of power struggles in a much wider context. However, The Coldest Winter Ever never becomes a simplistic cautionary coming-of-age tale in which a young woman is shown the error of her ways and learns the “true” value of community and black solidarity. When one considers the note of self-aggrandizement behind the expressions of self-sacrifice in Souljah’s letter, as well as the dubiety of the conspiracy theory lying behind her claims, it is clear that she is very much a character, like Winter, and has her own flaws—including a tendency to hectoring didacticism instantly recognized by the narrator. By giving Souljah a liminal position, both within and outwith her text, and by focalizing the fictionalized Souljah through Winter’s narration, the novel itself such avoids didacticism and the overwhelming of one pole of a binary by another. Although Winter, who finds herself in jail at the close of the novel, feels inclined to warn her sister Porsche “about certain things in life,” there is no epiphanic moment, and ultimately she decides: “Hell, I’m not into meddling in other people’s business” (1999: 430). By keeping conflicting viewpoints in tension until the very end, The Coldest Winter Ever avoids a factitious abstraction of wider political concerns from individual drives and shows how personal desires (consumer, sexual) are inextricable from larger political and economic forces. It is a novel that insists on the inseparability of apparent opposites like local and global, fiction and reality, individual and community, street and academy, and strongly suggests that to “recognize value fully one must, at least, see double” (Barrett, 1999: 17). It is most expressive, therefore, in its ambiguity and its refusal to offer a singular or “real” way forward for urban African-Americans. Sister Souljah followed The Coldest Winter Ever with the prequel Midnight: a Gangster Love Story (2008). It focuses on the childhood and early adolescence of Midnight (real name Bilal Odé), Ricky Santiaga’s right-hand man and

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Winter’s object of desire in the first novel, and the story’s moral fulcrum. The action of Midnight takes place before his imprisonment for shooting the man who sexually abuses his sister, and before the arrest of his mother for forced drug smuggling—incidents we learn about through his letters to Souljah in The Coldest Winter Ever (1999: 349–53). Like its predecessor, Midnight can be classified as a coming-of-age tale, although it differs in the completeness and unequivocality of its protagonist’s maturation. At the end of her story, as we have seen, Winter is reluctant to convey to her sister Porsche the lessons she has learned partly because she retains some ambivalence about them and still harbors resentment toward Sister Souljah; the reader is thus left in doubt as to whether she has truly come of age, in the sense of learning how the world really operates. Midnight, on the other hand, describes a remarkably successful story of emerging manhood based around a series of stereotypically masculine tests and achievements. Midnight, having emigrated from the Sudan with his mother, Umma, and his younger sister, Naja, after his father’s business empire comes under threat, is forced to undergo an accelerated coming of age, in fact. From his arrival in the States he assumes the roles of father and husband as he helps his family find accommodation (first an apartment in the Bed-Stuy projects and later a house in Rockaway Beach); starts a craft business called Umma Designs with his mother; learns ancient martial arts in order to become an “urban ninja warrior” (2008: 32); kills a sinister West Indian man intent on marrying Umma (2008: 94); and eventually falls in love with a Japanese art student called Akemi, marrying her in a Muslim ceremony at his dojo (2008: 473) and making love to her soon afterwards, when he is still only 14 and she 16 (2008: 526). Through all these events, Midnight stays true to his faith and to his family and strives to understand, if not ever to condone, what he perceives as the wayward and hypocritical culture of Americans. Although Midnight is an adolescent, his narration lacks both the naive, accidental perspicacity of other immature characters such as Huckleberry Finn or Vernon God Little, and the complex interplay of adult and adolescent perspectives exercised by Audrey in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn. The characteristic tone is one of absolute conviction, born of unusual maturity and heightened critical faculties. Only once in the whole novel, when Midnight clumsily declares “[e]ven back in the Sudan there are poor people” (2008: 32), does one perceive of any potential ironic distance between author and firstperson narrator, any sense that Midnight’s certainties are those of relative ignorance rather than experience. Otherwise, his narrative functions as a damning and unchallenged critique of a dysfunctional American society and its

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mores. Particular scorn is poured upon the societal and legal circumscription of what Midnight sees as timeless, natural instincts: In my grandfather’s village, they must have understood the human body and mind. They built a village that could stay in step with reality. If at fourteen the natural thing was to feel and become sexual, then at fourteen you could marry and start a family and become responsible and respectable. In the USA the society was out of pace with the natural development of its young. They made it a shame for a youth to feel and be sexual at fourteen, and looked away while they knew it was happening randomly anyway. Adults acted surprised and disgusted when teens got pregnant. Then they pressed them to kill their seeds. (2008: 97)

He goes on to speculate: “Is it the American way for the young to abort all the babies they create up until the time they are eligible to marry, have completed their studies, and are qualified to work? Reality says no” (2008: 98). This example is illustrative for several reasons and indicates why Midnight, when one compares it with The Coldest Winter Ever, is so deeply reductive and problematic. First, what Midnight deems “natural” or “real” is derived primarily from the “yearning” or “hunger” he begins to feel at 14 (2008: 97); thus, the ensuing moral judgments, whether or not they hold any wider applicability, are extrapolations from a limited, individual experience, albeit one which, as I have noted, is prematurely judgmental and paternalistic. And what Midnight fails to recognize is the cultural construction of the personal conception of “reality” to which he adheres so rigidly. Though this “reality” is frequently expressed as biological determinism, it is every bit as molded by the religious, kinship community from which he comes as the perceived degeneracy of American youth is shaped by its social and political culture. Deeply patriarchal in nature, Midnight’s culture, according to his narration, values “permanent” family (2008: 3) above all else. And family, as he explains it, emerges from the selection, by “real men who take real life, real serious” (2008: 2) of honorable women who bring their husbands “peace, progress, and pleasure” (2008: 3). Any woman “feels fortunate to be selected by a quality husband, a family man, who will be by her side for her entire lifetime” (2008: 3). In Sudan, Midnight insists: “Our women don’t argue with their man. A man knows what he is supposed to do and not do. It is the same thing he watched his own father do and not do. So he does it” (2008: 3). Patrilinearity is the measure of morality and ethics, and is unchanging, natural, and absolute. Within this value system, one signifier of authenticity is valued above all others: female virginity. Just before his wedding (an event designed by Umma),

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the Sudanese groom, Fawzi, says to Midnight: “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can find one single virgin American female who is not a child [. . .] You won’t find one virgin.” His Sudanese bride, in contrast, is “a virgin, of course” (2008: 274). In the same conversation with Fawzi, Midnight learns that “the American God” is money and that for Americans “[a]ll of their religion, rituals, and beliefs are just entertainment, just something for them to say and not mean” (2008: 272). Neither man appears to understand that the ideology of virginal authenticity is articulated through the very same language of ownership, commodity, and nationalism that drives the religion of money. In contemplating his first sexual encounter with Akemi, Midnight feels “a heavy Sudanese kind of pride that there would be blood coming from ‘below’, not a hand-me-down girl or someone else’s leftovers or an abandoned or passed around piece” (2008: 478). When they finally sleep together, Akemi shows him with pride the blood he “needed to see” (2008: 527). The blood functions as a marker of contractual fulfillment and as the confirmation and synthesis of Akemi’s intrinsic value and exchange value. If virginity is fetishized and commodified, so too is the capacity for childbirth. Making love to Akemi, Midnight reflects: “[H]er womb was the perfect place, and it gave me the perfect feeling. There were no problems inside of there” (2008: 526). When one considers that the nickname of his family compound in the Sudan is “The Womb” (2008: 12), and that the Bed-Stuy apartment is referred to as “our own little Sudanese world” (2008: 12), then it becomes apparent that the ideology of authenticity, with its origins in traditional gender prescriptions, is spatialized and transformed into a very particular brand of utopianism. It is far from being a critical utopianism, however. It relies upon absolute difference to the dystopia of the United States, producing yet another version of the ideological opposition of country and city discussed by Raymond Williams—this time with the Sudan standing in for the country and the United States for the city. Throughout Midnight, everything associated with the Sudan—food, handicrafts, family values, women—is regarded as honest, authentic, and beautiful, and everything supposedly native to America—gang culture, promiscuity, the pursuit of wealth for its own sake—as degraded and against timeless human values. Rather than an exploration of transnational identities, then, Midnight reads as an extreme reaction to the perceived breakdown of community in American urban spaces, with a concomitant extreme, Orientalist romanticization of a before and elsewhere in Africa. This romanticization reaches its apotheosis in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition of Akemi’s paintings at the end of the novel: with titles like Mother Africa, Sacred Modesty, Black Beauty, and The

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Proof, (2008: 584), these artworks reaffirm Akemi’s willing entry into Midnight’s family, as led by Umma, his mother, and her entry into the umma, the universal community of Muslims. They also confirm the potential exchange value of these ideas of beauty and authenticity. The umma is the only authentic community for Midnight, and it explains his desire to isolate himself from “the American Blacks. The ones who look just like me. [. . .] When I first arrived, they were Afro-Americans, then Blacks, then African Americans, and eventually niggas” (2008: 6). In her review of Midnight, Natalie Moore states that “[t]he subtext is race and poverty” (2009: 37). This is only partially true. On the one hand, Midnight’s color is a source of pride and acts as a fetish throughout the novel. On the very first page he says: “Females tell me they love me because I’m pure black. They say they never seen a black man so masculine, so pretty, so beautiful before” (2008: 1). But he is keen to emphasize that his look is typical “back home” (2008: 6), so that, in fact, the fetishization of his skin color participates in his attempts to separate himself from black Americans, to “keep it real” by reinforcing the ideological distinction between the Sudan and the States. His pure, beautiful blackness is an index to his moral and religious purity, those qualities he sees as sadly lacking in American blacks. Its singularity and perfection is one of the reasons he feels justified in remarking, in relation to the attainment of his citizenship: “I was an American on paper. I never became one in my heart and mind” (2008: 6). It is also, ironically, one of the reasons he is dismissive of the local members of the Five-Percent Nation who routinely claim “the Black man is God” (2008: 100, 165). By virtue of their Americanness, all their claims to affiliation with Islam and membership of the umma are instantly refutable. It is clear, then, that the novel is about race only inasmuch as its protagonist resists viewing blackness as an essential category and as an automatic symbolic cue to global solidarity and community. In this sense, it might ostensibly be regarded as progressively postrace in outlook. And yet Midnight bemoans the fact that in the eyes of others, he will always be associated with black Americans: “There was no real way for me to separate myself from them. We all looked the same, wore the same clothes, spoke the same slang. All united by our Air Jordan kicks” (2008: 7). Such lightly ironic statements hint at an appreciation of the connections between economics and the cultural signification of blackness, ideas treated with some sophistication in The Coldest Winter Ever, and also at an evolving transnational identity, even if it is only a strategic one, Midnight’s way of seeming to integrate in order to “lay low, to go underground, to go slow, to rebuild, to regroup” (2008: 15). One of the difficulties of Midnight is its narrator’s constant disavowal of these connections,

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even as his narrative appears to relish the street vernacular he dismisses and to take pride in clothes just like the Americans. Arriving at a basketball game in Madison Square Garden, for example, he says: “I took careful steps in my Clarks. I didn’t want dog shit smashed into the groves of my new soles. I didn’t want none of these overeager cats accidentally stepping on my new shoes” (2008: 211). Whether or not Midnight’s American garb is a form of disguise, it is one he evidently enjoys. However, none of this causes Midnight to question his assumptions: the dichotomies he has constructed between Africa and America, natural and artificial, authentic and fake, are simply too strong. He criticizes “niggas” because they “play themselves every day” (2008: 7) without interrogating his own tendency to assume roles. And despite enforcing boundaries between different groups of black people, he regards himself as a spokesman for his race (in a similar way to the narrator of Man Gone Down, at his moment of golfing crisis): “I’m telling my story so Black people worldwide will know that we wasn’t always fucked up. Also, that a good life takes great effort and sacrifice, but feels so much better than what we all got now. Besides, if the authentic men don’t say shit, there will be no evidence that real men really do exist” (2008: 7). Midnight’s moral manifesto reiterates, in the phrase “we wasn’t always,” an ideological spatiotemporal split between the virtuous before of the Islamic Sudan and the debased now of the irreligious United States, a split at odds with the unifying drive of his grand statements and of the umma. Moreover, the italics rather desperately reemphasize his insistence on a knowable (and in this case defiantly heterosexual and masculine) reality. This is the novel’s greatest missed opportunity. Though it challenges, through its devout religious framework and its refusal of a globally unified blackness, both the more sensationalist elements of the street-lit genre and the genre’s conventional racial associations, its absolute faith in a stable, continuous reality constitutes a refusal to engage with the reinterpretation of individual and community experience demanded by migration. There is no sense in which Midnight ever “suspects reality” because of his experience of difference cultures and environments, to use Salman Rushdie’s famous idea (Rushdie, 1991: 125). There is no meaningful engagement with race as one factor in the construction of a transnational identity, intersecting with language, gender, sexuality, religion, and culture. There is only a restating of supposedly timeless certainties, and a concomitant relocation of all “authenticity,” in direct contrast to Winter Santiaga and Dylan Ebdus, away from Brooklyn and into a utopian elsewhere. Though Midnight derides Americans for being “too accustomed to looking at life from

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only one fucked-up angle” (2008: 7), he is guilty of exactly the same misperception. And because Sister Souljah chooses not to employ the dialectical polyphony she uses in The Coldest Winter Ever—an approach effective precisely because it forces the reader, like the protagonist, to “suspect reality”—there is no access to the outside of Midnight’s immature but supremely confident perspective. In fact, the author’s “Dedication” actively endorses her narrator’s viewpoint: “To men who bow their heads, read their books, raise their fists, handle their business, and never abandon their families. To beautiful men who still have the glow of God in their eyes” (2008: vii). Midnight: a Gangster Love Story is a sincere attempt at cultural relativism, focalized through the words of a type of individual that tends elsewhere to be marginalized or silenced. If it fails to convince, it is because, unlike its predecessor, it is not relative enough, and therefore not dramatic or discursive enough. In the end Midnight fails to come of age precisely because of his boundless conviction and his stubborn adherence to a fixed notion of home. He does not accept, or even yet understand, the porous boundaries of selfhood and the conflicting narratives of participation that define his identity as he travels from Africa to the States, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from dojo to basketball court. His all-encompassing and ahistorical vision of authenticity cannot entertain the possibility of evolving communities and identities: unlike Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in The Fortress of Solitude, the narrator of Man Gone Down or even, reluctantly, Winter Santiaga, he is not yet torn. In the following chapter, I examine transnational Brooklyn fictions featuring protagonists more inclined to reflect on the effects of migration on their ideas of selfhood within communities. These are characters who are, in different ways and not necessarily negatively, profoundly torn.

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Reaching Out, Reaching In—Transnational Brooklyn in Geographies of Home, Brooklyn, and Girl in Landscape

Establishing grounds for comparison—the process of the transnational Even though this book is concerned with Brooklyn fictions, the simple fact that the three novels under scrutiny here are mainly or partly set in Brooklyn might not be considered sufficient grounds for comparison. And despite their shared interest in the tribulations, the potential opportunities, and the ontological complications attendant on emigration, the generic differences between them might seem to override any thematic congruities. Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape (1998), in particular, pushes one’s understanding of “Brooklyn fiction” further than any novel examined so far by relocating, a little less than halfway through, from a futuristic, dystopian version of Brooklyn to a mysterious distant planet. It is a work of science fiction, and even if, like Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999) and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), it is also a coming-of-age narrative, a story of female self-awakening somewhat in the tradition of Brown Girl, Brownstones and Leaving Brooklyn, one might find the differences between these three texts more notable and compelling than the similarities. However, I argue that the novels’ distinct generic characteristics are part of the attempt to articulate, in differing ways but with shared ethical intent, the development of a transnational consciousness in their protagonists. Throughout this book, we have encountered novels that emphasize Brooklyn’s status as a mode of perception, not simply a geographical entity, and “community” as something revealed only through repeated acts of imagination on the part of its participants. The important difference between,

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for example, Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and the novels discussed in this chapter is that in Stephens’ novel the state of mind revealed by the central characters is, for the most part, rigid and ahistorical, in other words ideological: the same might be said of the more utopian and picturesque gentrification novels. In the works of Pérez, Tóibín, and Lethem studied here, the state of mind becomes a process of mind, a process of continual reevaluation of one’s participation in multiple communities characterized by difference and mobility. With reference to the metaphor employed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz in Leaving Brooklyn, one can see Lethem’s genre clashes, Pérez’s magical realism, and Tóibín’s use of his own deep metaphor in an otherwise deceptively simple narrative as further examples of the “rogue eye”—a nuanced and deconstructive way of looking at the individual in her communities. Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home tells the story of a Latino family who settle in Brooklyn after emigrating from the Dominican Republic to escape the brutalities of the Trujillo dictatorship. The parents, Papito and Aurelia, have struggled since their arrival to reconcile strict Adventist religious beliefs (their local church congregation being one of the most oppressive communities depicted in any Brooklyn novel) to the economic exigencies of life in New York. Surrounded by poverty and racism, they fail to hold their family of 14 children together, and Aurelia in particular ponders the disparity between the migrant dream and the reality, worrying that “by emigrating they had unwittingly caused their children to yearn for a wealth generally portrayed as easily accessible to anyone in the States” (1999: 22). Implicit in her observation is an understanding that this generalization depends on a literalization of certain metaphors of consumerism; Aurelia displays what Richard Godden describes, in relation to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer, as “a fascinated mistrust for the ‘reality’ to which the respective historical moments of their class have apprenticed them” (1990: 9). This mistrust paves the way for the instances of oppositional magical realism that shape the later episodes of the novel. Beginning with the youngest daughter Iliana’s return from college in upstate New York to the family home, the novel explores the ruptures between expectation and reality, between past and present, and between home as a geographical location and as a state of mind in a series of increasingly horrific and traumatic episodes. Rebecca is trapped in an abusive marriage to Pasión, who regularly abandons her and their three children for days on end and, in a pathetic “embrace of a farmer’s lifestyle idealized in stories told by a father who had himself abandoned it upon arriving in the United States” (1999: 53), keeps chickens in a filthy coop on the top floor of their apartment in East New York—very much the

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same impoverished and brutal neighborhood described by Walter Thabit and fictionalized by Michael Stephens. One of the other daughters, Marina, suffers from schizophrenia and violent delusions, brought about, it is suggested, first by her parents’ decision temporarily to leave her in the Dominican Republic when they emigrated (1999: 32) and secondly by her rape at the hands of what she calls a “flat-nosed, wide-lipped nigger” (1999: 17). Marina is multiply traumatized, and her extreme sense of dislocation, exacerbated by the sexual attack, speaks to a wider sense of material and psychological displacement among migrant communities in a globalized world. As Myriam J. A. Chancy argues, the question of whether this rape is real or imagined “haunts the text” and is never answered (2008: 66). What is clear, however, is that it provokes Marina’s self-loathing and her dissociative relationship with her African body and heritage. After an ecstatic fit during an Adventist service (1999: 108–9), she fantasizes direct communion with God and believes herself “His instrument” (1999: 18). It is partly in this capacity that she rapes Iliana at the close of the novel, brutally thrusting a fist inside her sister to confirm her suspicions that Iliana possesses male sexual organs (1999: 284). From this brief synopsis, it is evident that for Pérez the agonizing question of what constitutes states of being and perception one might call “home” or “community” is inextricably bound up in issues of race, sexuality, and economics (as it is in Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down). As Aurelia reflects: “She had been poor even in the Dominican Republic, but something had flourished from within which had enabled her to greet each day rather than cringe from it in dread” (1999: 23). It is this indefinable “something”—call it “home,” “community,” or “a sense of belonging”—which, when mislaid in transit, precipitates the multiple tragedies of Geographies of Home. Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is an altogether more benignant and less harrowing fiction. Eilis Lacey is a young girl studying bookkeeping in Enniscorthy, Ireland in the 1950s, who finds herself emigrating to Brooklyn after a visit from the persuasive Father Flood, himself a migrant with an accent “a mixture of Irish and American” (Tóibín, 2009: 22). Like Iliana’s family, Eilis instinctively feels that those who travel to the States rather than England “could become rich” (2009: 24). Indeed, there is “an almost compensating glamour” (2009: 32) attached to New York as a location and an idea that lends even the drudgery of shop work “an element of romance” missing from equivalent employment in “Birmingham or Liverpool or Coventry” (2009: 32). Unlike Iliana’s, Eilis’ story unfolds not in horrific disillusionment and trauma but in a series of acutely observed personal experiences in private and communal spaces as the protagonist tentatively

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edges toward womanhood and an increasing sense of participation in the life of Brooklyn. Eilis takes a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Kehoe (2009: 53), starts work at Bartocci’s department store on Fulton Street (2009: 59), studies bookkeeping and preliminary accounting at Brooklyn College (2009: 79), becomes romantically involved with an Italian plumber called Tony whom she meets, to their mutual amusement, at an Irish dance (2009: 126), and briefly returns to Ireland after the death of her sister Rose (2009: 171). Brooklyn’s typical mood is quietly reflective, its characteristic mode the demotic; it achieves its effects primarily by taking prosaic details—a suitcase denounced as “too Irish” (2009: 49), the choosing of the right clothes for a dance (2009: 106), the meticulous balancing of accounts in a ledger (2009: 79)—and allowing them to acquire an amplified metaphorical status simply by virtue of the protagonist’s decontextualization and the interrelation of her Irish and American experiences. If Geographies of Home portrays transnational Brooklyn in terms of violent disjunction, Brooklyn sees it chiefly in terms of correspondence and balance, even if those qualities are difficult to achieve. The pursuit of correspondence and balance is played out at the level of syntax in Tóibín’s repeated use of the subordinate conjunction “as though.” As Edward A. Hagan notes, the phrase is used no less than 67 times in Brooklyn, a novel of only 252 pages. Early on Eilis reflects on the tacit arrangement between her mother and Father Flood: “And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance” (2009: 23). After the crossing, on her first day at Bartocci’s department store in Brooklyn, Eilis listens patiently to Miss Fortini explaining the intricacies of the cash office: “Eilis allowed Miss Fortini to explain it to her carefully, as though she had never seen anything like it before” (2009: 61). And as Eilis lies on her bed, morosely reflecting on the letters she has received from her mother and her brother, we are told: “There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away” (2009: 67). As these examples indicate, the conjunction is versatile, suggesting simultaneous presence and absence, concreteness and abstraction in the first example; benign deception but also a link between Brooklyn and Ireland in the second example; and a mode of perception excited by a particular emotional state in the third. As Edward Hagan says: “Because ‘as though’ is not as explicit a comparison as a simile, or as direct a correlation as a metaphor, Tóibín forces the reader to tease out the ambiguous relationships the phrase poses” (2012: 31). Whether or not one agrees that the phrase is typically used by writers from marginalized groups, as Hagan asserts, his suggestion that characters in novels such as Brooklyn live “‘as though’ the ordinary consensus

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about reality is tendentious” (2012: 32) is pertinent in this context. For Eilis, as for Iliana and for Pella Marsh, protagonist of Girl in Landscape, “as though” describes the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal destabilizations of reality when long journeys are made across borders; the sense that each “here” is informed by elsewheres (or that any location in a world dominated by movement “is an itinerary rather than a bounded site—a series of encounters and translations” [Clifford, 1997: 11]); and the realization that narratives of developing selfhood, so often allied to trajectories of increasing affluence, individuation and ideologically prescribed notions of success, are better seen in terms of multiple incarnations of being, of subtly overlapping selves. “As though,” in other words, balances both violent disjunction and correspondence in precarious balance, in supplementary relation. These abstract nouns are also useful descriptors of Girl in Landscape, whose uniquely haunting landscapes represent a fully imagined “as though.” If the sudden death of Pella Marsh’s mother from a brain tumor in Part 1 of the novel—“Brooklyn Heights”—constitutes the first act of violence, then Clement Marsh’s insistence that the family emigrate to the mysterious Planet of the Archbuilders constitutes the second, and exacerbates the daughter’s mistrust of paternal authority. Potentially more shattering than both of these, however, is the first encounter with one of the planet’s native inhabitants. The Archbuilder is a creature of “flesh and fur and shell and frond,” the fronds like “a bundle of calla lilies topping the Archbuilder’s head, twisted, drooping elegantly to the side, tucked behind the large, clownish ears” (1998: 61). On the one hand, the creature is “a joke, a tatter, too absurd to glance at twice.” On the other, it “burn[s] a hole in the world, change[s] it utterly” and makes “the glaring horizon draw closer” (1998: 62). This, in exaggerated form, is the essential building block of science fiction, “the meeting of self with other [. . .] the most fearful, most exciting and most erotic encounter of all” (McCracken, 1998: 102). But even in her immediate shock, Pella is perspicacious enough to understand that she is the immigrant, she is also the other: “The rubble and what grew in the rubble belonged to them. The girl felt her body understand” (1998: 62). So Girl in Landscape is, as Carl Abbott observes, a frontier homesteading story in the tradition of sci-fi novels such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles; if a viable new community is to be achieved on the Planet of the Archbuilders, it is incumbent on the settlers somehow to reconcile themselves to the absolute difference of the natives and, even more importantly, to their own inherent difference in the eyes of others. From disjunction must come correspondence.

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Community, then, is not dependent on similarity, familiarity, and uniformity, but, in this case, on difference and the (paradoxical) persistence of change. For this reason, science fiction suits Lethem’s purposes in Girl in Landscape just as elements of magical realism, as we shall see, suit Pérez’s purposes in Geographies of Home. Darko Suvin’s well-known concept of the “novum,” referring to the point of difference between the science fictional world and our world (in this case, primarily the Archbuilders), retains much of its currency in contemporary critical discussions of the genre because it succinctly expresses the importance of the defamiliarizing encounter with otherness for characters and readers alike. No matter which choices of nova the reader makes, what distinguishes these narrative elements is that they simultaneously embody difference and similarity through their symbolic qualities, in much the same way that genres in general rely for their effectiveness and appeal on a play of resemblance, repetition, and differences. As Adam Roberts states: “The novum acts as a symbolic manifestation of something that connects it specifically with the world we live in” (2006: 14). Indeed, its appeal derives not only from its alien elements, but from the readers’ recognition of its critical, satirical, or political qualities in relation to their own communities and the wider world. So an Archbuilder may be bewilderingly alien, at least on first sight, but it achieves part of its symbolic power as an embodied expression of grief, of a world altered irrevocably by the loss of a loved one—in this case Pella Marsh’s mother, Caitlin. In this respect, the novum functions much like Tóibín’s “as though”: in its simultaneous similarity and difference, it addresses the problem that, Fredric Jameson suggests, potentially attends utopian science fictions: that the assertion of “radical difference from what currently is” may render utopia “not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable” (Jameson, 2005: xv). The point of “as though” is precisely that it is imaginable. As these prefatory observations make clear, it is in their determination to see Brooklyn as a transnational space—one defined by movement, plurality, difference, process—that these three texts are most similar. Brooklyn becomes not a fixed space but one of “those diverse mobilities that, through multiple senses, imaginative travel, movements of images and information, virtuality and physical movement, are materially reconstructing the ‘social as society’ into the ‘social as mobility’” (Urry, 2000: 2). Moreover, all these novels refuse to dissolve into traditional, romantic notions of “community” as something stable, natural, pastoral, utopian, and, most importantly, associated with a past that preexists or is antithetical to the demands of contemporary capital. Nor do they trade in the facile oppositions between Manhattan and Brooklyn deployed in some other Brooklyn fictions such as Solos and, to a lesser extent and with more redeeming

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metafictional irony, Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999). As we have seen, such texts make use of the ideological opposition of “country” and “city” analyzed by Raymond Williams. They frequently cast Manhattan as superficially glamorous yet tawdry, obsessed with newness at the expense of an edifying historical sense, driven by global consumerism and the desire for financial gain rather than “traditional” Brooklyn imperatives such as community, family, and local shared culture. The novels under consideration in this chapter choose to undermine, or in the case of Girl in Landscape ignore, this opposition. In Geographies of Home, Papito’s customary dismissal of Manhattan as “Sodom and Gomorrah” (Pérez, 1999: 9) is merely a tic caused by his constraining religious beliefs and another means of ignoring the demoralization of his family’s life in Brooklyn. In Tóibín’s story, Eilis is disappointed to find, like the protagonists of Leaving Brooklyn and Brookland, that things are no “less broken down and dismal than they seemed to her sometimes in Brooklyn” (2009: 117). Following the work of Miranda Joseph in Against the Romance of Community, I have been suggesting that the chief reason the Manhattan–Brooklyn dichotomy collapses is that community, far from being separable temporally, spatially, and conceptually from global capital, is constituted by it and relies on capital’s legitimation of social hierarchies and differences. The “notions of purity” (Joseph, 2002: xxv) upon which traditional, naturalized, romantic conceptions of community are founded themselves rely on perceived oppositions which are actually constitutive, so that self is never pure and always-already incorporates the other. Such an awareness can help to undermine the “fantasies of communion” at the heart of romantic notions of community (2002: xxvi) and help interpellated subjects resist the definitions of community produced by configurations of power. This is, of course, difficult to achieve because it is hard to adopt a position “outside” contemporary capital and, as Slavoj Žižek has famously observed, hard even to conceive of an alternative to a system that is so pervasive, so powerful, and so apparently real and natural (2006: 301). The remainder of this chapter explores the ways in which these three novels display an awareness of community’s complicity with capital and suggest means of, if not outright resistance or rebellion, at least survival within the system through a renewed perception of selfhood and otherness. That these renewed perceptions are achieved through multivocality, generic transformations, generative metaphors, and through challenges to accepted senses of reality and realism is important: as has been stressed throughout this study, the novel’s elasticity and its capacity for embracing different forms and genres, allowing them contrapuntally to interact with each other, are strengths that suit it to the

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depiction of complex ideas such as “community.” And as Aliki Varvogli explains: “The novel’s capacity to create microcosms and offer concrete manifestations of abstract notions further allows us to appreciate the fluidity” of “competing terms” like “subjectivity,” “space,” and “time” (2012: xvi). This is not to say that any given novel automatically will assume a deconstructive or resistant position to conventional notions of place, time, and identity. As I have shown, some Brooklyn novels betray a conservative attitude in their attempts to shore up an ideal of sovereign, bounded selfhood and communities strictly policed by ethnic, economic, and cultural divisions, and their refusal to entertain the possibility of mobility and historical change. However, Brooklyn novels with transnational characters, as one might expect, frequently employ formal, generic, and metaphorical strategies to highlight identities, and by extension communities, that are mobile, tactical, and liable to change. In so doing, they remind the reader of narrative’s intrinsically ethical quality. (Even the novels of Michael Stephens, which depict extremes of defensive marginality and rigid adherence to family ties, employ such strategies in order to critique their subjects and hint at alternative outlooks.) To examine these strategies in Geographies of Home, Brooklyn, and Girl in Landscape is to discover surprising points of convergence. These include a shared interest in the “new subjectivities” (Kaplan, 1996: 142) engendered by migration; an understanding of how transnational forms of community arise “in the appropriation of the global by the local” and through a cosmopolitanism derived from mobility (Delanty, 2003: 158); and a refusal to romanticize either the “homeland” or the place of arrival.

The unknowable community—Geographies of Home Although Iliana is the closest thing to a protagonist in Geographies of Home, in the sense that the broadest narrative trajectory describes her education in the complexities of “home” as a feeling, the narrative perspective constantly shifts so that our identification with Iliana is at every stage challenged by the views of Aurelia, Papito, Tico, Rebecca, and even the palpably damaged and unstable Marina. To cite the most troubling example: as Marina, just before her brutal attack on her sister, adduces the evidence for Iliana’s masculinity—“the lack of sexual tension” between Iliana and her friend Ed (who happens to be gay); the sister’s “meager breasts, long arms and massive hands, thin legs and knobbly knees” (1999: 276)—the reader is robbed of the anchor of an omniscient narrator who can provide assurance that what appears to be mounting empirical evidence

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is in fact delusion. The author has particular political reasons for adopting this strategy: “We tend to want an authoritative narrator, one capable of interpreting the lives about which we read. Yet, for good or bad I refuse to provide such a narrator and leave it to readers to decide what are the essential truths or realities within the text. I do this because I want the act of reading to be as disconcerting for the reader as living life is for the characters, who, being immigrants, can take little for granted and are perpetually forced to reevaluate not only their lives but reality as well” (qtd. in Candelario, 2004: 77). Whether or not one has any sympathy for Marina, or finds her behavior appalling, her perception has to be granted some measure of autonomy in a narrative lacking an overarching authority. The reader, caught up in a community of narrating voices by no means in harmony, is challenged to face “the ethical consequences of narrating a story and fictionalizing persons and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process” (Newton, 1995: 11). Mariangela Palladino’s analysis of Toni Morrison’s Love (2003) applies equally well here. The “use of polyphonic narration, implying a number of intersubjective relations that eschew signification and mimesis, involves the reader in the making of the story” (2012: 336). Just as migrant characters in transnational fictions are forced to reevaluate their sense of self and their position within the communities in which they participate, so the reader is encouraged to engage in similar reevaulations. This lack of an authoritative, objective voice has multiple implications for characters, readers, and their communities. Quite obviously, it represents an undermining of a singular authority in ways appropriate to and consistent with the poetics and politics of post-colonial writers. Additionally, it challenges Raymond Williams’ conception of a novel as a “knowable community” by literally “disconcerting” it, by pulling it apart, unsettling it, and by denying us a reliable voice through which the community can become knowable. Though he appreciates that individual perception plays its part, Williams nonetheless believes that the “novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (1973: 163). Even if, to use Williams’ extended example, Jane Austen’s class identification and consanguinity with her characters achieves a “unity of idiom” (1973: 169) unavailable to George Eliot, who tends instead to ventriloquize characters with lower economic status, there remains the sense in both authors’ work that the community depicted, with class conflicts or without, is somehow recognizable and, indeed, conducive to representation by conventional realist literary means. In contrast, the community engendered in the process of reading Pérez’s narrative is inherently unstable, shifting between points of view, enacting the instability of individual identities, social and familial

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groupings, and thereby reflecting a subjectivized Brooklyn at times composed of “hard concrete and looming buildings” (Pérez, 1999: 23), at others “imbued with the warmth of a Caribbean sun magically transported to New York” (1999: 30). It is a Brooklyn, in ways that provoke an ethical response from characters and readers alike, inherently unknowable and, in the terms Fredric Jameson details in “Cognitive Mapping,” inauthentic: in the denial of “the fullness of the scene” arises the possibility of negotiating new understandings of community based less on social hierarchy and more on multiplicity. As it is in the majority of Brooklyn fictions, the borough in Geographies of Home is notably diverse: in another scene reminiscent of March’s observations on the elevated train in A Hazard of New Fortunes, Iliana observes a povertystricken family from the subway platform and then finds relief in “the faces of the people around her” on the train, “belonging to Italian, Polish and Asian Americans who boarded the train in Queens and deeper inside Brooklyn, then to African, Caribbean, Latin Americans and, finally, Hasidic Jews” (1999: 71). Yet the narrative technique, which refuses to privilege one perspective over another, means that Brooklyn is much more than a place to be celebrated for its ethnic mixing. Seen from Marina’s (and as we shall see shortly Aurelia’s) unique viewpoint, it becomes a shape-shifting, amorphous place where supposedly knowable categories—nationalities, races, historical periods, sexualities— mingle in ways liable to evade recognition at any moment. When Marina, for example, leaves the “shifting walls” of her parents’ house, seeking to escape “the instability of their home” (1999: 83), she seeks out a house with which she has become obsessed in a more affluent neighborhood. Gazing at its “windows on all sides,” the “densely foliated area,” and the “weathered oak” behind the fence (surely another acknowledgment of Betty Smith’s enduring influence), she “finally believe[s] Brooklyn had once been mostly farmland” (1999: 84). As past and present commingle, she transports herself eidetically into the house, climbing the stairs, greeting “a loving husband,” and finding herself, slimmer and more beautiful, in front of “an oval mirror” clutching “silk, brocades and linens” (1999: 85). Her immigrant history, she imagines, intertwines with that of the original occupants, “forming an extensive network of roots that assured her she too belonged as surely as did the oak outside” (1999: 85). On the one hand, this is an act of imaginative squatting and a pathetic fantasy of a better life. On the other hand, it is a compelling image of hybridity and a sense of community that transcends race, class, and temporal boundaries, standing in stark contrast to the parents’ living room which, to Iliana, seems “a version of what her parents believed a rich person’s house, or at least an American’s, might

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look like” (1999: 30). Certain economic and cultural expectations—the need to become “American” (whatever that means), the need to find a supportive, solvent husband, the need to conform to normative gender roles—are undermined by this shape-shifting view of Brooklyn community. It may be madness, in Marina’s case, but it is also a revealing form of visionary magic. And it is magic, finally, that is the most powerful metaphor for an understanding of home or community or identity that evades expectations, and that is liberatingly unstable in the way that certain fixed communities in the novel, such as the Adventist Church with its misogynist sermons, can never be. Beginning with Aurelia’s disembodied voice summoning Iliana in her dreams back to Brooklyn (1999: 2) and culminating in the mother’s brutal voodoo murder of Rebecca’s abusive husband Pasión (1999: 255), magic is an integral part of the family’s life, indeed the one reality that demands to be accepted from any number of the narrative perspectives. Magical realism, as Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris argue, “is a mode suited to exploring [. . .] and transgressing [. . .] boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic” (1995: 4). Here the presence of magic, whether benign or brutal, ensures that reality is “an ever-shifting and precarious realm” (Pérez, 1999: 309). Moreover, in an immigrant environment where the demands of the so-called American Dream are powerful and where, as Miranda Joseph has it, post-Fordist narratives of “flexible specialization” suggest that “capitalism [. . .] addresses us in our cultural particularity” (2002: 17), thereby exploiting diversified communities, magic enables the individual to, as it were, stay one step ahead of the game by rendering that “cultural particularity” endlessly elusive and unknowable. Shapeshifting individuals like Aurelia and Marina can be “not the same as themselves,” to evoke Joseph’s evocative phrase once again. Most of all, magic helps recreate “home” not as geographical space, or even as family (Iliana is determined, at the close of the novel, to leave the family home once again), but as “a frame of mind able to accommodate any place as home” (1999: 137) and, Iliana finally realizes, as accumulated individual experience, no matter how traumatic: “She would leave no memories behind. All of them were her self. All of them were home” (1999: 321). Another writer from Hispaniola, Edwidge Danticat, challenges conventional notions of empirical reality through forms of magic accepted as real by her characters. This is especially true of the female characters in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), nearly all of whom have suffered some kind of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of lovers, family members, and the malevolent foot soldiers of Haiti’s Tonton Macoute. First-person narrator Sophie’s grandmother

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claims that “all of us have the gift of the unseen” (1994: 229). This gift allows for occult connections between people, the formation of emotional and psychic communities uninhibited and unbounded by the main geographical spaces included in the novel—Haiti, Brooklyn, and Rhode Island. As the grandmother says: “If your soul is linked with someone, somehow you can always feel when something is happening to them” (1994: 152). This is one example of the doubling that is so important to the lives of these women. What is remarkable about this facility is its apparent appropriation from members of the sadistic dictatorship: “Following in the voudou tradition, most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives” (1994: 156). Haitian women put this doubling magic to more benign uses in order to engender solidarity and work through trauma together. (This is despite the fact, as David Cowart argues, that the abusive patriarchal system has been so thoroughly assimilated and naturalized that the “custodians” of the system of testing for virginity so many Haitian women endure are women themselves [2006: 136].) Lying in bed with her partner Joseph in Providence, Sophie thinks about her traumatized mother back in Brooklyn: “I would visit her every night in my doubling and, from my place as a shadow on the wall, I would look after her and wake her up as soon as the nightmares started, just like I did when I was home” (1994: 200). Though the novel includes straightforward comments on similarities between Brooklyn and Haiti, notably in the streets along Flatbush Avenue and the Creole spoken there (1994: 50), doubling in Breath, Eyes, Memory, as it is in Geographies of Home, is much more than a matter of simple geographical and cultural correspondences. It suggests a personal life “readily understood and lived in its communal dimension, as an effect and a mediation of more impersonal forces and larger collective histories” (Heffernan, 2000: 179), and thus it describes communities of interiority nonetheless affected by material circumstances. Fredric Jameson, who makes some general claims about the linking of private and public in third-world culture (1986: 69), describes magical realism as an “alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism” (1986: 301). This is because while postmodernism is “the cultural correlate of the universal reach of commodity relations in first-world societies” (Heffernan, 2000: 180), magic realism, according to Jameson, is inherently disjunctive and implies the simultaneous existence of “precapitalist” and capitalist modes of production (1986: 311). Although it is inspired by “the destruction of older communities and collectivities [. . .] it may also be understood as the conquest of new kinds

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of relationships with history and with being” (1986: 321). As Nick Heffernan correctly points out, Jameson’s arguments, though consistent with his interest in space and politics, as well as the political implications of genres and fictional modes, rely on too clean a separation of first-world and third-world forms in terms of before and after, and too ready an “othering” of the latter for specific political reasons. Some of the characteristics of magic realist fictions Jameson highlights, notably continuities between private and public realms, are just as likely, Heffernan contends, to be found in so-called first-world fictions in a time of “global economic recomposition” and a post-Fordist “intensification of the production of uneven development within the metropolitan core” (Heffernan, 2000: 180). In transnational stories such as Geographies of Home and Breath, Eyes, Memory, the distinction between third-world and first-world fiction is rendered meaningless, in any case; doubling, magic, powerful intuitions and unspoken connections between souls should not be seen in these novels as evidence of vestigial pre-capitalist ways of being (a view potentially as spatialized and romantic as those Miranda Joseph critiques) but as evidence of evolving transnational, global consciousnesses, caught up in and precipitating processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Balancing the books—Brooklyn Unless one counts the lightly satirized Catholic sorcery in the form of “the miracle of the turkey and the ham” (Tóibín, 2009: 88) served up to the destitute “leftover Irishmen” (2009: 84) by Father Flood and his helpers at Christmas, magic is absent from the Brooklyn of Tóibín’s novel. Yet, I argue, it is very much concerned with its own forms of doubling and shape-shifting (though not traumatically induced ones). In fact, one might consider its central metaphor of double-entry bookkeeping an even more ingenious and powerful repudiation of fixed, normative categories of community because it is a metaphor drawn specifically from capital, and one precisely historicized. Set in the burgeoning consumerist United States of the 1950s, the novel chooses the locations in which Eilis lives, studies, and works deliberately to highlight the strategy of “flexible specialization” increasingly in operation at the time. In Bartocci’s department store, in particular, we see how consumer capital begins to undo “the rigidities of national economic regulation and mass production” (Joseph, 2002: 147) and starts attending to people in their particularity. When Eilis starts work, Miss Bartocci informs her: “Brooklyn

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changes every day [. . .] New people arrive and they could be Jewish or Irish or Polish or even coloured. Our old customers are moving out to Long Island and we can’t follow them, so we need new customers every week. We treat everyone the same. We welcome every single person who comes into this store” (2009: 59). Brooklyn’s shape-shifting is here seen wholly in terms of marketable categories, and it is slightly disingenuous to say that every customer is treated the same. Later Miss Bartocci grandly declares: “We’re going to welcome coloured women into our store as shoppers” and adds, as if this approach to product marketing were a self-evident universal truth: “Coloured women want Red Fox stockings and we are selling them” (2009: 110). Despite Miss Bartocci and Miss Fortini’s request that politeness be shown to all customers regardless of color, it becomes clear that the Red Fox stockings will be kept at a separate counter, discreetly removed from the suspicious eyes of more established customers. And the “big Irish smile” with which Eilis is required to accompany every transaction (2009: 60) is yet another commodity on offer (like Jay Gatsby’s theatrical smile) but one conceived in an antiquated notion of national characteristics no longer applicable in this immigrant environment where the smallest gesture, action, or object is transfigured. Given this context, double-entry bookkeeping might appear a strange method of resistance to or critique of community formation through capital. What is described as “the simple matter of writing down in an ordinary ledger all money going into the bank and all money going out” (2009: 79) suggests rigidity, a balancing of the books designed to maintain order and sustain economic power structures. Yet in this novelistic context, where the obvious pun on “bookkeeping” resonates throughout as a constant reminder that the novel itself, following Bakhtin, is a dialectical process, it achieves a metaphorical status more to do with inner equilibrium and the delicate balancing of disparate personal experiences than with the cold exigencies of finance. Considered alongside the letters to and from Ireland that constitute the other form of correspondence in the novel, it stands as a means by which Eilis (and indeed Brooklyn) can embrace a transnational identity. Throughout the story, a kind of typology is at work, with events in Ireland and events in Brooklyn mirroring each other and achieving a balance. For instance, the cash system at Bartocci’s is the same as the one at “Bolger’s in Rafter Street at home” (1999: 61); in addition, the brief romance she shares with Jim Farrell after returning to Ireland upon hearing news of her sister Rose’s death corresponds to her relationship with Tony in Brooklyn, even down to the last-minute proposal of marriage before her departure (1999: 241).

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As Eilis readily acknowledges, it is not always easy to balance the books, especially when one has to take into account “all the details of an annual life of a company” (2009: 195), but the aspiration to do so serves as a powerful metaphor of transnational relations, of departures and arrivals, of symmetries and differences, and of the ways in which Brooklyn is only legible in relation to what has been left behind, just as Ireland is newly remodeled by Eilis’ American experience. It is no coincidence that Eilis first begins to appreciate Brooklyn’s beauty, “the trees in leaf, the people in the street, the children playing, the light on the buildings” (2009: 155), when she receives the letter confirming that she has passed her first set of bookkeeping exams. Having successfully started to balance the books, both literally and metaphorically, she is able to feel more at home. And “home,” as it is in Geographies of Home, is a flexible psychological conception, something internalized. At her lowest ebb, Eilis feels nothing in Brooklyn to be “part of her” (2009: 67). As she leaves Ireland at the close of the novel, she is able to hold thoughts of past and future, Ireland and Brooklyn, Jim and Tony simultaneously in her head, home now being a hybrid of the two, an evolving transnational consciousness. Moreover, the ending is characterized by uncertainty and unknowability because it is couched in a modal future tense: “‘She has gone back to Brooklyn’, her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself ” (2009: 252). The significance of this delicately evasive passage is twofold. First, the curious blend of present perfect and future tenses further undermines any notion that Ireland is somehow “before” and Brooklyn “after”; the supplementarity between the two locations that has pertained throughout the novel has already destabilized a simple temporal hierarchy. Secondly, the precise “meaning” of return to Brooklyn, or indeed of “Brooklyn” itself, is withheld so that its subjectivity is emphasized and certain demands placed on the reader to arrive at a provisional understanding. Deliberately inconclusive and open, the ending suggests that the book (also called Brooklyn) is never really closed, that accounts always need to be tended to, and that to try and close the book unthinkingly is to fall prey to a notion of identity and community as fixed and resolved, rather than always in process. Both Geographies of Home and Brooklyn resist any notion of assimilation as an achievable or desirable endpoint, a state of replete “Americanness” at which the process of community ends. Both suggest that “assimilation—cleaving to the hope of an ‘American Dream’—is no longer at the heart of the immigrant

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story. Instead of shedding the trappings of the home culture and throwing himself headlong into the work of Americanizing, the protagonist of the contemporary immigrant novel [. . .] is more concerned with his or her dual identity as it manifests itself in America and in the shrinking global community” (Friedman, 2008: 112). Tóibín’s strategy is particularly shrewd; without focusing on the isolationist “paranoids, drunks, wife-beaters, bigots and religious and sexual neurotics” (McCaffrey, 1992: 43) inhabiting the pages of novels by James Carroll, Jimmy Breslin, and, as we have seen, Michael Stephens, he nonetheless destabilizes notions of assimilation and homogeneity even in the novel’s historical setting, when postwar optimism was conducive to such ideologies. It is, in Natalie Friedman’s phrase, a “contemporary immigrant novel” but one which resonates back through time. In both Pérez and Tóibín’s work, the questioning of assimilation stems partly from recognition of the supplementary relationship between self and other, and the resulting multiplicity of selfhood. In Julia Kristeva’s evocative terms: “we are our own foreigners, we are divided” (1991: 181). Such a view of selfhood disallows the other forms of assimilation examined in previous chapters: the construction of monolithic identities in opposition required for frontier-based visions of urban communities; and the assimilation of diversity into the personalized aesthetic vision of the picturesque.

Brooklyn goes to outer space—Girl in Landscape The final text under consideration, Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, takes the idea of community as process even further and travels further than any previous examples in this book from the geographical specificities and “local color” of Brooklyn, and from ideals of assimilation. Lethem has stated in interview that when it comes to Brooklyn he considers himself “a regional writer, testifying about a place I’m helpless not to think of, to dream of ” (Birnbaum, 2005). However, the analysis of The Fortress of Solitude in Chapter 6 suggested strongly that his preoccupation with the borough does not inspire regionalist literature in any traditional sense, but more a literature self-consciously exercised by the differing uses to which Brooklyn as a real or imagined space is put, and keen to interrogate the romanticizing impulses behind the creation of urban communities. Moreover, the treatment of race in Fortress implies an extended joke on the idea of “local color.” On the surface, Girl in Landscape appears to carry few of the hallmarks of classic American regionalism. For a start, it is set primarily on the Planet of the Archbuilders, with their frond-like

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hair and their habit of adopting bizarre yet strangely poetic English collocations for names, such as “Hiding Kneel” (1998: 61). (These names might be dismissed as whimsical if they did not speak to the underlying theme, the collision of differences.) Yet, in chronicling the arrival of human settlers on the planet, and their subsequent relationships with the Archbuilders, the novel does reflect an enduring regionalist theme: the effect on a community of the arrival of outsiders. In this case, the outsiders are the Marsh family, evacuees from a blighted Planet Earth of the future. And like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Leaving Brooklyn it is a coming-of-age narrative, a story of how a young girl achieves adulthood through hardship and calls upon her community for support. Here, however, a community is not yet established; it is on the brink of foundation, at a stage of frontier encounter. Girl in Landscape is a Brooklyn fiction, though one in which the borough undergoes a radical transposition. Here, past and future, earth and space, reality and fantasy, all collapse in a genre-twisting meditation on the reconciliation of inner impulses and the formation of a community from melancholic fragments. In this novel, Brooklyn is, to revise the sentiments of Brooklyn Follies, “not New York” and also not of this earth. Yet Lethem has admitted that after the outlandish fictions of his first three novels, his fourth novel initiates a sort of homecoming and a confrontation with his past: For years, I was overwhelmed by Brooklyn [. . .]. The richness of my own upbringing was too much for me to contend with, either in my life or my writing, and so I was in a kind of flirtation. When you see me going back in the first couple of chapters of Girl in Landscape, you’re seeing me daring myself to open that box and really let it come. (Zeitchik, 2003: 37)

In these opening chapters, we meet the Marsh family who, after the father’s electoral defeat and the loss of his political reputation, are set to emigrate to the Planet of the Archbuilders. Before leaving, they embark on one last family outing to the beach, traveling by subway through the shattered urban topography and under the blasted skies of a futuristic Brooklyn. Global warming has reached its logical conclusion. The sun is now “the enemy: horrible, impossible, unseeable” (1998: 9). Pella, the teenage protagonist, is nonetheless reluctant to leave Brooklyn, and her fears are compounded by the sudden death from a brain tumor of her mother, Caitlin. Given that Lethem’s mother died in 1978 when he was 14, and that the absent mother theme is reprised in both Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, one has to regard Caitlin’s departure as the pivotal moment not just

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in the narrative of Girl in Landscape but in Lethem’s writing career. It is the first direct attempt to “open the box” of his autobiography. For Lethem, as for Pella, Brooklyn is inextricably connected to the loss of the mother. However, Lethem’s technique here is to relocate and re-imagine the maternal Brooklyn in the Planet of the Archbuilders, a surreal and melancholic landscape littered with ancient ruins from former Archbuilder civilizations. As fragmented as the Brooklyn left behind, this is a “landscape of remembrance” (1998: 49) not just because the ruins are testimony to the ambitious creativity of previous generations, but also because Pella envisages it as a maternal landscape. “Caitlin had left but was still here,” we are informed; “[h]er voice hung over this landscape” (1998: 49, 48). Girl in Landscape is a kind of frontier narrative, as I have suggested, which deals with the evolution of community through the settlement of disparate individuals. What distinguishes it from more traditional frontier narratives, however, and from the stark and unbreachable frontiers depicted in early gentrification novels, is not simply the alien environment, but the way in which the alien landscape speaks simultaneously of the mourned past and of the optative future, as well as linking personal and collective concerns. For Pella, the development of the new community is co-terminous with certain traditional elements of the comingof-age narrative (in this case the rejection of paternal authority), and with her personal project to externalize the mourning of her mother in the landscape. These symbolic connections are confirmed by her culminating verbal rejection: “‘He’s nothing without my mother.’ The words snuck out of her like a thread between her lips, a betraying filament that stretched back to Brooklyn, to Pineapple Street” (1998: 240). Here for the first time, the symbolic linking of her former home and the alien landscape is explicitly acknowledged. Pella’s aim is thus to become “a feature of the landscape” (1998: 173), but this is not a form of retreat. Rather, it signals her awareness of what the landscape represents: a chance to reassemble the scattered fragments of memory in the establishment of a new community, to alter their function from nostalgia to the possibilities of new connections. The town of “Caitlin” she founds at the close of the novel is her maternal Brooklyn reimagined, the culmination of the mourning process (1998: 279). While Pella might appear to fabricate a myth-symbol complex every bit as incorporative and inwardly focused as Emily Lime’s in Solos, or the Cooles’ in Season at Coole, there is, in fact, a fundamental redeeming difference. Whereas Solos’ nostalgia for the present requires a denial of what came before—thus locating it in a mythic tradition which includes Thomas Cole’s Essay on American Scenery and Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis—Pella recognizes the importance of the indigenous inhabitants, the Archbuilders, in the development

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of the new community. In an obvious allegory of the encounter with Native Americans (and, perhaps, of contemporary immigration issues), Girl in Landscape envisages the new Brooklyn as a process of continual meetings with absolute otherness, a transgression of the boundaries of the self. Pella faces stiff competition in the form of Efram Nugent (inspired by Ethan, John Wayne’s character in The Searchers). The novel pits Pella against Efram, one view of community against another. Spoken about before his first appearance with a mixture of awe and fear, and known initially to the Marsh children only as a set of rigid preferences (1998: 72), Efram, as the original settler, already seems to have achieved integration with the landscape. When Pella first spots him, “a silhouette against the pink” of the sky, he is “almost like another of the broken arches on the horizon” (1998: 80): his crooked smile, when he flashes it, is described as “carved in rock” (1998: 81). And his farm, unlike the other settlements that “[cling] to the floor of the valley like shells on a beach,” seems to have “carved out a portion of the planet” (1998: 98). Indeed, such are Efram’s charisma and monumentality that Pella senses immediately that she might be inclined to attribute too much power and importance to him: “It seemed mistakes of scale were possible in this alien landscape [. . .] Efram Nugent could seem too big, out here. She wanted him adjusted, made smaller” (1998: 81). If one considers the connections between local and global this book has pursued, then it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that the treatment of “mistakes of scale” is one of its most important aims: to realize that the personal is intimately related to the collective, and the local to the global, is to reassess “the very meanings of scales and spaces” (Joseph, 2002: 174). In this sense, Efram and his looming presence in the landscape perform a synecdochal function for Pella and for the reader in a novel where transnationalism is transfigured into transglobalism. Efram’s granite masculinity provides a foil to Clement’s liberal, accommodating version, and Pella’s denunciation of paternal authority is balanced with the necessity of also making Efram “smaller,” of not allowing a monolithic ideology to expand and therefore exclude alternative views of how the community should proceed. This is not simply a question of overcoming her sexual attraction to him, though this is an important aspect of the story, but of coming to understand that his view of life on the planet is antiquated, too monolithic, too driven by frontier metaphors of separation and irreconcilable difference. (“Not everybody turns out to like breaking new ground,” he observes [1998: 106].) Although he speaks Archbuilder languages (1998: 151) and has reconstructed an Archbuilder interior in his main room (1998: 175), Efram’s opinion of the remaining indigenous population is entirely negative. Regarding them as passive

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“fools” (1998: 106) who have let the glories of former civilizations collapse, and as “sexual deviants” (1998: 180) who fail to make distinctions between children and adults (1998: 150), Efram advocates a separatist, species-specific approach to community building in the valley. As he explains to Clement: “I think we ought to draw a line around this town we’re starting here, Marsh. Make it a human settlement, a place where kids are safe” (1998: 114). These opinions lead directly to the nightmare of accusation and retribution which ensues after Archbuilder Truth Renowned and the artist Hugh Merrow are discovered to be having a relationship (1998: 122). First Efram kidnaps Truth Renowned (1998: 141), then Merrow’s house is burnt down (1998: 208) and eventually Efram is shot dead by Doug Grant after Pella, in a desperate bid to nullify Efram’s threat, forces Morris Grant to accuse him of raping her (1998: 273). At heart, Efram’s sentiments imply a nostalgic elevation and circumscription of the “legitimate past” described by Elizabeth Gumport (2009); a separation from the present that precludes progress in its denial of continuities; and a rigid adherence to a narrow, subjective vision of authenticity. In glorifying the departed ancestors of the Archbuilders, Efram refuses to acknowledge the reality and the importance of those that remain; appropriately, it is the Archbuilder Hiding Kneel who is perspicacious enough to remind Pella just how close her hagiography of Caitlin comes to Efram’s attitude: “So you too are concerned with the superiority of your lost ancestors,” said Hiding Kneel [. . .] “Caitlin isn’t my ancestor,” said Pella. “She’s my mother.” “Yet you speak of her as legendary, like my departed fore-cousins,” said Hiding Kneel. (1998: 240)

Efram is inclined to talk in tired tropes of legendary frontier heroism: while criticizing the current Archbuilders for “picking through their own memories of greatness” (1998: 180), he succumbs to the same romanticization of the past when he refers to “the real frontier” of the stars to which the former Archbuilders emigrated (1998: 180). His metaphors are all about division, exclusion, and opposition. Most damaging of all is Efram’s insistence on privileged knowledge, based on his status as the first human pioneer. In response to Clement’s earnest ambitions to “[w]ork together with the Archbuilders,” to “come to a real understanding of their culture and biology” (1998: 218), Efram disparagingly says, “[b]e

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more specific, Mr. Marsh [. . .] Some of us have a good understanding of the Archbuilders” (1998: 219). Precisely this misplaced confidence in his knowledge inspires Efram to impose his personal brand of frontier metaphor on the nascent community. Pella comes to realize, soon after Hiding Kneel has warned her of her fixation on the past, just what an impediment to the formation of a working society Efram’s presence has been: “There is no town, thought Pella. There never was one. There had always only been Efram and whatever he wanted. A frontier, a prison, a fire” (1998: 257). His vision, which he believes takes in “the fullness of the scene,” is here reduced to a list of generic elements, all of which connote separation and destruction. In one sense, then, the founding of “Caitlin” represents not only the culmination of Pella’s mourning process, but also her victory over Efram in the battle to metaphorize the landscape. However, what distinguishes Pella’s view from Efram’s is her acceptance that nobody can know “the whole truth” about Archbuilders (1998: 66). Hers is a material metaphor of inclusion, one which sees the irreducibly different and aspires to meet with it as best it can. Rather than explaining, rationalizing, and thus dismissing the Archbuilders like Efram, Pella accepts that the new community is founded on negotiations, on alterity, compromises, and uncertainties. It is only through this acceptance that the past and the present (and therefore a possible future) can be reconciled and the mourning process completed for her. Pella ultimately distinguishes herself ethically, and truly comes of age, when she realizes how important perceptions of the Archbuilders are: “None of what happened was really about Archbuilders, Pella decided [. . .] It was still all about the humans, what they saw when they looked at the Archbuilders [. . .] Maybe now they would meet them” (1998: 279). Breaking free of an essentially solipsistic gaze frees the settlers from a colonial or parochial mentality and allows them literally to transcend worlds in pursuit of a viable regional community. This is why Girl in Landscape, for Lethem’s purposes, demands to be set on another planet. Not only does the Archbuilders’ landscape perfectly capture how the death of a loved one renders the entire world, and any other worlds that might exist, utterly strange, utterly fragmented, and forever incomplete, it is also the perfect location for the cultural, ethical, and generic complexities of Lethem’s distinctive regionalist vision. Moreover, it enables (rather like the magical realism of Geographies of Home) the kind of “violent formal and narrative dislocation” (1991: 284) which, for Fredric Jameson, can reinvigorate a sense of historicity in a postmodern, late capitalist era characterized in part by what he calls “schizophrenic disjunction” (1991: 29). This is a breakdown of

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temporality and historicity into “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (1991: 27) brought about, to summarize very briefly, by the proliferation of empty aesthetic spectacles, by pastiche, by the ascendancy of the reified commodity and by the immediate joys of hypertextuality. As Jameson states: “Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective” (1991: 284). This is precisely how the Archbuilder landscape functions for Pella and for the reader—as a key to a renewed historical perspective, the uniting of past and future via the cognitive estrangement of the present, and thus an understanding of the historicity of her own experience and of new, ongoing community formations in contrast to the fossilized, ideological attitudes of Efram. And spectacular though it is, the landscape is not mere aesthetic spectacle. Nor is it a commodity, something to be exploited by settlers as part of a nascent capitalist economy. It is a concretized metaphor for that very historicity. As such a metaphor it is also, importantly, something that characters are therefore required to read in particular ways. Throughout Brooklyn Fictions it has been argued that formal strategies combine with thematic concerns in different novels to induce idiosyncratic ways of reading texts which also suggest ways of reading the complex communities being depicted. One might almost view books like Leaving Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead as allegories of reading approaches. In the former, Audrey’s coming of age is commensurate with the emergence of her literary perspective. In the process of reading about it, we are in effect taught how to read Brooklyn, to exercise our deviant eyes, and disassemble the skin holding together a myopic belief in romantic community values. Proceeding from the death of the author (the father), The Brooklyn Book of the Dead presents us with a multivocal, fragmented structure, shifting chronologically and in space from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs where a number of the Coole siblings now live. Our reading thus participates in a view of community not ahistorical but rhizomic, formed not by patrilinearity, but through ceaseless negotiations across history and between center and suburb, borough, and metropolis. Girl in Landscape is also about reading processes, even though entering its landscapes as a reader is by no means a comforting experience. Indeed, Pella’s isolation throughout the novel stems largely from the epistemological and ethical supplement she is afforded as the most perceptive reader of events. It is she who

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has the “lonely knowledge” that the whole truth is never available (1998: 66), but at the same time she witnesses, during a series of out-of-body experiences brought about by exposure to the planet’s native viruses, a number of secrets. These experiences constitute another concrete metaphor, this time for internal division, the potential to become a foreigner to oneself. During these episodes, the secrets Pella witnesses include her father’s affair with the biologist, Diana Eastling (1998: 166) and the artist Hugh Merrow’s sexual relationship with an Archbuilder (1998: 121–3). In bearing witness to these events “[i]t was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew” (1998: 169). Yet her transition from adolescence to adulthood, somewhat like Audrey’s, combines an awareness that reading is partly the uncovering of secrets with an understanding that, in the end, the textual landscape will always retain a certain “clandestinity” amenable to ethical reading (Newton, 1995: 246). That is, any attempt fully to “know,” or to take in “the fullness of the scene,” becomes an incorporative strategy, a desire to possess. Crucial to this understanding, once again, are the Archbuilders: their irreducible difference refuses incorporation. They function as the “anamorphic stain” which “constitutes the point from which the SF text looks back at us, radically estranging our empirical, social environment and revealing its arbitrariness, its basic fungibility” (Beaumont, 2009: 36). Within a text framed in ostensibly realist terms, in the sense that it makes very few explicit, knowing metageneric gestures and displays no experimental techniques, the Archbuilders nonetheless excite “extreme relativisation” (Beaumont, 2009: 34), not only subjectifying the act of seeing for characters such as Pella, but also breaking down the “consensus [. . .] the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text” (Ermarth, 1998: ix–x) underpinning realism. Though Girl in Landscape less explicitly challenges capital’s role in forming individual identities and communities than Geographies of Home—with its graphically depicted poverty—and Brooklyn—with its gentle satire of flexible specialization and its metaphor taken from accounting—it is in this radical relativism and undermining of consensus that the challenge of Lethem’s novel lies. On the one hand, at the narrative level, it is made evident that new economic forms are necessary on the Archbuilder planet: E. G. Wa’s store is a parody of private enterprise and cannot hope to meet the needs of native or settler. (The fact that his name is an anagram of “wage” is clearly an ironic gesture.) At the end of the novel, the children make bread with little hope of finding customers for it, and the strong suggestion, as they dig up “fresh cake and tea potatoes” from the landscape and collect eggs from Ben Barth’s chickens (1998:

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278), is that some kind of subsistence economy is likely to emerge. On the other hand, the very presence of Archbuilders disallows the kind of totalizing vision on the part of characters and readers that is the province, according to Matthew Beaumont, of both utopian fictions and the capitalism that inspires them (2009: 37). Girl in Landscape neither universalizes one viewpoint—the technique of many picturesque Brooklyn fictions, which are, as we have seen, utopian at heart—nor legitimates hierarchies among the various inhabitants. Furthermore, and most importantly, abstract value is not placed on difference for its own sake; radical diversity is not in any way commodified or seen as confirmation or consolidation of a preexisting subjective worldview, however liberal that view might appear. In fact, the fundamental unknowability of others stands always as an impediment, though an ethically productive one, to a complete understanding of a community only ever provisional in nature. In this sense, the hope that “[m]aybe the Archbuilders would buy the bread” the children bake at the end of the novel (1998: 279) is less directed at the possibility of making a profit from difference than a simple means of reaching out to the alien inhabitants and starting a process of community through an attempt at mutual understanding. The Archbuilders’ ethical challenge is symbolized by the figure of the arch itself: reading is an individual or solitary act, but to enter the landscape of “crumbled arches [. . .], [f]allen bridges, incomplete towers, demolished pillars” (1998: 48) constitutes an ethical conjunction to “explore the boundaries” (1998: 125), to become a member of a wider community founded on true difference, not superficial diversity. Such arches, though fragmented, have the potential to be connected and to connect, after all. Clearly, Lethem sees the real Brooklyn in similar terms to the Archbuilders’ landscape: “It’s a place where the renovations that are so characteristic of American life never quite work. It’s a place where the past and memory are lying around in chunks even after they’ve been displaced” (qtd. in Zeitchik, 2003: 37). Viewed in this way, it is very much a “broken land” of mourning. As this chapter has suggested, Pella’s success, and Girl in Landscape’s, lies in taking the process of private mourning—for Caitlin, and for the author’s own mother—and in forging a community from it in the foundation of “Caitlin.” Distinct from the pre-lapsarian cravings of nostalgia, or the hagiography of ancestors that is the weakness both of the Coole brothers and of the Archbuilders (1998: 241), such mourning is the recognition of the inseparability of past experience from the communal present and future. Most importantly, it lies at the heart of all reading. Every reading experience combines remembrance of stories which have passed with a series of encounters, negotiations, and inventions of

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new relationships. Therefore, Pella’s translocated maternal Brooklyn is not an atavistic utopia, but rather a communal space analogous to the work of readers: the bringing of internalized fragments of memory and experience to bear on the ethical encounter with the alien (yet strangely familiar) landscapes of the text. Though all the novels discussed in this chapter concern mobility, and all are transnational Brooklyn fictions, I am aware that some liberties have been taken, particularly in the case of Lethem’s novel, with the meaning of “transnational.” By expanding the application of the word to include the magic employed by characters in Geographies of Home; Eilis’ delicate balancing of the books, her recalibration of the everyday according to the dialectical relationship between Brooklyn and Ireland; and the interplanetary negotiations of Girl in Landscape, this chapter has demonstrated that “transnationalism” not only denotes the crossing of geographical boundaries, but connotes a reconceptualization of selfhood in community as mobile, processive, and thus unknowable in any definitive way. Raymond Williams’ notion of the novel as “knowable community” is still persuasive; if I offer an alternative coinage—the “unknowable community”—it is not to discredit his ideas, only to emphasize their perspectival, subjective aspects and to offer the argument that the most successful Brooklyn fictions are those which deliberately deny protagonists and readers access to “the fullness of the scene.” All the Brooklyns depicted in these novels are “broken lands” in various senses—in terms of poverty and familial dysfunction; in terms of transatlantic correspondence; in terms of mourning. In all cases, these Brooklyns can be taken as allegories of fragmented reading. They demonstrate that the individual needs others to complete the scene, and that the resultant community is an endless series of what Martin Buber calls “relational incident[s]” (2004: 46) in time and space rather than a fixed and bounded locality. Those Brooklyn fictions which actually stray away from local color, from signifying details, and from facile comparisons with Manhattan, dramatize the ethical endeavor involved in constructing communities, and involve the reader more directly in that endeavor. In so doing, they reconfigure Brooklyn itself as an ethical space, not simply Manhattan’s friendlier neighbor.

Conclusions and Further Thoughts

A community of writers, writing about community In Brooklyn, you can’t move for writers these days. The Spring 2013 edition of Brooklyn magazine features “A Brooklyn Web of Literary Connection.” This is a parodically complex family tree of authors multiply connected by, among other arbitrary criteria, whether they have been National Book Award finalists; whether they attended Brooklyn College; whether they were involved in N + 1 magazine; whether, like Jonathan Lethem, they have now been “exiled” from New York; and whether, like Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri, they are “post-colonial Commonwealthers” (2013: 8–9). In interview, Paul Auster mentions with evident glee that Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss live just up the road from him.1 Though it has not been the focus of this book, the fact that the borough is full of writers is now as much part of its mythology as the Dodgers. Given the sheer density of writers living in Brooklyn these days, it was perhaps inevitable that a novel devoted entirely to its literary community should be published. Nate, the protagonist of Adelle Waldman’s debut The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013), has not yet achieved the acclaim and adulation of an Auster or a Foer, but he has received a sizeable advance on his debut novel and is rapidly building a reputation. All his friends and acquaintances are writers, too (indeed, “the whole publishing industry lives in Brooklyn” [Waldman, 2013: 47]): some of them are struggling with first novels and earning money through reviews and reports, others, like Greer Cohen, author of a sexually charged memoir, seem destined for even greater success than Nate and therefore attract envious derision from rivals. Connected by their chosen career and their Brooklyn location, these characters also share a tendency toward enervating self-consciousness and inward reflection. Nate, for example, is “in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience” (2013: 3) that causes

1

Personal interview with author, June 6, 2013, Brooklyn.

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him obsessively to analyze the minutiae of his interactions with Hannah, his girlfriend. He wishes that sometimes he could silence “the critical voice” in his head (2013: 169). Nevertheless, the alternative to over-analysis is even less desirable: “But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick. If Nate consulted only his ‘feelings,’ he’d fuck Hannah without regard for anything else” (2013: 43). Though much of Nate’s contemplative time is spent on personal and local concerns—the fact that he “only superficially lived among the poor” in his “unfashionable” neighborhood (2013: 62); what the interior of Hannah’s closet might reveal about contemporary womanhood (2013: 150); the troubling proximity of anger and lust in his sexual relationships (2013: 175)—he is perspicacious enough to appreciate the global implications, too. His peer group’s comfortable Brooklynite brand of “latte liberalism” (2013: 143) is symptomatic, to his mind, of “the inexorability of exploitation under capitalism” (2013: 13), the process by which conscience itself becomes commodified. To shop in Wholefoods, for example, is to pay more for “the privilege of feeling ethically pure,” to ignore the fact that the shareholders are the major beneficiaries, and to protect oneself “from feeling complicit in the economic exploitation that goes on all around us.” Conscience, Nate opines, is “the ultimate luxury” (2013: 11). Acute observations such as these prevent Waldman’s debut from lapsing into a self-satisfied (if satirical) portrayal of the milieu in which the author presumably dwells. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is not merely a realistic depiction of Brooklyn’s expanding literary crowd and its internecine squabbles; nor is it merely the kind of intense, existential examination of the tortured, solitary writer’s mind favored by Paul Auster in novels such as Oracle Night (2003). Rather, it negotiates a path between these two extremes. It takes qualities traditionally associated with the novel such as subjectivity and the dissection of inner lives and, by populating its pages with novelists predisposed to an inwardness bordering on solipsism but by no means always conducive to circumspection in public (the pontificating of Nate’s friend Jason attests to this), it tests the efficacy of these qualities in sustaining relationships and forming meaningful communities, and the ability of the thinking individual to break free from the carapace of selfhood. Moreover, it highlights the danger of extrapolating from individual experience to make general claims about groups. Nate, a novelist “devoted to humanity in the abstract” but inclined to see individuals in “an increasingly unattractive cast” (2013: 84), frequently falls into the trap of seeing others as representative, as synecdoches, or, like the characters in Rakoff ’s A Fortunate Age, as clichés. In the romantic sphere, Nate feels able to generalize: “The well-groomed, stylishly

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clad, expensively educated women of publishing found him appealing. The more his byline appeared, the more appealing they found him” (2013: 25). Later, as his relationship with Hannah begins to deteriorate, he thinks that her closet embodies “so much that was unattractive about women: mustiness, materialism, clutter” (2013: 150). Such observations are symptomatic of a failure to understand or accept the multifaceted nature of the individual which stems, in a knowing irony doubled by Nate’s presence in an acutely observed psychological novel of manners, partly from his novelist’s heightened perception of revealing characteristics and behaviors. Obliquely, then, Waldman’s Brooklyn novel, which deliberately avoids naming neighborhoods and accumulating the surface details of gentrification, comments both on novelists and on contemporary Brooklyn fictions in which a factitious sense of community—defined merely by proximity and shared careers—supersedes the requisite exploration of the individual in diverse groupings. If conscience is indeed a luxury already commodified, and the writer’s deep reflectiveness and interiority has an exchange value measured in advance payments from publishers, then the process of writing a novel, Waldman seems to suggest, is compromised from the start no matter how passionately and sincerely it is pursued. The quotation from George Eliot with which Waldman prefaces the book is illuminating: “To give a true account of what passes within us, something else is necessary besides sincerity.” Sincerity, like authenticity understood as “staying true to oneself,” is a quality of the post-Fordist marketplace of individuated consumers. Waldman suggests that the novelist is not a collector of types, but someone whose relationship with others is supplementary: close attention to others completes the self through an ironic understanding of its incompleteness and discontinuity, and opens up the possibility of community. What Waldman does share with a writer like Paul Auster, then, is a somewhat romantic (though surely admirable) belief in the possibility of communityas-process enacted in the writing moment, which is viewed as a breaching of selfhood: “Many of those late nights, when he’d paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he’d painstakingly created and could finally inhabit—moving within it from character to character, feverishly distilling into words thoughts not his own but theirs—had been ecstasies of absorption and self-forgetfulness” (2013: 142). Nate’s reflections here evince a kind of sincerity, of course, but also adumbrate Waldman’s best joke: that Brooklyn writers are most capable of community when they are not meeting face to face. Colson Whitehead, one of the authors included in the “Brooklyn web,” addresses the new mythology of Brooklyn writing with more exasperation

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than Waldman, and much more than Auster: “As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. Google ‘brooklyn writer’ and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? People are coming in from all over. In fact, the physical act of moving your possessions from Manhattan to Brooklyn is now the equivalent of a two-year M.F.A. program” (2008: 31). Whitehead’s frustration with the hype and the self-generated, self-congratulatory nature of Brooklyn’s literary reputation is perhaps understandable. However, to satirize this rapid influx of writers is to forget that they are participating in a long tradition of immigration to the borough, whatever their motives. Moreover, his attempts at demystification—“I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties” (2008: 31)—run aground on the simple fact that his very contribution to the discussion fuels the myth. And his dismissal of a “boroughspecific inspiration feeding the work of this fresh crop of writers” (2008: 31) sounds a little like the slightly disgruntled words of a literary elder statesman (though Whitehead is, at the time of writing, only 44). Most of all, his exhortation to “get over it” echoes that most Brooklynite of phrases, “fuhgeddaboudit,” and hence subscribes to some of the mythic values of the borough.

Unstable genres, moving people, and constellated communities The reader may well wonder why the author of this book has chosen not to “get over it.” During this research project I have been asked the same question a number of times by colleagues, interviewees, friends, and family. Though it has been articulated in a variety of ways, and with varying degrees of amusement, puzzlement, and irony, it can be summarized thus: “Why is a Brit so interested in Brooklyn?” There are the objective, scholarly reasons, of course, which the previous chapters explain: Brooklyn as simultaneously a part of the “world city” and a supposed exemplar of small-town, neighborhood virtues is uniquely placed to act as a case study for a discussion of community in a global age. And its constant reimagining and reinvention in literature provide the researcher with an abundance of “symbolic cues” to community formations which are, in turn, constantly being reimagined. But one might also insist that an “outsider” perspective on Brooklyn community—or, with less pejorative connotations, a transnational perspective— holds intrinsic scholarly value because it productively generates what Paul Giles

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calls the “friction” emerging from the encounter between different critical traditions. As Giles explains: “An international angle on American studies can create interference between text and context, thereby disturbing the tautological assumptions that would explain individual events through metanarratives of American consciousness” (1998: 529). If, as Giles argues, there has traditionally been in American Studies a rhetoric of individual emancipation and “selfauthenticating freedom” (1998: 526) in contrast to European cultural studies’ left-leaning concerns with ideology, multi-disciplinarity, and reflexivity, then bringing the two approaches together can subject both traditions to irony and reevaluation. A study of the over-determined and contested word “community,” and all it implies about the relationships between individuals and societies; about interactions between the local and the global; and about the very real emotional responses such debates excite, would seem a highly suitable laboratory for the transnational criticism Giles espouses. Indeed, one sees, as this study has demonstrated, such a productive collision of transatlantic ideas in Miranda Joseph’s work, which examines ideas of selfauthentication and the individual in communities using the work of, among others, Raymond Williams and Jacques Derrida. And in novels such as Geographies of Home and Brooklyn, one finds writers interrogating concepts like “home,” “community,” and “national identity” through the prism of their characters’ immigrant experience, which, as this conclusion stresses, is of particular importance to our understanding of these ideas. In their writing, as in mine, the intention is not simply to dismantle American mythological constructs of assimilation, individualism, aspiration, and self-determination, or even to derogate what I have labeled, following Miranda Joseph, the “romantic” view of community, but to reevaluate these ideas in the light of multiple mobilities and the dynamic model of identity these stimulate. “Community,” like “globalization” and “capital,” should thus be regarded as a “travelling” concept (Bal, 2002: 25), one inherently plural in nature, tending to move between disciplines and do particular work in particular contexts. Just as dynamic as these concepts is the analogous relationship between writing and reading practices and community formations. Examples from this study have included Gilbert Sorrentino’s “shiftingly prismatic and infallibly tough-minded” depiction of Bay Ridge (Howard, 2011: 148) in Steelwork and Paul Auster’s sentimental construction of Park Slope in the novel Brooklyn Follies through the accretion of anecdotes. In examining the perfectionism of Paula Fox’s descriptive prose and dialogue in Desperate Characters, which is closely equated with the obsessive attention to tasteful detail on the part of the

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pioneer gentrifiers, it has been argued that the literary text is given the exclusive interiority of a refurbished brownstone. Other examples have included Sister Souljah’s decision to insert herself as a character in The Coldest Winter Ever; and the shifts in narrative perspective within The Fortress of Solitude which highlight racial and cultural differences. But it is not only the novels’ architecture and language that serve the analogy between literature and community; it is also the fact that they raise awareness of how readers are situated in multiple communities through the act of reading. Alongside Raymond Williams’ concept of “knowable communities,” which has informed the literary analysis in this book by showing that the knowability and communicability of the urban community depends not only on size, scale, and complexity of urban formations, but also on the subjective consciousness of the writer, it is also useful to cite (as I also have done elsewhere)2 Rick Altman’s work in Film/Genre (1999). Although Brooklyn fictions, as we have seen, encompass a number of genres—coming of age, crime, romance, social realism, magical realism—and cannot be regarded as constitutive of a single, recognizable genre in themselves, Altman’s most suggestive and persuasive idea, that of “constellated communities” in genre formation, is applicable in this context because it corresponds so closely to the way Brooklyn fictions reveal community formation through symbolic, imaginative cues. Inspired by Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” Altman argues that consumers of genre texts only infrequently engage in face-to-face dialogue. Rather, “genre spectatorship more often involves constructing an image of such a group out of fragments gleaned from every possible field,” including “industry discourse [. . .] critical language, passing comments and chance encounters” (1999: 161). Altman dubs these groups “constellated communities” because “like a group of stars their members cohere only through repeated acts of imagination” (1999: 161). Simply to read a novel is to engage in “lateral communication” (1999: 162), to speak symbolically with like-minded consumers; thus, acts of reading reinforce the feeling of community and stability. Altman calls the relationship between one reader and another “secondary discursivity” (1999: 172). So to return for the last time to the question of my personal involvement in this project, I would stress that researching and writing Brooklyn Fictions has expanded my understanding of the many constellated communities in which I participate as, concurrently, a literary scholar communicating with academics

2

See my book Jonathan Lethem (Manchester University Press, 2012) for a more detailed application of Altman’s work.

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working on similar topics; a fan of certain authors; a regular visitor to Brooklyn; and thus an “outsider” who is nonetheless an active participant by means of these various discursive strands. Evidently genres and constellated communities have a symbiotic relationship: the existence of genre texts creates communities in repeated acts of reading and secondary discursivity but, importantly, it is that very discursivity which keeps genres splitting and evolving. For Altman, the inevitable inconsistency of genre definitions between members of a community is “a basic component” of reception (1999: 175). Each member of a group characterizes and defines each text differently and, as Altman explains: “Only through inconsistencies of this type can a genre be redefined through one of its subsets, thus giving rise to a new genre. It is precisely because there are no master systems but only diverse system-building paths that new generic categories remain constantly possible” (1999: 176). Moreover, this same diversity applies to community participation itself. Even though stability is imagined in the shared enjoyment of texts, it is also the case that participants are not limited to one generic community: at different times an individual may participate in different communities. Altman’s sees genre as another traveling concept—one subject to a potentially infinite number of “system-building paths,” perceived as adequately stable at the point of reader reception but inherently amorphous and adaptive precisely because of the multiple ways readers define and interpret it. It implies a notion of constellated reading communities based, as Jacques Derrida would understand it, not on belonging but on participation (1980: 65). I would maintain that it is a notion equally germane to real-life communities. If “belonging” connotes an organic state of fixity and thus exclusivity, “participation” more accurately describes the way an individual might perceive a stable-enough position within a particular grouping at a particular time, while acknowledging first that this grouping is to a significant extent constituted by other contiguous groupings, and secondly that the individual is simultaneously a participant in any number of differently imagined communities. In other words, viewing community as participation rather than belonging necessitates “a frame of mind able to accommodate any place as home” (Pérez, 1999: 137). Audrey’s idiosyncratic eyesight in Leaving Brooklyn also provides a useful metaphor. The left eye, with its “normal” vision, offers the possibility of a momentarily stabilized world; the right, with its deviant, fragmented vision, reminds us that the apparently seamless view is itself an act of consensual imagination, and reveals that the institutions in which the individual participates are highly variable.

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Community might therefore be to a great extent provisional, fragile, precarious, shape-shifting, just like the people who participate in it, but this is cause for cautious celebration. Not only are such people—not sovereign individuals but entities in constant flux—harder to locate as “niched or individuated producers and consumers” (Joseph, 2002: 22), but also the communities arising from their interaction have the potential for inclusivity and the embrace of historical change without recourse to enervating nostalgia. To emphasize further the analogy between literary text and real-life community, one might substitute the word “genre” for the word “community” in the following statement by Gary K. Wolfe: “A healthy genre, a healthy literature, is one at risk, whose boundaries grow uncertain and whose foundations grow wobbly” (2002: 27). Every community is “at risk” from the moment of its inception, its boundaries uncertain and porous: what nuanced and sophisticated Brooklyn fictions such as Brookland, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, and Geographies of Home demonstrate is that this risk is constitutive, and always has been. And rather than resisting or disavowing that risk by insisting on facile binaries—before and after, local and global, faceto-face relations and extraterritorial anonymity—they insist on a version of plural, interconnected selfhood which can transform “the very meanings of scales and spaces, redefining what counts as local, what counts as global, what we understand to be the boundaries and contents of our bodies, communities, and nations” (Joseph, 2002: 174). A brief return to a novel examined in Chapter 4 of this book provides an example. In the light of my analysis of Geographies of Home and Brooklyn in the previous chapter, both of which feature protagonists who, through migration and an understanding of constitutive otherness, arrive at an expanded idea of home and community, it is possible to appreciate the full import of certain key passages in Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies. When Nathan Glass avers that Brooklyn is “New York and yet not New York” (2005: 50), he is not simply making a facile claim to an identity distinct from Manhattan’s. Rather, his statement functions as a reminder that Brooklyn (and indeed New York City as a whole) cannot be regarded as a continuous or self-contained structure. Brooklyn’s relationship with Manhattan, the other outer boroughs, with the rest of the United States, and indeed with all the countries from which its immigrant population is drawn is, to recapitulate one of the key terms of Miranda Joseph’s argument, one of supplementarity. Joseph uses the supplement, as we have seen, to describe community’s relationship with capital, but it also provides a means of exploring inter-community relationships, deconstructing their supposed completeness and continuity. “New York and yet not New York,” from this perspective, is both

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a rather self-satisfied assertion of quirky uniqueness and a statement of crisis, a call to reassess boundaries. One of the central claims in Brooklyn Fictions, originating in the unpacking of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s deep metaphor in Leaving Brooklyn and culminating in the analysis of transnational novels, is that not only are communities discontinuous entities, unstable, and always “at risk,” but the people who participate in communities are likewise discontinuous. They are “not the same as themselves” and hence they constitute communities and social spaces “composed of elements without an essence, elements that are subject to articulation into various social/political formations” (Joseph, 2002: xxvii). Yet crucially, any attempt to articulate a social formation from such social beings always opens itself up to rearticulation because of the supplement, the constitutive exterior by which a community has to be understood. With caveats outlined in due course, I see in this view of community and selfhood a means, if not of entirely escaping capital’s attempts to address the individual in his or her particularity, at least of making the process more difficult, of ensuring that particularities are multiple, changeable, endlessly evasive. At the same time, it helps undermine the “fantasies of communion” (2002: xxvi) at the heart of so much romantic community discourse. Having proceeded from a suspicion of romantic notions of community inspired by the work of Raymond Williams and Miranda Joseph, I am aware that the version elaborated here might be interpreted as equally romantic or utopian, despite its avoidance of essences, chthonic origins, strict hierarchies. At worst, it might be caricatured as a collapse into a kind of anarchy—profoundly confused, interpellated souls unable to form even the most desultory of affiliations because they have no coherent sense from one moment to the next of who they actually are. To which I would respond by reiterating that the “symbolic cues” through which community as “a possible social reality” rather than “a real entity with physical substance and attributes” emerges (Krase, 2004: 157) enable a sense of participation which feels, at any given moment, stable enough for lived relations to occur. These symbolic cues, which include architecture, dress, visual art, literature, and, importantly, accepted patterns of behavior, combine to suggest the “horizons of significance” by which personal choice can be measured (Taylor, 1991: 39). Without them, a kind of anarchy does ensue—a preoccupation with individual authenticity and freedom as an autotelic category. What protects this vision of fluid, discontinuous participants in communities united by “horizons of significance” from accusations of romanticism is the rejection of nostalgia that has been an important theme throughout this study. It is a nonutopian vision

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because it accepts that a functioning provisionality has always been community’s best hope, and that perfect, stable communities have never existed. Moreover, romance and utopia are easily avoided when the contribution of global capital in shaping the symbolic cues to community is, conversely, so hard to avoid. In fact, reading Miranda Joseph’s conclusions one might be inclined to revert instead to a mood of pessimism. Joseph admits: “I have told what might be taken to be a very depressing story, one that might seem to close off spaces of activism by implicating community, so often the imagined basis for activism, in capitalism” (2002: 171). Too often, she argues, the romantic notion of community as spatially or temporally distinct from capital, with its implied “opposition between culture and economy” (2002: 171), denies the relationship of supplementarity. Therefore, “the two primary strategies of resistance offered to date—investment in particular local or identity-based communities and the proliferation and celebration of heterogeneity—are inadequate insofar as they participate in the constitution of community as autonomous from capital and aid capitalism in the elaboration of the differences it needs” (2002: 172). In other words, they play into capital’s hands. Especially in picturesque Brooklyn fictions like Solos, as I have shown, the inadequacy of obsessive neighborhood localism and a superficial kind of heterogeneity—one based on signs and consumer choices but which disavows capital’s role in enabling those choices—is clearly seen. Moreover, Solos attempts to posit the protagonist as a fixed point in a rapidly changing world, an individual with easily classifiable tastes and cultural demands and a definitive identity. This version of selfhood, coupled with the always-already nostalgic, historical present mode that dominates the narration, results in an all-encompassing aesthetic vision that is as homogenizing and restrictive as the luxury Manhattan loft developments the protagonist so despises. What the novel does not countenance (and what fictions such as Leaving Brooklyn, Geographies of Home, and Brooklyn do) is the change intrinsic to the self. Joseph, attempting to finish her book on a more optimistic note, calls for “a politics of scale and space that would refigure our understandings of here, of who is here with us” (2002: 174). That “here,” I maintain, includes the self in communities, a figure who is constantly, if largely unconsciously, reassessing her own scale and the spaces she occupies. It is undoubtedly true, then, that capital shapes the symbolic cues to our communities, but it works “so relentlessly and so explicitly” to this end precisely because community and its participants, as supplements to it, are “potentially disruptive and displacing” (Joseph, 2002: 172). Thriving on contradiction, capital nonetheless inevitably encourages “a great proliferation of

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sites of weakness, of contradiction and crisis”: for Joseph, “those sites are us, in our desires and discontents” (2002: 174). Though one should resist the urge to see literary texts straightforwardly “as homological expressions” (Annesley, 2006: 6) of complex material processes like globalization, capital, and community, it has been a consistent theme of Brooklyn Fictions that the novel is equipped to represent the “desires and discontents” of which Miranda Joseph writes and the contradictions and crises they engender. More than simply taking community as a subject, novels have formal features that at least shed light on and provide useful analogies for the ways in which the discourse of community evolves. Like lived communities, novels give an impression of unity through certain symbolic and structural cues: character, plot, chapter organization. But these elements, though they appear to the reader stable enough at any given moment of reception, are in a constant state of reaction and co-reaction to each other. Employing metaphors of movement and space which lend further weight to the comparison between novels and communities, Mikhail Bakhtin, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, argues that the novel undergoes constant transformation in the act of reading, as elements interact in new and unexpected ways. Much of this, of course, is beyond authorial control; in addition, it is important to remember that such complexity and fluidity (inherent to all complex systems) does not necessarily constitute a benign or utopian freedom. It is merely a kind of compelling mess, as Jonathan Lethem reminds us: There’s just too much stuff. The secret to novels, I think, is that they are a pile. They’re an accumulation. In a way they’re a journal of impressions with the kind of electricity, in a Frankenstein sense, shot through them of causality or thematic unity that seems to make the pile stand up and wobble around and do a wonderful performance. But the truth of them is that there’s too much matter there. (“Hypergraphia,” 28)

Nevertheless, writers on Brooklyn, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, frequently make conscious use of the dialogic complexity of the form in their attempts to convey community relations in the borough. For example, in Prospect Park West and Motherland Amy Sohn circles back to critical incidents and describes them from different characters’ points of view, thus emphasizing the multivocality of both the narrative and the communal relationships with which it deals. In addition, her inclusion of italicized interchapters serves as a reminder that a community involves those people we do not know just as much as those with whom we have close relationships. And Sister Souljah quite deliberately

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makes her novel an argument by placing at its heart the opposing worldviews of “Sister Souljah” and Winter Santiaga.

Brooklyn fictions/fictional Brooklyn—the magic of stories The reflexive quality of Souljah’s writing, one shared by Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Jonathan Lethem, is instructive in the context of this discussion; to make conscious literary gestures toward the fictionality of a text which is concerned with place and community is to show awareness of place and community as imagined, as subject to fictionalization (if not wholly fictitious). Moreover, it plays with the possibility that literary representations of a place contribute to its popular perception. A good example is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a novel of such influence that numerous writers have felt obliged consciously to engage with it. Some, like Solos, pay homage through evocation of the novel’s title and in shared plot elements, for example, the presence of the “sex fiend” in Smith’s novel (2000: 246) and the “Williamsburg rapist” in Florey’s (2004: 146). Others, like Geographies of Home, take the image of the tree and expand its imaginative possibilities; the “weathered oak” (1999: 84) upon which Marina gazes becomes a metaphor for a degraded pastoral vision but also for the idea of “roots” complicated by immigrant experience. These intertextual references constitute another form of reflexivity, and recognition that there exists a constellated community of writers on Brooklyn who are helping to shape the specific meanings of “community” for that place. Such a constellated community provides Blue, protagonist of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, with nothing less than the opportunity to live, to learn what it means to call a place home, to break out of his isolation: unfortunately, he does not take that opportunity. For a final illustration, it is fruitful to look at a Brooklyn novel that makes storytelling its main theme. Haley Tanner’s love story Vaclav and Lena (2011) also contains similarities to other Brooklyn fictions and specific intertextual references that locate it in constellated communities of New York and Brooklyn writers. Besides Vaclav’s obsession with Harry Houdini, which reprises the immigrant escapology theme of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), there are further examples of subway scenes in which diversity is observed from a safe distance, recalling A Hazard of New Fortunes and, more recently, Geographies of Home. For example, the chapter called “Riding on the Q Train” tells of Lena’s first trip to Coney Island, and begins “[o]n the train Lena saw” (2011: 75); the extended list which follows has a Whitmanian

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drive to inclusion shared, as we have seen, by many Brooklyn fictions. The ironic transformation of Coney Island into a place of magic is distantly related to the final scene of Sophie’s Choice, in which the rides become “bizarre spires and minarets, Gothic roofs, baroque towers” (1979: 597). Later in Tanner’s novel, a teenage Vaclav looks down from the subway platform and sees houses in which “families are loving one another in Russian and Czech and Spanish while they watch the news, and in these houses, on the stoves, the mothers are making stuffed cabbage and pollo” (2011: 140). The conceit here of a wider community united in a single panoramic gaze is familiar from the discussion of the picturesque in Chapter 5, but such allusions have another significance because they play their part in confirming the impression that Vaclav and Lena is about the literary construction of Brooklyn community, even if the sophisticated metafictional impulses are partially disguised by an ingenuous, child-like narrative voice. The eponymous characters are children of Russian immigrants who meet in an English-as-a-Second-Language Class in Brighton Beach. Although the novel follows their relationship from childhood to young adulthood (and in this respect it can be counted as another Brooklyn coming-of-age tale), the tone of questioning innocence and occasional bewilderment remains throughout, even as the true horror of Lena’s experience—the death of her guardian Radoslava Dvorakovskaya (2011: 179); the years of isolation and squalor in her aunt Trina’s apartment; and later her abuse at the hands of one of Trina’s friends (2011: 280)—is revealed. The reason for this is simple: Vaclav and Lena is about the childish wonder of storytelling, and the transformation of everyday, often brutal experience into magic. It is not the vicious fuku curse so central to Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) or Aurelia’s malevolent voodoo magic in Geographies of Home but a benevolent magic able to render life more than simply bearable. The dominant technique (appropriately enough, perhaps, for a story about the Russian community) might best be expressed by the formalist term ostranenie, described by Victor Shklovsky in “Art as Device” (1925): “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object” (1991: 12). Vaclav’s magic, then, is a form of artistic expression and allied very closely to literature. It is through his magic that the metafictional qualities of the novel are implied; magic transforms and makes unfamiliar his and Lena’s world just as the novel aestheticizes our perception of the characters’ lives.

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Yet as Vaclav’s flamboyant patter at the start of the novel suggests, this magical ostranenie is double-edged: I am Vaclav the Magnificent [. . .] born in a land far, far, far, far, far, far, far distance from here, a land of ancient and magnificent secrets [. . .] born there in Russia and reappearing here, in America, in New York, in Brooklyn (which is a borough), near Coney Island, which is a famous place of magic in the great land of opportunity (which is, of course, America), where anyone can become anything, where a hobo today is tomorrow a businessman in three-pieces-suit, and a businessman yesterday is later this afternoon a hobo. (2011: 3)

As has been the case with immature protagonists from Huckleberry Finn, the evident naivety of Vaclav’s perception, exaggerated by his linguistic errors, exposes some of the absurdities of contemporary American experience. For his apparently unblinking belief in the “American Dream,” with its clichés of opportunity and self-fulfillment, is undermined by his associating capitalism with magic—echoing, of course, Marx’s thoughts on the transformation of objects into commodities. In so doing, he robs capitalism of assumed rational, Enlightenment value and implies that it is, in part, merely a fantasy or a confidence trick. Moreover, the transformation of the businessman into a hobo shows the brutal logic of a supposed meritocracy. In this opening monologue, then, there is a humorous but necessary destabilizing of the opposition between “reality”—that which is material, solid, serious, rooted in the concerns of this world—and “magic”—that which is immaterial, insubstantial, frivolous, otherworldly. Seen in another way, opportunity recast as magic leads to Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space,” where abstraction breaks down fixed barriers between places and creates a “homogenous space of value” (Heffernan, 2000: 171), but simultaneously to “striated space” in which differences and inequalities are reinstated and boundaries—between nation states, classes, ethnic groups, communities—reinforced. Vaclav and Lena thus has something in common with texts such as Geographies of Home and, to a lesser extent, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, which introduces a rusalka (a mermaid from dark Slavic folk tales that may or may not be real) to help the protagonist through the period of her husband’s disappearance. Though it might more accurately be described as “fiction about magic” rather than “magical realism,” it nonetheless shares with that mode a sense that “disjunction is structurally present” (Jameson, 1986: 301) and that the dominant logic of western capitalism is being challenged.

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The tensions between reality, fantasy, and magical transformation are thus crucial to understanding Tanner’s novel and the role that fiction-making, as a productive kind of magic, plays within it. It is clear that the youthful Vaclav’s ideas are charmingly ridiculous, but his father’s version of the American Dream is equally so: “He came from Russia, he is always telling Vaclav, for Vaclav to learn about stocks and dollars and American business, and to buy his papa a hot tub full of American Hooter waitresses one day” (2011: 19). Immigration from Russia does not involve a sudden “reappearance,” as Vaclav’s introductory spiel suggests; nor does it inevitably bring the kinds of riches about which his father fantasizes, new-found material possessions that might allow one to forget about the homeland. Rather, the comic over-repetition of the adjective “far” in Vaclav’s patter draws attention to the fact that the unfolding narrative of Lena’s misfortunes shows just how intrinsic Russian attitudes and traditions are to American experience, and how the “secrets” are in no way “ancient and magnificent” but present and depressingly cruel. Just as reality and magic exist in a supplementary relation, so do the categories of “Russia” and “America.” (Tanner’s novel is allied to Reggie Nadelson’s Artie Cohen mysteries in this regard.) Yet Lena feels herself to be in a liminal space, caught between the worlds of Russia and America, fully existing in neither, talking English at school and with Vaclav, and Russian with her babushka and other relatives (2011: 45). For her, Vaclav represents the possibility of boundaries and solidity: “Vaclav does not know that to Lena, he is a place to go instead of nowhere. If he knew, he might be happy to be her somewhere, but he does not know” (2011: 44). In turn, Lena comes to embody for Vaclav the imponderables and mysteries of the immigrant experience, especially after her disappearance, which is brought about when Vaclav’s mother reports the abuse to the police. Thinking about the absent Lena is “like having a mystery novel you are reading and you cannot focus on any of your routine daily activities” (2011: 48); she is “unknowable” and excites a feeling of unheimlich (a more troubling magical transformation than the childhood conjuring act) which forces the adolescent Vaclav to reassess his own experience as an immigrant, beginning in his bedroom: “Vaclav’s eyes go all over the walls of his room like it is a new room he has never been in before. He closes his eyes though he is not at all sleepy in this new room, where everything looks different” (2011: 151). From his defamiliarized bedroom, Vaclav’s thoughts become more expansive and metaphysical: “Lena, to Vaclav, is an inconceivable concept. Lena is infinity. Lena is the universe expanding. Lena is the deepest part of the ocean, where no light has ever been” (2011: 152). The image of the ocean

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once again recalls migration, but it is now inflected with a sense of universal mystery, a questioning of the very grounds of experience and knowledge; Vaclav is beginning to reconfigure (to revisit Miranda Joseph’s idea) his understanding of “here.” In keeping with the novel’s consistent preoccupation with fiction-making, Vaclav’s musings thus indicate a more profound questioning of reality than he has previously allowed himself. Vaclav is learning the truth of Salman Rushdie’s assessment: “The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier [. . .] Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world [. . .] plural, hybrid, metropolitan” (1991: 125). If one follows Rushdie’s logic, to “see things plainly” is, ironically, to understand that they can never be seen plainly, that for the migrant they are always ambiguous and shifting. In the same way, when Vaclav asks his mother to tell him what happened on the evening Lena was taken into care and she declines, he reflects: “But this, this is too real. This is the same place, the same neighborhood, nothing has happened since, nothing has healed, this is still bad, and to talk about bad things is not good” (2011: 146). Lena’s harrowing experiences are “too real” to talk about precisely because they are too outlandish and unfathomable (like the ocean) and signify too many realms of experience. In order to emphasize Vaclav and Lena’s symbiotic connection, their status as “VacLena with no remainder” (2011: 54), the novel cuts immediately from Vaclav’s musings on Lena and the mysterious universe she embodies to her thoughts on the same day, which happens to be her seventeenth birthday. Now living in Park Slope with her adoptive mother Emily, in a house which Vaclav later observes “has accomplished the easy Americanness his house never could” (2011: 283), Lena is similarly bewildered by feelings of infinitude. In her case, her varied experiences have caused a kind of dissociation: “Lena feels her many selves multiply, like looking into parallel mirrors and seeing the back of your head, surprisingly unfamiliar, spiral into infinity” (2011: 158). Looking at a spot on the ground, she envies its unambiguous nature, its “unknowing specificity,” and worries about “the enormous gaps between her multiplying selves” (2011: 159). Despite knowing that everyone around her is “self-consciously creating themselves” and that identity is therefore a process (2011: 164), she longs to live life “as a complete person, not as a disjointed jigsaw puzzle made up of many different people trying to masquerade as one person” (2011: 160). Although it is never strongly implied that Lena has a specific psychological disorder like Marina in Geographies of Home, her compulsive behaviors, her tendency to

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introspection, and her perception of herself as multiple imply traumatic damage. This is, of course, mainly because she has been sexually abused, but in the wider context of the novel it can also be seen partly as a result of her multiple movements and dislocations. As Aliki Varvogli suggests, travel and migration are strongly connected to “[t]rauma and memory, family ties and family rifts” in their potential to dislocate individuals (2012: xvi): this is certainly true of Lena. When Lena is eventually reunited with Vaclav and returns with him to his house, her suppressed traumas resurface. Although it is a necessary step on her journey to “fill in the holes” of her experience (2011: 212), the journey to the old neighborhood from Park Slope is itself deeply troubling for her: “Walking in this neighborhood, Lena feels like she is returning to the site of her own death. This is strange and paradoxical for a human being, a living, breathing thing, to look and say, Oh, yes, I remember this place. This is where I died” (2011: 244). This paradox stems partly from the anfractuous nature of memory: throughout the novel, it is clear that memory is considered of the order of representation, in contradistinction to reality. For example, before their reunion, Lena “is afraid to touch the perfect memory she has of Vaclav [. . .] she has been terrified to take him from her memory and risk losing him to real life” (2011: 203). Inasmuch as they show awareness of the dangers of nostalgia, Lena’s feelings are laudable, and yet one glimpse of Vaclav’s house upon her return destabilizes the opposition between memory and reality, which is closely associated with the difference between fiction and truth, just as it once again highlights continuities between Russia and America. What is remarkable about the following passage is the way that Lena’s memories of the house and its present-day reality coalesce because of concrete material, economic factors: It was not just a big, fuzzy, dark, rotting memory, it was an actual place and no matter how much she forgot, here it is just as big and powerful as ever. Vaclav’s parents are frugal people, they’re immigrants, they’re ex-communists. They’re refugees from a place and time when nothing was owned, when you battled the neighbor-woman for a mealy potato. Not really, but really. What is real is that they have been citizens of a great empire and watched it fall. They have felt the rug pulled out from under them. So even in America they save every penny, glue together the broken dishes, stitch together the rips in the couch. (2011: 245)

The apposite phrase here is “Not really, but really.” Reminiscent of Auster’s “everything it was and everything it wasn’t,” it captures perfectly the way material reality and fiction inform each other in Vaclav and Lena, in Brooklyn fictions, and in community constructions more generally. For Lena, it is a crucial moment

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of understanding in a process that ends with her seeing Vaclav’s mother again just as she and Vaclav are about to make love: “It all comes together when she sees Rasia’s face. She remembers. She remembers, and she can’t get her clothes on fast enough, and she runs” (2011: 252). At this point, Lena both understands and, in Salman Rushdie’s words, suspects the reality of her situation, finding it unbearable. In this house where she died, “a real place where a piece of her has been rotting all these years” (2011: 248), Lena undergoes a traumatic rebirth which is far removed from the magical reappearance in the new world imagined by both the young Vaclav and his father. And yet Vaclav and Lena offers her another chance at rebirth, one last piece of magic. It comes in the form of Vaclav’s romantic origins tale about Lena’s parents, a tale he tells her finally to “fill in the holes” of her transnational history. In his version of events, Lena’s parents were brilliant students in Russia, poetic souls whose love for each other was instantaneous and unbreakable, and who were thrown into jail for their radical ideals (2011: 286). Trina is cast as a truly compassionate aunt, trying her best for Lena in the New World after the death in prison of Lena’s mother, and constantly haunted by “the sister she lost; her beauty, her brilliance” (2011: 287). The first-person interpolation of this story comes immediately after Vaclav’s visit to Trina, in which he learns the truth: that Lena’s mother came from an impoverished family and fell into prostitution and drug abuse, conceiving Lena with a man she barely knew and never loved (2011: 273–82). Although Vaclav’s romanticized history has an obvious therapeutic function for Lena, the novel is structured so that the reader is disallowed the simple supplanting of the true story by the fictional one. Rather than eliding the socioeconomic reality of life for poor Russian immigrants, the novel holds it in tension with the romance of Vaclav’s invention, to the extent that the two perspectives, combined, provide “truth,” somewhat in the manner of Audrey’s eyes in Leaving Brooklyn. Lena is quite aware of this: Lena’s real mom, Emily, knew that this was not the truth, but she also knew that Vaclav was not lying. Vaclav knew that he was telling the truth. Lena knew that it was a lie, but she loved it and believed it, like a fairy tale, like a song, like a bedtime story, like a magic trick. She loved Vaclav until it became the truth, and so it was. (2011: 288)

What the story allows is neither “closure,” to employ the contemporary self-help vernacular, nor the final integration of Lena’s multiple selves. Rather, the delicate balancing of the two contrasting histories allows Lena to embrace her multiplicity,

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to understand her participation in provisional, evolving communities made more complex by the vicissitudes of immigrant experience. Moreover, in having a specific use-value in the context of Lena’s rehabilitation, Vaclav’s fiction does not in any way obscure the particularities of global migration and economics that have shaped his and Lena’s families. In fact it reminds us, precisely because it exists in tandem with those particularities, that the chain of abstraction from use-value to exchange—what one might visualize in this novel as materiality to magic—is discontinuous, open at every point “to determination by social relations” (Joseph, 2002: 14) which are themselves historically determined. As abstracted from reality as it might appear, Vaclav’s redeeming tale enables Lena’s emotional and material reinvestment in the communities in which she now finds herself, located physically in Park Slope but connected in numerous ways to Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Russia. Having said that Brooklyn fiction has been dominated by coming-of-age, crime fiction and memoir, it is tempting, in the light of this reading of Vaclav and Lena, to proffer another genre: the Brooklyn fairy tale romance. Such a genre, as written by Haley Tanner and in a slightly less adventurous way by Amy Shearn in The Mermaid of Brooklyn, can offer an intelligent approach to the question of community because it recognizes at a fundamental level the importance of imagination in community construction. Reflexivity plays an important part, firstly in the sense that the novel dramatizes its own fictional processes; secondly in its recognition that Brooklyn has been created partly by the writers and artists who have made the borough their subject; and thirdly in the implication that the blurring of generic boundaries mirrors, as I suggested earlier, the overlapping of communities containing discontinuous individuals. And in upholding the virtues of romantic, even fantastic, narrative, the Brooklyn fairy tale romance suggests an alternative to what critics such as Roland Marchand, Richard Godden, and Mark Fisher have called “capitalist realism,” even if that realism is itself actually “an extended and often unacknowledged metaphor” (Godden, 1990: 9). Crucially, the Brooklyn fairy tale in the hands of Haley Tanner is distinct from the “Brooklyn Book of Wonder,” as satirized by Melvin Jules Bukiet because, as I have argued, it holds in tension various levels of truth and fictionality and thus avoids portraying Brooklyn simply as an “illusory Eden” (Bukiet, 2007: 23) in which trauma is overcome merely by faith, beauty, or a beguilingly eccentric outlook. So storytelling in Vaclav and Lena is not merely magic, and it is not merely consolation, as it is in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). It acts, importantly, as another kind of mobility and participates in the creation of multiple,

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discontinuous selves that can exist in multiple, discontinuous communities. It disrupts settled conceptions of belonging, of “here” and “there,” yet is one of the symbolic cues that allows for a stable-enough conception of community relations at any given moment. It recognizes that “Brooklyn is only a borough” (Tanner, 2011: 282) while knowingly implying that it is much more than that if individuals recognize their own subjective, imaginative role in its construction (whatever Colson Whitehead might claim). In a sense, Tanner’s novel is a suitable place to conclude this study in part because it returns us to the beginning—to an understanding of Brooklyn as diverse, as the exemplary immigrant destination. It should be clear from this chapter and the last that the immigrant story is central to an analysis of Brooklyn communities. However, that is not because the many thousands of immigrants make the borough more colorful, more picturesque, more multicultural in a static, ideological way, but because immigrant stories emphasize “new subjectivities” (Kaplan, 1996: 142) which force a reassessment of community formations and a suspicion of traditional notions of face-to-face relations and pastoral idealism. Bound up in capital flows, in global forces that inspire both homogenization and specialization/localization, migrants are not simply passive victims of capital’s effects but active participants in the shaping of new communities. And, as Aliki Varvogli says, the novel is ideally equipped to examine these participants in depth: “Through its emphasis on subjectivity and interiority, the novel can show that to be an exile or expatriate may mean different things to different individuals. Through its ability to tell the stories of generations over time, the novel can also chart the processes by which one category turns into another: the expatriate may one day stop missing home, and the émigré may one day understand that she is after all an immigrant” (2012: xvi). Likewise, Brooklyn and “Brooklyn” change over time: so reading Brooklyn fictions encourages us to avoid statements about the essentials of local or neighborhood identity. It encourages us to ask not “what makes Brooklyn Brooklyn?” but “at this time and in this place, why do we read Brooklyn the way we read it?” As more and more Brooklyn novels are published, the answer to that question can only become more complex and more illuminating.

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Index Abbott, Carl 193 abstraction 32, 63, 161, 233 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams 41 Adventism 190, 191, 199 African Americans 82–3, 88, 89, 90–1, 98, 126, 135, 136, 143, 148, 157–9, 161, 173, 177, 191, 198, 202 Agamben, Giorgio 36 alienation 139, 152 Altman, Rick 176, 221 American Dream 38, 39, 47, 49, 71, 73, 199, 203–4, 228, 229 American studies 219 Americanness 203 amnesia, imaginative 46, 47, 58, 121 Amsterdam 128 analogy, problems of 159–60 Anderson, Benedict 31, 34, 87 Andrews, David 38 Annesley, James 7 anxiety, patriarchal 108 racial 160, 163, 167 apocalyptic depictions 116, 118, 119, 121, 122 art, autographic and allographic 107–8 aspiration 5, 16, 18, 39, 49, 54, 72, 74, 134, 155, 160, 173, 203, 219 assimilation 44, 69, 74–5, 91–2, 126, 133, 137 of diversity 204 dream or ideal of 49–50, 74, 90, 203–4, 219 and home ownership 53 ideology of 74 metaphors for 73 questioning of 204 see also Brooklyn, assimilation into New York City assumptions, shared 127 Austen, Jane 197

Auster, Paul 3–4, 20, 34, 69, 215, 218, 231 “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” 111–12 Blue in the Face 13 The Brooklyn Follies 3–4, 13, 32, 36, 67, 68, 72, 94–5, 97, 103–10, 113, 138, 148, 205, 219, 222 Bukiet on 68 City of Glass 41, 102–3 Ghosts 18, 100, 226 The Invention of Solitude 41 Leviathan 111 Man in the Dark 104 Moon Palace, Kepler’s Blood 104 The Music of Chance 106 The New York Trilogy 100, 102–3, 177 Oracle Night 216 on Park Slope 12, 19, 104 Squeeze Play 102 Sunset Park 9, 39, 95, 103–4, 110, 112–15 see also Blue in the Face (film); Smoke (film) Austin, Joe 168 authenticity, black 163 comparative 154 as concept 43, 60–2, 68–9, 94, 101 and crime 9, 69 desire for 23, 62, 95, 114, 135, 147–8, 153 ethnic 157 and family 72 ideology of 136, 184 individual 57, 111, 223 and “old Brooklyn” 5, 89 sense of 31 and sincerity 68, 217 as subjective 120 subjective view of 208 and utopianism 184, 186 and virginity 183–4 autobiography 21, 41, 48

250 babyboomers 125–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail 33–4, 95–6, 202 Ballantine Books 176 Barbadians 53–4 Barrett, Lindon 161, 173, 177 Barton, Emily 6 Brookland 3, 25–8, 63, 195 baseball 18 Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 62–3, 103 Community 21–2 Beaumont, Matthew 212 Beck, Robert (Iceberg Slim) 176 belonging, and Britain 24 capitalism and 31 and community 29, 72, 86, 161 as concept 10, 91, 234 crisis in 6 desire for 51, 55 loss of 75, 191 paradox of 67 and participation 221 right of 113 Bender, Thomas 22, 23 The Best Years of Our Lives 110 bildungsroman 41–3, 93, 144 binary oppositions 24, 39, 59–60, 65, 74, 79, 98, 129, 161, 172 biography 109 black consciousness, blackness 54, 160, 162, 174–81, 186 see also African Americans Black Cowboy Federation of America 143 black population see African Americans Blue in the Face (film) 13, 18 Bolter, Jay David 163 boundaries 33, 39, 98, 145, 152, 157, 177, 198, 199, 212, 228, 229, 233 between good and evil 98 blurring of 54, 60, 65, 161, 233 of community 10, 39, 121, 152, 157, 222–3, 236 cultural 161, 177 ethnic 186 of narrative 65 national 30 of self 10, 121, 187, 207 sexual 145

Index spatial and temporal 22, 97, 124, 154, 157, 213 see also community, boundaries of Boyle, Thomas 1–2, 3 Bradbury, Ray, The Martian Chronicles 193 Bramen, Carrie Tirado 131, 137, 140 Breslin, Jimmy 204 Brightman, Harry 105 Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn 13 broken lands 212, 213 Brooklyn, assimilation into New York City 5, 16–17, 44 Bay Ridge 37, 38, 96, 98, 219 Bed-Stuy 81, 84, 158, 182, 184 Brighton Beach 117, 118, 121, 233 Brooklyn College 192, 215 Brooklyn Heights 6, 131 brownstone houses 126 Brownsville 6, 81, 93 Bushwick Avenue 50, 81 Carroll Gardens (South Brooklyn) 96, 129–30 Clinton Hill 165 Cobble Hill 5, 142–5 Dean Street 164, 166, 170 dystopian version of 189 East New York 5–6, 16, 19, 67–8, 72, 73, 81, 82, 83, 85–6, 88, 90–1, 127, 190–1 Ebbett’s Field 18 Flatbush 47, 163 Flatbush Avenue 200 Fort Greene 158 General Post Office 100 Gerritsen Beach 117 Gowanus (Boerum Hill) 19, 129, 154, 158, 162–3, 164, 167, 169 Green-Wood Cemetery 103 Greenpoint 149, 150 House of Detention 167–8, 170 influx of writers into 215–18 outsider view of 218–19, 221 Park Slope 2, 4, 5, 6, 12, 19, 31, 67, 68, 96, 103, 104, 112, 146–8, 147, 152, 159, 219, 230, 231, 233 Brooklyn Superhero Supply 168 Prospect Heights 148, 158 Prospect Park 17, 25, 148, 151

Index Red Hook 2, 95, 116–17, 120, 121, 129 Sheepshead Bay 116 Sunset Park 5, 103 as transnational space 194 Williamsburg 16, 19, 25, 48, 51, 55, 70–1, 136, 137–40, 152–3 Williamsburg Bridge 81 see also New York City, Manhattan, compared with Brooklyn; as distinct from Brooklyn Brooklyn Books of Wonder 68–9, 71, 233 Brooklyn Bridge 3, 4, 17, 26–8, 44, 97, 98 Brooklyn Eagle 17–18 Brooklyn magazine 215 Brooklyn Standard 17 “Brooklyn style” 14, 161, 162, 179 Brooklyn Was Mine (anthology, ed. Knutsen and Steiker) 13 Brooklyn-Queens Expressway 129 “The Brownstone Hunters’ Guide” 123–4, 125 brownstone movement 5, 123–4, 128–30, 157 The Brownstoner 127–8 Buber, Martin 106, 213 Budapest 128 Bukiet, Melvin Jules 28, 68–9, 71, 72, 76, 233 bunds 34, 145 Cacace, Celia 130 capitalism, capital, and belonging 31 and commodities 56, 102–3, 210 and community 20–2, 28–32, 95, 160, 180, 195, 199, 224–5, 225, 234 exploitation under 216 and magic 228 Marx on 77 narrative of 57 and pre-capitalism 200 and realm of natural 54 and waste 50–1, 77 capitalist realism 52, 69–70, 72, 233 Carroll, James 204 Carroll Gardens Association 130 Catholicism 73–4 CBS 21 Chabon, Michael, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 226

251

Chancy, Myriam J. A. 191 characters, literary 34–5 Chicago 100 Civil Rights 175 class conflict 103, 197 Cleveland 128 Clinton, Bill 145 cognitive mapping 94, 101, 141 Cohen, Anthony 33 Cohen, Gabriel 2, 94 Boombox 158 The Ninth Step 95 Cohen, Samuel 164, 169 Cold War 37 Cole, Thomas, Essay on American Scenery 206 color 163–4 see also local color comics 166 coming-of-age narratives 41–8, 52, 175, 182, 189, 227, 233 and community identity 93 critique of 56 failure of coming of age 187 female 3, 181, 205–6, 210 motherhood and 150–1 narrators of 61 and nostalgia 175 and paternal authority 206 pun on 144 in wartime 46–8 commodification 143 of conscience 216–17 of experience 141 commodities 22, 31–2, 56, 69, 72, 151, 228 and capitalism 56, 102–3, 210 children as 78 consumption of 141, 143–4, 161 cultural 137 desire for 178, 179 fetishized 132 language of 184 reified 210 community, and belonging 29, 72, 86, 161 boundaries of 10, 39, 121, 152, 157, 222–3 as concept 6–8, 11, 12, 13, 23, 32–3, 189, 191, 195, 219 construction of 112

252

Index

and difference and change 194–5, 196 divisions in 127 formations 35–9, 44, 94 groupings 129–30, 145 history of 22 idealization of 73 identity 16, 20, 23, 42, 93 multifaceted 54, 198, 199 and observer 35 perceived as force for good 8 as process 65, 204, 217 production-based 125 romantic idea of 6, 12–13, 21, 23, 28–9, 58, 65, 115, 171, 194, 195, 210, 219, 223–4 secession from 99 sense of 18, 94 spatialized concept of 21 understanding of 44–6 unknowability of 101–2, 196–201, 213 unstable 196, 197–8, 222, 223 see also capitalism, capital, and community Coney Island Dominators 97 consumerism 20, 72, 143, 151, 190, 195, 201, 21.70 consumption, of commodities 141, 143, 161, 179 signifiers of 131, 140 as term 160–1 context, historical 107 correspondence 193, 202 and balance 192 country and city 24, 45, 195 Coupland, Douglas, Generation X 45 Cowart, David 7, 200 Cox, Earl 176 crime fiction 1–2, 9, 56, 62, 69, 93–115, 233 crimescape 95–6, 101, 102, 104, 121 cultural particularity 31, 199 Curnutt, Kirk 45 Daily News, “The Battle for New York’s Neighborhoods” 129 Danticat, Edwidge 215 Breath, Eyes, Memory 199–201 Davis, L. J., A Meaningful Life 124, 134–6, 157, 174

Declaration of Independence 129 deconstruction, by narrator 173 Delanty, Gerard 7, 75, 112 Deleuze, Gilles 62, 87, 228 democracy 49–50 demystification 174 Depression 37, 39, 125 deracination 75, 80 Derrida, Jacques 29, 219, 221 Descartes, René 106 DeSena, Judith N. 19, 149–50 detectives 2, 6, 10, 18, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 115, 116–17, 121 deterritorialization 62, 87, 201 development, uneven 62, 63, 65, 86, 201 Diaz, Junot, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 227 Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist 45 didacticism 181 differentiation 23, 62 Diken, Bulent 38 Dinkins, David 158 “dirty” realism 8 disjunction 42, 48, 116, 160, 192, 228 and correspondence 193 of nostalgia 87 schizophrenic 209–10 diversity 31, 38, 90, 172 assimilation of 204 and consumption 140 ethnic 2 and motherhood 149 racial and ethnic 2, 49, 141, 145, 148, 173, 198, 199 radical 212 sexual 143–4 Diwali 20 Do the Right Thing 18 The Dodgers 18, 44, 215 Dominican Republic 190, 191 double-entry bookkeeping 201, 202 doubling magic 200, 201 Draper, R. P. 16 Dray, Philip 13 drugs economy 180–1 DuBois, W. E. B. 172 Dylan, Bob 75

Index

253

East River 116 Eastern Europeans 82 Eco, Umberto, “Travels in Hyperreality” 105 Eggers, Dave 69 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 68 ekphrasis 163, 168–9 Eliot, George 197, 217 Ellis, Bret Easton, Less Than Zero 45 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 41 enclaves, ethnic 75, 87, 128, 134, 157 England 191 Enlightenment 228 epochs 22, 44, 118–19, 154–5 ethnicity 53, 80, 91, 94, 157, 159–60 cultural 87 exchange value 30, 32, 51, 56, 63, 69, 114, 184–5, 217, 233 extraterritoriality 62–3

Flusty, Steven 62 Foer, Jonathan Safran 215 Foner, Nancy 20 food, ethnic 129, 140–1 Fordism 30, 142 see also post-Fordism forgery 104–10, 148 Foucault, Michel 111 FOX 21 Fox, Paula, Desperate Characters 9, 124, 131–4, 136, 219–20 fragmentation 139 Franzen, Jonathan 133 The Corrections 43 free indirect discourse (FID) 87 free market ideology 160 Freud, Sigmund 98 Friedman, Natalie 204 frontier 9, 97, 100 imagery 53–4, 62, 83, 98, 128, 129, 137, 149, 206, 208, 209 Fuchs, Daniel, Summer in Williamsburg 70–1 “fuhgeddaboudit” road sign 14, 218

fairy tale romance 233 family 8, 16, 30, 32, 44, 52, 55, 69, 81–92, 144, 181, 195, 196, 199 and authenticity 72 and community 45, 63, 75, 83 groupings 35–6, 90, 197–8 identity 88, 92 mythology of 78–9, 83 tradition/history 76–7 values 128, 179, 183, 184 Faris, Wendy 199 Ferrante, Ernest 129 Ferrell, Jeff 168 Fetterley, Judith 7 First World War 17 Fisher, Mark 233 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 70, 190 The Great Gatsby 202 Five-Percent Nation 185 flexible specialization 23, 30–2, 37, 114, 137, 143, 149, 160, 176, 199, 201, 211 Florey, Kitty Burns 16, 19 Solos 13, 25, 32, 48, 97, 104, 113, 124, 136–42, 146, 152, 156, 194, 206, 224, 226

Gandhi, Mohandas 172 Geherin, David, Scene of the Crime: the Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction 100 genre clash 190, 221 gentrification 5, 8 and black population 158 and capitalism 150 and crime fiction 94 depictions of 9 inequities of 2 and motherhood novel 146–52 motivations 119 novels of 9, 25, 31, 69, 123–56, 157, 190 opposite of 84 as revanchism 128 and social experiment 172 see also postgentrification; pre-gentrification Germans 82 ghetto fiction 175–87 ghettos 9–10, 82, 86, 91, 126, 158 Gibson, William 119 Giddens, Anthony 22–3, 30 Gifford, Justin 176

dysfunction 8, 92, 169, 182, 213 dystopia 184, 189

254

Index

Giles, Paul 218–19 globalization 6, 7, 8, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 62, 64, 172, 219, 225 “glocalization” 23, 30 Godden, Richard 70, 80, 114, 190, 233 Goines, Donald 176 González, Jesús Ángel 104 “Good Mother” ideal 146 Goodman, Nelson 107 Languages of Art 107–8 graffiti 162–71, 165 grand narrative 109, 156 “Great Suburban Migration” 125 grittiness 5, 137, 153, 161, 176 groupings 10, 52, 98, 173, 217, 221 community 129–30, 145 ethnic 38, 98, 126, 143–4, 196, 228 family 35–6, 90, 197–8 fictional 34–5 friendship 145 social 9, 112, 197–8 Grusin, Richard 163 Guattari, Félix 62, 87, 228 guilt, white 172 Gumport, Elizabeth 132, 152, 154–5, 208 Hagan, Edward A. 192 Hahn, Kornelia 21, 23, 30 Haiti 199–200 Hamill, Pete 1, 3, 14, 16, 17 Harvey, David 7 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter 105, 107, 108 Heffernan, Nick 30, 201 Hemingway, Ernest 70, 72 heterogeneity 89, 102, 131, 137, 151, 175, 224 hip-hop culture 176 hipness 8, 114, 153 Hispanics and Latinos 75, 88, 89, 121, 126, 142, 153, 157, 198 Hispaniola 199 historical present 113, 115 historicity 42, 43, 96, 105, 115, 209–10 historicization 29, 88, 91 history 43 historical determination 43–4 historical perspective 210 historical setting 41, 46–8

Hoberek, Andrew 44, 119 Holiday, Billie 161 Holloway House 176 Holmes, Shannon 176 Holocaust 34, 47 home 16, 24, 78, 81, 91–2, 187, 190–9, 203, 219, 221–2, 226 ancestral 73, 75, 78, 81, 91, 179 see also homeland homeland 73, 75, 196, 214, 229, 242 homogeneity 31, 131, 159, 204 ethnic 83, 120, 138, 204 homogenization 5, 18, 19, 51, 62, 80, 86–7, 92, 103, 140, 142, 224, 234 Houdini, Harry 226 Howells, William Dean, A Hazard of New Fortunes 198, 226 “Every Other Week” 34 Hudson River 116 Hughes, Evan 47 Literary Brooklyn 11–12 hybridity 198, 203 hypertextuality 210 identity, community 16, 20, 23, 42, 93, 130 cultural 87, 90 ethnic 46, 87, 92, 157, 175 family 88, 92 local and national 49, 51, 219 personal 104, 197, 230 transnational 185, 186, 202 ideology 63, 97, 138, 227 of assimilation 49, 74 of authenticity 136, 184 categories of 64 of community 8, 44 of country versus city 24 of free market 160 monolithic 215 political 43 of progress 104, 113–15 of wilderness and frontier 136–7 immigration 9, 10, 20, 47, 71, 73–4, 82, 87, 90, 116, 120, 125, 157, 190–1, 193, 198, 204, 219, 229–34 individualism 104, 111, 112, 219 economic 180 individuation 52, 53, 57

Index Ingold, Tim 95 innocence 26, 42, 43 interdictory spaces 62 intersectionality 159 intersubjectivity 36, 197 intertextuality 115–16, 226 Ireland 75, 81, 202–3 Irish Americans 49, 72, 73–5, 80, 81, 82, 88, 90, 191–3, 202 Catholic 73–4 irony 17, 88, 104, 113, 132, 136, 195, 217, 218, 219, 227 Irving, Washington 26 Islam see Muslims isolation 18, 63, 82, 99, 102, 104, 121, 204, 210, 226, 227 Israel 10, 118 Italian Americans 20, 51, 75, 82, 88, 89, 98, 129–30 Jamaica Bay 116 Jameson, Fredric 7, 101–2, 106, 115, 118–19, 194, 200–1, 209–10 “Cognitive Mapping” 94, 198 Jarvis, Brian 102–3, 111, 112 Jews 3, 10, 47, 51, 75, 82, 89, 142, 198, 202 Johnson, Jeremiah 17 Joseph, Miranda 7, 11, 12–13, 22, 23, 32–3, 35, 37, 39, 69, 73, 75, 127, 129, 159–60, 161, 199, 201, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230 Against the Romance of Community 28–32, 195 Joyce, James 80 Kafka, Franz 109 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement 106 Kazin, Alfred, A Walker in the City 93–4 Kelly, Adam 44, 119 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 82 Kennedy, Liam 33, 158, 160 King, Martin Luther 172 Korean War 39 Krase, Jerome 30, 33, 34 Krase, Sue 125 Krauss, Nicole 68, 215 Kristeva, Julia 204 Kunkel, Benjamin, Indecision 68

255

Kushner, Seth, and LaSala, Anthony, The Brooklynites 12, 140–1 K’Wan 176 Labine, R. A. Clem 125 LaGuardia, Fiorello 20 Lahiri, Jhumpa 215 Latinos see Hispanics and Latinos Lawrence, D. H. 2 Lawson, Mark 113 Lee, James Kyung-Jin 139, 174 Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism 160 Lee, Spike 18, 157–8 Lenin, V. I. 62 Lethem, Jonathan 2, 11, 13–14, 15–16, 18–19, 121, 215, 225, 226 The Fortress of Solitude 9, 13, 36, 39, 129, 147, 160, 161–71, 172, 178, 187, 204, 205 Girl in Landscape 189, 190, 193–5, 196, 204–13 Motherless Brooklyn 13, 18–19, 194–5, 205 Lewis, R. W. B. 44 Lichterman, Paul 112 Lindsay, John 82 linguistic exchange 89–90 local color 9, 47, 58, 114, 149, 156, 172, 204, 213 Lopate, Philip 13, 19 Los Angeles 100 Lovisi, Gary, Blood in Brooklyn 96–100 Lutz, Tom 7, 35 Lynch, Kevin 101 McCaffrey, Lawrence J., The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America 73–4 Textures of Irish America 87 McCullers, Carson 20 “Brooklyn is My Neighbourhood” 16 McDonald, Kathlene 53 McEwan, Ian, Atonement 233 Saturday 156 Machor, James L. 24 magic 200, 209, 213, 227–9, 232–3

256 magic realism 68, 190, 194, 199–201, 200, 209, 220, 228 Mailer, Norman 190 Manhattanization 18–19, 124, 131, 140, 169 Marchand, Roland 233 marginalization 78, 181 Markfield, Wallace 3 Marshall, Paule, Brown Girl, Brownstones 46, 48, 52–5, 57, 189 Marx, Karl 228 Capital 31, 77 Marx, Leo 44 Marxism 28 mass production 30, 125, 201 materiality 133, 139, 160–1, 233 matrifocal texts 146–52 maturation 27, 41, 42, 45 melancholia 17, 18, 105, 205, 206 Melucci, Alberto 112 memoirs 9, 12, 41, 93–4, 233 memory 12, 65, 81, 93 collective 16 and community formation 94 and imagination 88, 90, 91 as revision 61 social 18 metaphors 69, 77, 83, 190, 208–10, 211 deep 8, 36, 39, 70, 86, 86–7, 190, 223 Millard, Kenneth 42–3 Miller, Kerby 74, 76 minorities, ethnic 90, 152, 159 “Mommy Lit” 146, 159 Moore, Natalie 185 Morrison, Toni 159 Love 197 Mosley, Walter 100, 176 motherhood 153, 159 motherhood novel (Brooklyn) 9, 146–52 multiculturalism 2, 20, 151, 160, 174, 234 Muslims 182, 185, 186 N + 1 magazine 215 Nadell, Martha 12, 48, 49, 51, 53, 93, 95 Nadelson, Reggie 2, 6, 9, 10, 115–22, 229 Disturbed Earth 94, 116–18, 120, 121 Manhattan 62, 115 Red Hook 9, 18, 94, 95, 116, 119, 120–1 Red Mercury Blues 115, 121

Index narrative, authoritative voice 196–7 ethical qualities 36, 64 polyphonic 197–8, 225 narrator, role of 171–5, 182–3, 185–6 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs 13, 23 National Book Award 215 Native Americans 124, 207 nature, human 63 Nazism 47 NBC 21 “neighborhood”, as concept 5, 7, 19, 127, 130 neighborhoods, authenticity of 31, 105, 120 black 136 bohemian 173 disappearance of 130, 141 Irish 74 Italian 51 Jewish 51 mapping 94 “marginal” 127 regeneration 60, 124, 127 New Criticism 177 New Jersey 3, 176, 210 “new social novel” 71 New York City 128 The Bronx 85, 97, 124 Community College 128 Coney Island 13, 30, 116, 117, 226, 228, 233 Ground Zero 119 Harlem 128, 179 Long Island 17, 19, 56, 72, 73, 74, 81, 85, 88, 91, 179 Lower East Side 128, 154 Manhattan 26–7, 119, 140, 156 and “The City” 123–4 compared with Brooklyn 3, 6, 14–19, 15, 24–5, 32, 63–4, 67, 84, 86–7, 89, 93–4, 97–9, 194, 213 as distinct from Brooklyn 116, 195, 222 as glamorous 5, 14–15, 195, 224 Museum of Modern Art 184–5 Queens 3, 11, 198 Rockaway Beach 182 Staten Island 124

Index Upper West Side 83 Wall Street 21 as world city 20 World Trade Center attacks 67, 116, 119 see also Brooklyn New York magazine 128, 152–3 New York Times 152–3 Newman, Judith 7 Newton, Adam Zachary 36 Norwegians 98 nostalgia, in Brooklyn novels 47–8 as cliché 154 comforts of 115 in coming-of-age novels 175 and community 2, 141, 158, 171, 206 as concept 43, 94 “flinty-eyed” 14 for homelands 73, 81 for legendary past 208, 212 for objects 114 for old Brooklyn 91, 173 rejection of 38–9, 81, 83, 87, 222, 223, 231 for sense of futurity 48, 65 in view of family 45 novel, Bakhtin on 33–4, 225 novels, compared to communities 33–4, 225 Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life 47 novum 194 nuclear terror 12 “NY-LON” 21 Obama, Barack 119 O’Donnell, Patrick 8 The Old-House Journal 124–5, 127–8 Oldenburg, Ray 35 Olmsted, Frederick 25 omniscient narration 26, 87, 89, 98, 138, 196, 198–9 O’Reilly, Andrea 146 Orientalism 184 origin moment 43, 44, 48 Osman, Suleiman 14, 30, 128–9, 157 The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn 60, 61 ostranenie (defamiliarization) 227–8 otherness, othering 10, 110, 194, 195, 201, 204, 207, 222

257

Palladino, Mariangela 36, 197 parallel play 149–51 Paretsky, Sara 100 Paris 100, 128 participation 31, 86, 91, 112, 113, 175, 187, 190, 192, 221, 223, 233 particularity 23, 29, 223, 233 cultural 31, 199 pastiche 106, 118, 210 pastoral mode 105 pastoralism 17, 24, 25–6, 44, 47, 88, 155, 226, 236 patriarchality 74, 78, 84, 89, 91, 108, 183, 200 penis envy 144 perception 35, 41, 42 Pérez, Loida Maritza, Geographies of Home 34, 36, 39, 189, 190–1, 192, 194, 195, 196, 196–201, 203, 209, 211, 219, 222, 224, 226, 227, 228, 230 personalism 112, 113 Petry, Ann 161 Philadelphia 85, 128 picturesque fiction 6, 9, 25, 38, 47, 55, 71, 131, 135, 175, 177, 190, 204, 212, 224, 234 consumer 140–2 sexual 142–6 and variety 151 Pierre, DBC, Vernon God Little 182 pioneer spirit 128 Pitkin, Colonel John R. 68 Podnieks, Elizabeth 146 Poles 202 pornography 114 post-apocalyptic landscape 120 post-Fordism 23, 30, 30–1, 31, 55, 63, 125, 142, 149, 172, 199, 201, 217 post-gentrification 34, 61, 62, 95 post-postmodernism 118 postmodernism 118–19, 137, 177, 209 postrace 175, 177 poststructural theory 28 poverty 67, 74, 82, 86, 135, 137, 139, 178, 185, 190, 198, 211, 213, 216 pre-capitalism 180, 200, 201 pre-gentrification 53, 95, 120, 163 production (as term) 160–1

258 Pryse, Marjorie 7 Publishers Weekly 176 Puerto Ricans 82–3, 98, 142, 158, 164 purity, notions of 29, 129, 185, 195 Putnam, Robert D. 127 quiddity 52 race 157–87, 191, 204 racial anxiety 160, 163, 167 racial realignment 160 racism 82, 99, 151, 158–9, 172, 190 Rakoff, Joanna Smith, A Fortunate Age 9, 34, 124, 149, 152–6, 216 rape 191, 200, 208 Rayfiel, Thomas, Parallel Play 9, 104–5, 146, 148, 149–52 reading and writing processes 210–11, 212–13, 219–20 Reagan, Ronald 160 realism 69–70, 72, 100, 109, 176–7, 195, 211 capitalist 52, 69–70, 72, 233 “dirty” 8 reality 190, 195, 230–2 concept of 179, 183, 186, 187 and magic 228 memory and 231 realness 161 Rebein, Robert 8 redlining 128 reflexivity 46, 219, 226, 233 regeneration 158 regionalist texts 7, 35–6, 46, 204, 209 Rejnis, Ruth 128 relativism, cultural 187 soft 62 religion 12, 52, 109, 116, 183–6, 190, 191, 195, 204 remediation 163 reterritorialization 62, 87, 201 Rhode Island 200 Roberts, Adam 194 Robinson, Jackie 18 rogue eye 47, 48, 64, 66, 86, 221, 223 romanticism 5, 8, 20, 30, 45, 51, 52, 55, 57, 69, 91, 105, 114, 115, 143, 164, 177, 184, 194, 196, 201, 216–17,

Index 232 see also community, romantic idea of Rorty, Richard 64 Rosen, Judith 176 Roth, Henry, Call It Sleep 49 Roth, Philip 3, 142 Rushdie, Salman 186, 230, 232 Russia, Russians 10, 118, 121, 227, 229, 231, 233 Saldívar, Ramón 175 Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye 43, 45 Schwartz, Jane, Caught 48, 54–7, 58, 139 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon 6, 86–7, 226 Leaving Brooklyn 5, 8, 13, 36, 39, 41–8, 49, 54, 57–66, 73, 99, 111, 134, 182, 189, 190, 195, 205, 210, 221, 223–4, 232 Schwartz, Richard 98 science fiction 189, 193–4 Scotto, Salvatore “Buddy” 130 Sebold, Alice, The Lovely Bones 68 Selby, Hubert, Jr, Last Exit to Brooklyn 95 self-authentication 219 self-reflexivity 69 selfhood 51, 52, 60, 65, 195, 196, 224 as authenticity 105 boundaries of 10, 187 and community 112 and graffiti 166 multiplicity of 204 sovereign 49, 53, 61 split 101 transnational 121 and writing 217 sexuality 41, 63, 110, 114–15, 142–6, 196, 208, 216 and commodities 179 sexual abuse 191, 231 treated as equivalent to race 159–60 shape-shifting 198–9, 201–2, 222 Shearn, Amy, The Mermaid of Brooklyn 9, 104–5, 146, 148, 149, 151–2, 228, 233 Shklovsky, Victor 227 Shortell, Timothy 19 Siegel, Jacob 171 significance, horizons of 62, 105, 154, 223

Index signifiers, ethnic 14 patriarchal 74, 78 of urban acceptability 162 signs (street) 139–40, 141 Simenon, Georges 100 Simon and Schuster 176 Sirowitz, Hal 13 slavery 180–1 Smith, Betty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 25, 48, 49–52, 57, 60, 63, 71, 144, 198, 205, 226 Smith, Neil 62, 124, 150 The New Urban Frontier 128 Smoke (film) 13, 103 social capital 127 social experiment 172 social hierarchies 29 Sohn, Amy 4–5, 31–2, 151, 152 Motherland 31, 36, 146, 151, 225 My Old Man 34, 124, 142–51, 156, 159 Prospect Park West 31, 36, 146, 147, 149, 151, 158–9, 225 Soja, Edward 7 Sorrentino, Gilbert 71 Steelwork 11, 37–9, 41, 46, 47, 219 Souljah, Sister 175–87 The Coldest Winter Ever 10, 36, 160, 162, 176, 177–81, 182, 183, 185, 187, 225–6 Midnight: A Gangster Love Story 10, 160, 162, 181–7 space, absolute and relative 62 smooth and striated 62, 228 spatiality, analysis 101 categories 157 concerns 104 dialectic 70, 86, 94, 184 division 163–4 reality 12 spatial authenticity 120, 192 structuring 102, 172 theory of 22 spatialized language 119 specialization, flexible 23, 30, 31 Spivak, Gayatri 32

259

squatting 9, 95, 96, 104, 110, 112, 115, 198 Squires, Gregory D., From Redlining to Reinvestment 128 Starbucks 140 Steinke, Darcey, “Brooklyn Pastoral” 25 Stephens, Michael Gregory 5–6, 10, 16, 18, 71–92, 93, 191, 196, 204 The Brooklyn Book of the Dead 5–6, 8, 13, 34, 36, 48, 67–8, 71, 72–3, 78, 81–92, 96–7, 99, 189–90, 210 Green Dreams 14, 90 Season at Coole 8, 51, 71, 72–81, 84, 87, 89, 92, 134, 179, 206 Where the Sky Ends 77, 80, 84 street lit 176–7, 186 structure of feeling 107 Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice 34, 47, 227 Suarez, Ray 126, 128 The Old Neighborhood 19, 125, 127 subjectivity 37, 43, 110, 196, 211, 224, 234 authorial 107 new 196, 234 Sudan 182–5, 186 supergentrification 140 supplementarity 29, 32, 35, 46, 60, 64, 104, 105, 154, 177, 203, 222, 224, 233 Suvin, Darko 194 symbolic cues 33, 34, 39, 45, 54, 58, 105, 147, 162, 185, 218, 223–4 Szalay, Michael F., Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party 161 tangibility 114 Tanner, Haley, Vaclav and Lena 226–34 taskspace 95–6 Tate, Greg, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture 161 Taylor, Charles 105, 154 Taylorism 31 Thabit, Walter 68, 82, 127, 191 third-world culture 200–1 Thomas, Michael, Man Gone Down 10, 160, 162, 171–5, 186, 187, 191 Thoreau, Henry David 134 Time Out 152–3 Time Warner 21

260

Index

Tindall, Gillian 101 Tóibin, Colm, Brooklyn 31–2, 189, 190, 191–3, 195, 196, 201–4, 219, 222, 224 Trachtenberg, Alan 17, 19 transglobalism 207 transition moments 44 transnational fiction 187, 189–213, 223 transnationalism, and blackness 162, 186 as concept 7, 213 in criticism 218–19 metaphors of 203 and selfhood 121, 197, 213 as topic 101, 115–16, 189 and transglobalism 207 transnational identities 184, 185, 186, 232 transnational locality 10 Trilling, Lionel 68 “true fakes” 105, 107, 109 Trujillo, Rafael 190 Tucker, Martin 16 Turner, Frederick Jackson 97, 206 Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn 43, 45, 182, 228 United Nations 21 unity of idiom 197 unknowability 101–2, 196–201, 207, 213, 229, 237 urban decay 127 urban pioneers 128 Urry, John 7, 22, 23, 35 use value 32, 69–70, 79, 114, 233 utopianism 164, 171, 184, 190, 194, 212, 223–4 value 161, 162 see also exchange value; use value variety, nonthreatening 151 signifiers of 137 Varvogli, Aliki 7, 196, 231, 234 Village Voice 152–3 virginity 183–4, 200

Waldman, Adelle, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. 8, 215–18 Walker, Joseph S. 111, 112 Wall, Eamonn 73 Warren, Kenneth W. 171, 173, 175 wartime novel 46–8 waste, aestheticization of 79–80, 88 luxury of 50–1, 52, 76–8 waste-value 81 Watt, Ian 32 Weil, François 17 Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence 46 Whitehead, Colson 217–18, 234 Whitman, Walt 17, 19, 38, 70–1, 138–9, 226–7 wilderness metaphor 25, 83, 98, 134, 136–9 Williams, Raymond 8, 22–5, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 39, 45, 92, 97, 107, 124, 184, 195, 197, 219, 223 The Country and the City 23 Williams, William Carlos 38 Wolfe, Gary K. 222 Wolfe, Thomas 2 “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” 49 Wolfe, Tom 71 Wolk, Douglas 166 Woods, Teri, True to the Game 176 World War I 73 World War II 37, 39, 46–8, 157 Wysocki, David, projects 158 yuppies 5 Yurick, Sol, The Warriors 95, 97 Zamora, Lois 199 Žižek, Slavoj 195 “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire” 94 Zukin, Sharon 137, 140 Naked City: the Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces 60, 62, 152