Introduction

I HAVE ADMIRED LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ’S WORK ever since I read her gorgeous and unsettling novel Disturbances in the Field (1983). In the winter of 1986, I added that novel to my reading list for my seminar in women’s literature, and in 1988 I invited Lynne to Eastern Washington University for a reading. As she spoke to my students about writing, it became evident that the fierce intelligence, the generosity, and the wisdom in Lynne’s writing also define her as an individual.

That was the year that Lynne began work on Leaving Brooklyn, an evocative and lyrical novel about the complexities of vision and desire.

In the years since, Lynne and I have talked often about writing and about our lives as writers, and we’ve become friends. She told me that Leaving Brooklyn first came to her as an essay “in a mood of despair, thinking I had nothing more to write about. I was looking in the mirror and noticed my eye—the description of the eye in the book is indeed autobiographical—and I thought, well, if I have nothing else, I have myself. And this odd eye.”

This odd and splendid eye veers off toward truth, toward passion, toward outrage against compliance. It follows “its desires. Light and air stroked it.”

In Leaving Brooklyn, Lynne gives the intricacy of that gaze to her protagonist, Audrey, a young girl who grows up in postwar Brooklyn during the McCarthy era and whose right eye, legally blind, gives her secret images behind the “skin of the visible world.”

For Audrey, a thinker and a dreamer, Brooklyn is confining, Manhattan mythic and brilliant. Her desire to escape Brooklyn leads her to the words of Euclid and Socrates and Wordsworth. She imagines herself studying at the Sorbonne. She despises Abraham for his obedience to a God who would order him to kill his son Isaac: “Abraham would have been a better person if he refused… Some parent.’ Abraham is a failure.

And so is McCarthy. Audrey has fantasies of being accused by McCarthy and fixing her right eye on him, demolishing him with her articulate outrage. “You have exceeded the boundaries of civil behavior. Moreover, you’re nothing but a pig.”

However, she is aware of the boundary between dream and reality: “I was a dreamer with a dream life. Despite what people think, dreamers are very clear about what it fantasy and what is reality—they have to be.”

Audrey discovers a certain power and joy in her way of seeing: “I had to peel whatever I saw.” But her parents consider her eye a flaw and take her to an eye doctor, who fits Audrey for a lens, a “hard, clear plastic disk with about the diameter of a half dollar… molded like a human eye…and, in the swift sneaky manner of doctors, [he] spread my upper and lower lids with his fingers and slipped it in. I wanted to howl in protest.”

Painful and irritating, this stiff lens warps what has been precious and freeing to Audrey: “With its confinement, a freedom seemed to have been taken from me.” In her protest against this violation of self, Audrey flushes the lens.

The treatment of time in Leaving Brooklyn is complex in its fluidity, in its graceful passage from present to future to past. The point of view is equally complex. Readers are within the perspective of the very young Audrey one moment and the next moment in the perspective of Audrey as an adult wondering about her younger self, doubting, evaluating. It’s a brilliant form for telling a story, sophisticated and inventive.

Audrey’s first childhood crush is on Bobby, whose mother is the local chicken flicker. For a while, he is the focus of Audrey’s strong imaginary life, of daydreams, of long conversations: “In my mind, as always, I told him how things truly were and felt.” Bobby’s mother has a cleft palate and speaks in jumbled sounds, but she is accomplished at pulling “feathers from the chicken, her fingers so swift that they dissolved in a blur… tossed up by the energy in her fingers …while the chicken flicker sat in the midst of them, large, solid, and draped, a Madonna assumed into a cloud.”

Lynne juxtaposes the sensuous immediacy of the young Audrey’s experiences—external and internal—with the reflective voice of the adult Audrey as she evaluates her experiences, challenges her memories, and separates what happened from what might have happened, sometimes even adjusting the story: “I am confused about who I was: why else would I need to tell this story of my eye? The confusion is that I seem to have grown up into someone who could not have been me as a child. Yet, in the telling the girl grows to sound more and more like the woman I became.”

I find this border between memoir and fiction mesmerizing, and I trust the voice of the adult Audrey even as she doubts herself: “Even as I recall it, record it, I suspect I really didn’t do such an outrageous thing and memory is falsifying, inventing what I wish I could have done or imagining it from what I have since become capable of doing.”

Lynne has told me that it was her intention to have this novel “read as a memoir… an autobiographical account, when in truth it is highly fictionalized.” Audrey’s vision—intuitive, daring—mirrors Lynne’s way of writing: going beyond what is apparent; challenging the mysterious border between imagination and memory; rejecting the stiff lens of conformity.

Some writers, I believe, are born with that odd and magical way of seeing, and Lynne is certainly one of them. For writers, there is no other way of seeing: they’re drawn toward the beauty found in distortion and celebrate the gift and the persistence of this odd vision.

 

URSULA HEGI Author of Stones from the River