11.

Into the Thickets of Urban Crisis

JONATHAN LETHEM, L. J. DAVIS, PAULA FOX

Mongrel by deep nature, the place absorbed the first scattering of hippies, homosexuals, and painters pretty ungrudgingly. But with signs of a real-estate boom, and a broad displacement of the existing population, the changes were politicized.

—JONATHAN LETHEM, on 1970s brownstone Brooklyn

It’s sixth grade and your clothes aren’t right, you’re not an athlete, you’re scrawny, and you’re too good at school. And if you’re Dylan Ebdus, the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s autobiographical novel The Fortress of Solitude, you’ve got the added problem of being the wrong color at the wrong time and place.

It’s the mid-seventies and you’re living in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, though to some people it’s still called Gowanus, after the fetid nearby Gowanus Canal. Some of the stately brownstones that line the streets, mostly built in the nineteenth century, are now cheap rooming houses, and others are boarded up and falling apart. You live on Dean Street, and the high-rise Brooklyn House of Detention looms overhead just two short blocks north, on Atlantic Avenue. And a low-income housing project looms two blocks south, off Wyckoff Street. If you’re Dylan, you don’t want to go near Wyckoff, but really there’s nowhere that’s a safe haven from getting “yoked.”

You’re walking back from school, just one block from home, and a group of kids spot an easy mark and surround you. One or another puts you in a headlock and sends your book bag flying. Others dig into your pockets and empty them of money and your bus pass.

“Yoke the white boy. Do it, nigger.”

[Dylan] might be yoked low, bent over, hugged to someone’s hip then spun on release like a human top, legs buckling, crossing at the ankles. Or from behind, never sure by whom once the headlock popped loose and three or four guys stood around, witnesses with hard eyes, shaking their heads at the sheer dumb luck of being white. It was routine as laughter. Yoking erupted spontaneously, a joke of fear, a piece of kidding.

Worse things have happened, Dylan knows, but still it’s not so funny. And it’s not so funny to be one of those guys roughing Dylan up, either. Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Bobby Kennedy have all been shot dead, and anyway they’re just names to these young kids. They’re more familiar with the attitudes and ground-level realities the civil rights era didn’t fix. The dysfunction eating away at New York City and Brooklyn, which no one in power has wanted to talk about for a decade or two, is now impossible to ignore.

The forces behind the anger and fear outside Dylan’s house in The Fortress of Solitude had been growing unchecked in Brooklyn for years. Back when Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964, the same year Lethem was born, a crisis was brewing that New York City’s leadership was not equipped to handle. America’s GDP was still on the march, and the city was still at the center of it, still the financial capital, still the manufacturing capital, still outpacing most U.S. states in retail trade. Still, still, still. But what about the future?

As the historian George Lankevich argues in his book New York City, a certain blithe denial reigned among city officials. Job growth was a small fraction of the national average and a growing segment of the population relied on government aid. Racial conflicts were coming to the fore nationwide, including in destination cities of the Great Migration. Major riots broke out in nearby Newark, New Jersey (1967), in Detroit (1967), and in Chicago and Washington (1968, in the days after the King assassination). New York, with its famously close quarters and its tradition of confrontational politics, threatened to become a pressure cooker. Parts of Brooklyn—a place stricken by economic stagnation and home to more black residents than any other borough—seemed to be dry tinder ready for a spark. During a 1964 heat wave, four days of sporadic rioting had broken out in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant after a police officer shot and killed a black boy in Harlem. Yet voters were alarmed enough about crime to overwhelmingly side with the cops: a proposal for a civilian review board to monitor police behavior was struck down, angering minority groups who distrusted police. In retrospect it is perhaps surprising that New York did not have a much larger riot, a fact that many have credited to the leadership from 1966–73 of Mayor John Lindsay, who had a very mixed record in other respects.

Nevertheless, crime was on the rise, and it would rise much higher in the ensuing decades. Living conditions and safety declined around low-income housing projects that had been built with the opposite intention in mind. Slum dwellings had been razed to construct the Walt Whitman and Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses, bordering Fort Greene Park and located where Whitman once lived. They were proudly billed as the world’s largest public housing project when they were renovated in the fifties. A New York Times reporter gave this assessment of the result (in a news article, not an editorial): “Nowhere this side of Moscow are you likely to find public housing so closely duplicating the squalor it was designed to supplant.” Marianne Moore, recall, was living just across the park then. Toward the end of her time there, an elderly woman was mugged and beaten in the subway near Moore’s apartment; her neighbor was robbed three times; people sometimes slept on the stoop of her building. She bought a new lock for her door and a can of tear gas but, she reluctantly admitted, she still didn’t feel safe. By 1966 she was gone, back to Greenwich Village. She moved only after much urging from family and friends. “It’s a terrible thing to be beset by fear,” she told the New York Times just after her departure. The article’s headline is “Brooklyn Loses Marianne Moore” and the reporter writes that she “was sometimes called Brooklyn’s last ornament.”

Leaving aside “the Manhattan-oriented enclave on the Heights,” the late L. J. Davis once wrote, some felt that when Marianne Moore left Brooklyn, “the sun had set forever on its literary life.” And yet as Moore was leaving, Davis was one of a group of writers who passed her on their way in. Where one saw decline, others saw opportunity, and Brooklyn’s literary life went on.

Davis opted to buy a cheap, neglected house in Boerum Hill in 1965, on Dean Street in fact. “Anyone who chose to move to the neighborhood was in some way crazy,” he later said. “I know I was.” In several well-received novels written in the late sixties and early seventies and in occasional essays and interviews, Davis paints a rather caustic portrait of the Brooklyn of this era. “Davis is not a writer tender of others’ susceptibilities,” Paula Fox has written, being polite. In other words, he’s mean. He’s also exceptionally funny. A Meaningful Life (1971), reissued by New York Review Books in 2009, is a very enjoyable novel—if you don’t mind some truly uncomfortable reading.

By the late sixties, parts of Brooklyn that were once prosperous had faltered and become unstable. Some educated newcomers, though, were just starting to reenter the picture, hunting for houses with “good bones,” hoping to spiff things up. The urban poor and the middle class began to cross paths at the corner store—and not always with a smile. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, a tussle for the turf was taking shape, and one side had the advantage of a thicker wallet. Davis’s novel chronicles the wrenching and halting beginnings of Brooklyn’s era of gentrification, a word so politically fraught that to this day it will silence a Brooklyn auditorium full of people wondering who will say the wrong thing. In A Meaningful Life, L. J. Davis stands up and says the wrong thing. He spins out his comic tale and pays no heed to the fact that he’s stomping around on the fault lines separating races and social classes in America. You spend some time dying of laughter and you spend some time dying for him to change the subject. I suspect that some of Davis’s neighbors wanted to burn this book when it came out.

In the novel, Lowell Lake, intelligent but comically ill-equipped for the world, wanders over from Manhattan and into the thickets of urban crisis by buying a huge Brooklyn mansion that’s been turned into a rotted, foul rooming house. His marriage has been going badly. He’s given up on his novel because of its “overwhelming livid awfulness” and because his nocturnal writing schedule had the drawback that “for all practical purposes, he might as well have been dead.” His subsequent job at a plumbing-trade magazine has only left him fearing that he will stay in it forever: “It was surprisingly easy for him to imagine what the rest of life held in store for him, short of Negro rebellion or atomic war. It did not hold much, and he would go through it sort of standing around mutely in tense attitudes reminiscent of Montgomery Clift, not particularly liking what was happening to him but totally unable to think of a single thing to do about it.” Finally he finds inspiration in an article he reads: “Creative young people were buying houses in the Brooklyn slums, integrating all-Negro blocks, and coming firmly to grips with poverty and municipal corruption. It was the stuff of life. It was what he was looking for.” Lowell’s wife, raised in Flatbush, wants no part of moving back to Brooklyn, unless it’s the Heights or Albemarle Road, a suburban-looking street near her childhood home. It is not.

The house they buy—or really he buys, sending another wrecking ball into the marriage—is one of a cluster of grand homes near the border of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Most of these were built and owned in the nineteenth century by the cream off the top of Brooklyn society: the Pratts, other magnates, pillars of the community. The twenty-one-room mansion that Lowell goes to see—with ornamental brickwork, terra-cotta panels, a mansard roof, and a turret—fits right in. But now each room is a home, sometimes for an entire family. The real estate agent, shady as they come, has told Lowell and his wife that for less than twenty thousand dollars the house will be theirs, “delivered vacant.” (Any Brooklyn house hunter is well acquainted with the term, which has an ugly whiff to it: Don’t worry about the people who live there—we can make them go away.) Showing the couple around the house, the realtor acts as if the residents aren’t there. Lowell sees what’s cooking on a stove in one room and blurts out to the tenant, “Soul food, huh?” He gets a look of “implacable hatred” in response.

As it turns out, Lowell gets stuck with the task of gradually forcing out the tenants so he can restore the house. In one case, Lowell mistakenly disposes of all of a destitute black man’s belongings, thinking they’ve been abandoned—a cheap old bed and chest, a ratty mattress and suit—and the man confronts him about it. I wasn’t the only one cringing when Davis read this passage aloud in 2009 at Fort Greene’s Greenlight Bookstore. The scene takes place four decades earlier, but the setting is within a five-minute walk of the store.

With his narrative of unintended consequences, Davis creates a pressurized microcosm of the central story of brownstone Brooklyn since the time the book was written. In come the expensively educated bargain hunters, drawn by the lovely real estate and visions of historical preservation, staking themselves on a faith in social harmony, carrying with them a little pride, perhaps, in their willingness to live among families poorer than their own. Out go the people who called the neighborhood home before the “pioneers” started to “discover” it, now lacking the means to stay on a block getting fancier by the day.

Davis could not have known when he published this book in 1971 that “brownstoners” like him would help bring about the kind of dramatic and disruptive change that they have in the decades since. And in fact A Meaningful Life doesn’t leave you with the suggestion that the tide of the neighborhood is going to rise, though Lowell’s experience is perhaps not the best guide. For him, things go wrong, first slowly and amusingly, then quickly and shockingly. The novel eventually casts his whole project and its intentions thoroughly into darkness.

Despite the comedy that continues nearly to the end, A Meaningful Life offers up something of a nightmare vision. The Brooklyn streets here are sinister, barren, and frightening, lined by abandoned or burned buildings, full of people leering from the shadows and from windows overhead. Davis describes the sights on one particularly ugly block, where Lowell is being harassed by drunken men as he passes by: “Half the front doors appeared to be off their hinges, all the brownstone facings were flaking in a way that suggested rotting teeth, and naked light bulbs could be seen burning weakly in bare and garishly painted rooms beyond cheap and often ragged curtains hung from sagging bits of string.” It’s typical that in the midst of this description we get a bit of dark wit, in questionable taste: “The scene was so hyperbolically poverty-stricken that it didn’t look real; it looked contrived, like a set for some kind of incredibly squalid version of Porgy and Bess.”

It’s often unclear what the novel’s attitude is to the protagonist, since the narration closely tracks Lowell’s point of view. Those tempted to make judgments about the author’s own attitudes may be surprised to learn from Lethem’s introduction to the 2009 edition that Davis adopted two black daughters, who were raised alongside his white children. While Lowell thinks his neighbors are making his life difficult, he is making his own life difficult, too, and the novel eventually lays waste to his notion that he can tackle urban ills and renovate his life by fixing up an old house.

The high-wire risks that are liable to alienate readers are also what make the novel significant. Like Henry Miller and Mailer on his better days, Davis doesn’t appear to care whether we like his book or even like him. He’s hunting bigger game. The novel explores material that most of America doesn’t want to hear about—urgent and ambiguous matters like crime, class, and race that many people were seeking to ignore or “transcend” at the time the book appeared. The bleak comedy lends charm but also ups the ante by creating a discomfort that provokes thought by force. Lethem (who was a friend of Davis’s son growing up) discusses the way Davis trained a spotlight on the elephant in the room.

The dystopian reality of late 60s and early 70s outerborough New York City can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman, crossed off the list. Firehouses and police stations refused to answer calls, whether out of fear, or indifference, or both.… How precarious this existence was—morally, sociologically, financially—was never exactly permissible to name outside of L.J.’s books, or at least not with such nihilistic glee.

Perhaps Davis and Lethem exaggerate the local horror, for effect or out of an impulse to share war stories from the bad old days. (Lethem has written of “New Yorkers my age, we who preen in our old fears … mythologizing the crime-ruled New York of the seventies.”) Many Brooklynites of the era would take issue with the idea that they lived in a “dystopian reality.” However, a little-known 1974 nonfiction book called Fort Greene U.S.A., by Barbara Habenstreit, does much to confirm the grim conditions depicted in A Meaningful Life. Habenstreit, a resident of Fort Greene for eight years at the time she was writing, carries out a careful examination of the neighborhood. She poses it as a microcosm of urban poverty in America, using statistics and case studies to fill out her account. Bearing a cover illustration of a crumbling block of brownstone, this book is a depressing visit to a not-so-distant past. Although the author shows much more empathy for the poor than Lowell does and gives some committed local social service agencies their due, the overall picture hits hard.

“In Fort Greene, few people leave their houses after dark if they can help it,” Habenstreit writes. She describes Myrtle Avenue—which today has its grit but also its French bistro and its hip wine store with art on the walls—as a virtual wasteland. Faced with rampant shoplifting and a dwindling number of customers willing to brave the street, businesses shut their doors in a domino effect. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Habenstreit writes, opened a tiny takeout branch on Myrtle in the early seventies with floor-to-ceiling safety partitions and a closed-circuit camera. The store thus escaped robberies, but the customers did not, as teenagers stood outside and shook people down for their food. The place closed in a year. Those businesses that did remain open relied indirectly on government money: shoppers used their welfare checks, which kept the whole neighborhood economy from collapsing, Habenstreit says. In response to “a drug problem that can only be described as devastating,” eighteen methadone clinics operated in the neighborhood. Offenses like purse snatching and vandalism, more so than major crimes, meant that, in her words, “an air of lawlessness prevails on the street.”

The situation wasn’t quite so severe in nearby Boerum Hill, where Davis and young Lethem lived at the time; a fixer-upper cost a little bit more there. But since citywide and nationwide trends played a large role, the dynamics were much the same, and conditions were still very poor. Davis said of his family, “We got robbed—not mugged, robbed—four or five times, which was not so bad, actually.”

In spite of the crime, the writer Paula Fox, born in 1923, came from Manhattan to live in Boerum Hill in 1967, two years after Davis arrived. She also lived on Dean Street, oddly, as did Davis and the Lethem family (who came the next year). It was there that she wrote Desperate Characters, before moving three years later to adjacent Cobble Hill, where she still lives.

Desperate Characters, a slim, bleak novel published in 1970, has attracted an illustrious and powerful crowd of admirers (including Alfred Kazin). In its pages Brooklyn’s disputed terrain gets a cold portrait, discolored by fear and filtered through the disintegrating fabric of a failing marriage. Recounting one weekend in the life of the Bentwoods, a white, childless married couple in their forties, the book portrays a Brooklyn close to its nadir. Otto and Sophie Bentwood live within walking distance of Brooklyn Heights but inhabit more precarious territory, as the author did at the time. Although Otto’s and Sophie’s personalities and politics refract the atmosphere differently, they both feel a steadily encroaching sense of threat. The Bentwoods own their town house, appointed with the domestic signposts of the intellectual class. Otto is a lawyer, and his wife, Sophie, the protagonist, is a sometime literary translator who doesn’t need to work. They have a Mercedes and a second home on Long Island and live on a kind of oasis block of mostly owner-occupied brownstones. There is one boardinghouse, but the tenants are “very quiet, almost furtive, like the last remaining members of a foreign enclave who, daily, expect deportation.”

In the opening scene, a stray cat Sophie has been feeding bites her hand fiercely, triggering a swelling panic she tries to suppress. Otto has warned her that she shouldn’t feed the mangy cat. She doesn’t want it to be true that it has bitten her—that Otto was right, that it is dangerous to venture outside, even with good motives. The wound drives the novel’s suspense as Sophie spends the weekend in a state of dread. It can’t be rabies, can it? Things couldn’t be that bad, could they?

Around them, the Bentwoods see an atmosphere of delinquency and blight, a landscape where they feel unwelcome and embattled, where they grimly contend with garbage dumped out on the streets, dogs tormented nearby, rocks thrown through their friends’ windows. Sophie is bewildered and ill at ease, unsure of what right she has, if any, to judge the community she’s chosen. Otto is more confident that he’s in the right and tends to paint Sophie as a hysteric. Two more Manhattanites have bought houses nearby on a poorer block than theirs. Sophie asks, “What happens to the people in them when the houses are bought? Where do they go? I always wonder about that.” Otto doesn’t seem to care. Sophie tells a friend that Otto is “too preoccupied with fighting off a mysterious effluvium he thinks will drown him. He thinks garbage is an insult directed at him personally.”

Otto’s law partner, Charlie Russel, breaks with him over Otto’s lack of interest in serving a needy clientele. (Otto: “You can’t imagine the people in the waiting room, a beggar’s army.”) Charlie, pointing up the street toward downtown Brooklyn, tells Sophie, “There’s Family Court.… Your husband won’t set a foot in there. Too low class. Half my clients spend most of their time in those urine-scented chambers.”

Sophie and Otto’s childlessness, while rarely discussed, is a significant element of the backdrop. Today Brooklyn is full of couples who go there to raise children, but the Bentwoods go it alone, and Sophie is troubled by a concern that her life—“the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house”—has turned too far inward. “Now I’m at the brink,” Sophie thinks, “the extinguishing point.” She is beset by the feeling that the world around her is changing too fast to keep her safe.

There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously. Hosing vomit off the sidewalk was only a temporary measure, like a good intention. The lines were tightening—Mike Holstein had known that, standing in his bedroom with the stone in his hand—but it was almost impossible to know where the lines were.

The Bentwoods try to one-up each other morally, which leads nowhere. A man rings their doorbell and asks to use the phone to find out the train schedule from Grand Central to a town upstate, where he says his mother has suffered a stroke. Otto gives him money for the fare, but later tells Sophie he doesn’t believe the man. Sophie says:

“But it’s not so strange a story, Otto. It’s ordinary. And what if it wasn’t true? What is $11?”

“You mean, they are not to be held accountable?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant, when you give something, give it.”

The argument peters out, with both showing pangs of social conscience, as they do elsewhere in the novel (Otto more rarely), but only enough to feel a gnawing sense of self-reproach. Sophie takes the subway to Manhattan on the theory that taking a taxi “would have been self-indulgence, made more obnoxious by the fact that she could afford one.” But neither she nor Otto can always suppress the alienation and even scorn they feel about “them,” who are referred to as “the slum people.”

The country is shifting underfoot—Vietnam is dividing everyone, the city is falling, strangers hate each other—and the Bentwoods don’t know which way to turn. As Charlie puts it, they are “drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.” Such intimations and metaphors of violence recur throughout, underscoring a ferocious social upheaval that Fox makes palpable by addressing it both in miniature and indirectly. Jonathan Franzen has said about the novel, “I had never read a book before that was about the indistinguishability between an interior crisis and an exterior crisis.”

Like A Meaningful Life, Desperate Characters traffics in uncomfortable truths. Fox won’t let us have our avoidances, our unexamined beliefs. In a 2001 interview, she said, “When there’s a terrible murder, people who are interviewed say, ‘This has always been a quiet neighborhood.’ That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn’t anyplace that’s a quiet neighborhood.”

No matter how the Bentwoods look at it, it seems that in their neighborhood, in their city, a kind of war is on. There might be friendliness and cooperation and good faith, too, but one shouldn’t pretend there’s no battle. On one side the tenants at the boardinghouse look like they “expect deportation,” as though they’re in a hostile foreign land. On the other “the besieged” hose vomit off the sidewalks while the invisible lines tighten around them. Both sides think they’re losing. Both might be right.

*   *   *

Jonathan Lethem, born in 1964, was a young boy when Paula Fox was writing Desperate Characters just down the street. Davis and Fox were writing about the Brooklynites of his parents’ generation. In his late thirties, with five novels under his belt, Lethem looked back at his youth in the neighborhood in The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Its portrait of the area is less stark than Fox’s, more expansive. The core of the book takes place in the seventies, when in many respects New York City declined even further, especially in the outer boroughs. Commission after commission had warned of the city’s fiscal state, but not nearly enough action was taken before financial catastrophe came to visit in 1975, arguably the rock-bottom moment for New York. On October 17, New York City’s cash needs totaled $477 million, but the balance in all its accounts was a hair less than that. Actually it was $34 million. The city was fifty-three minutes from default when a deal was reached for a short-term fix. But New York needed help from the country, and President Gerald Ford did not want to give it. He took a firm position against any bailout despite warnings of the nationwide ripple effects of a bankruptcy. “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” read the famous agonized cry on the cover of the New York Daily News.

State and federal intervention finally averted a city collapse, but painful austerity measures and other consequences followed. During the 1977 World Series, the television broadcast showed an abandoned school on fire near Yankee Stadium. At the time the Bronx had for years been losing as much as four square blocks of housing per week to physical decay and suspicious fires. Speaking over the image of the building ablaze, announcer Howard Cosell said, “There it is again, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” One July night in a heat wave in 1977, the year the Son of Sam killer was on the loose, the power went out in the city. Many parts of Brooklyn, particularly Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, were lit up by fires and beset by looting in what Mayor Abe Beame called “a night of terror.”

The blackout makes a touching appearance in Lethem’s novel. Young Dylan, the main character, is out of town for once, in Vermont courtesy of the Fresh Air Fund, a charity that sends city kids to the country for the summer. He’s fallen for the daughter of the family hosting him, so when footage of the blackout chaos in New York appears on the news, he tries to act casual, playing it cool. But that night, Lethem writes, “Dylan lay dreaming awake of the city on fire.” For Dylan, the seventies in Brooklyn are not about urban decay, fiscal shortfalls, and the limitations of the civil rights movement. They are the world of his youth, at once frightening and exhilarating, perplexing and charged with meaning. In some ways he is as embattled as the Bentwoods, and more vulnerable. He can never be sure what path to take home, what group of kids might shake him down with no one around to help: “Adults, teachers, they were as remote as Manhattan was to Brooklyn, blind indifferent towers.” But the streets as seen through Dylan’s and Lethem’s eyes are tinged with a reverie and nostalgia entirely absent from Desperate Characters. The writing is jazzy, loose, even exuberant, and The Fortress of Solitude is suffused with the fumbling excitement of reaching across social boundaries, of forging a relationship to the world on the fly.

Lethem’s family, he has written, defined themselves as “artists or potential artists,… hippies, protesters, commune dwellers, Quakers, white kids but in public school.” His father was a serious and inventive painter, and his mother held odd jobs like piercing ears in Greenwich Village. She destroyed lettuce and grapes in the supermarket because they’d been picked by exploited migrant workers. Both parents were deeply involved in volunteering and liberal activism; they marched against Robert Moses freeways (one of which cut right through the neighborhood next door), against Vietnam, against nuclear power. For them Brooklyn, and specifically Boerum Hill, was a natural place to be. Alongside black and Puerto Rican families and “some new white renovators who’d launched an unsystematic gentrification,” five or six houses in the immediate blocks served as communes for young people. Lethem writes, “The neighborhood was a laboratory, a zone of mixing, never defined by one ethnicity or class,” and it felt accepting, at least at first. The Lethems were among the same wave of white brownstoners as the Bentwoods, but instead of being shut inside a claustrophobic house, the Lethems threw open the doors—to friends from back in Greenwich Village, to a new crowd from the area, even to other lovers. Where the Bentwoods saw a social ecosystem of trespasses and distrust, the Lethems saw neighbors and potential allies in a new social order.

Lethem clearly modeled Dylan’s parents, Rachel and Abraham Ebdus, on his own, with some significant variations. Rachel, a chain smoker of cigarettes and marijuana, insists on sending Dylan to a public school with only two other white students. Otto Bentwood probably wouldn’t have approved, any more than Isabel Vendle does in The Fortress of Solitude. Vendle, an older white woman who coins the term Boerum Hill in an effort to impart some class by evoking the area’s Dutch past, is a kind of grande dame of the neighborhood’s slowly whitening face, policing the area to make sure her kind of people set the tone. To her, Boerum Hill is “partial, recalcitrant, corrupt.” She wishes “she could slather money over Dean Street entirely, could bribe the man with the car with the painted flames to polish it on Pacific or Nevins instead or just drive it into the Gowanus Canal.” Isabel urges her Dean Street neighbor Rachel to consider private school for Dylan—Packer, the Friends School, or St. Ann’s—and even offers to help pay for it. “It isn’t about money,” Rachel answers. “I believe in public school.” Rachel also tells her son to call their neighborhood Gowanus, because Boerum Hill is “pretentious bullshit.”

Even after Rachel skips town and even as his father holes himself up in his top-floor studio, Dylan takes their optimistic sense of possibility with him to the blocks around their house. There he tries to keep his fear under wraps, finds friends, and plays ball games packed with the drama of childhood defeats and victories in the fading light of wonderfully evoked summer afternoons.

Dylan finds his most crucial ally in a boy named Mingus Rude, who becomes a popular kid about town after he moves in down the block. He’s the son of a black man, a washed-up former soul singer for a chart-topping group, and another absentee white mother. Dylan and Mingus grow close, ardently pursuing their pastimes—comic books, stickball, graffiti, pop music, chasing girls, smoking pot—with Mingus leading the way. He is more confident, Mingus, more of a piece with the surroundings and one grade older, at an age when that matters. But they share crucial things, not least the experience of growing up without a mother and of trying to walk a delicate line in an urban environment whose growing pains mirror their own.

The grid of zones, the huddled brownstone streets between prison and projects, Wyckoff Gardens, Gowanus Houses. The whores on Nevins and Pacific. The high-school kids pouring out of Sarah J. Hale all afternoon, black girls already bigger than yo mama, Third Avenue another no-man’s-land, the empty lot where they raped that girl. The halfway house. It was all halfway, you walked out of your halfway school and tried to chart a course through your halfway neighborhood to make it back to your own halfway house, your half-empty house.

For Dylan there’s a critical bond between these two, this “uncanny sporadic pair, their solidarity a befuddlement to passersby,” though Mingus’s presence later grows more sporadic than Dylan would like. Mingus puts Dylan in reach of the social life he craves among the cool kids who look nothing like him. Mingus gives him cover in the neighborhood when he wants to join the crowd, brings him along one cherished day to a DJ jam session where he’s the only white face. Their relationship is made magical when Dylan allows Mingus to share a ring given to him by a vagrant—a ring that confers supernatural powers. It allows the two boys to fly, to take on the role of a superhero and fight crime. As Dylan felt when he first met Mingus, “Anything was possible, really.” Maybe Dylan’s mother was on to something real. Maybe all could be made right, and Brooklyn could be a kind of multicultural commune where everyone is welcome and safe.

But Dylan’s father, Abraham, can only wonder the opposite when Mingus gets caught mistakenly breaking up a drug sting in Fort Greene while wearing a superhero costume. What Abraham thinks but does not say, never mind getting an answer: “Is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?” Just down the street, Mingus’s father is going to pieces, padding around his dark sanctum in a threadbare robe; he and Brooklyn have discovered freebase cocaine. A few years down the road, it’ll be crack, which will take hold of Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods like a strangling vine.

The bridge between Mingus and Dylan proves shaky as they move through adolescence, strained by the racial and class dynamics that didn’t seem to matter so much back when they were kids—the divisions that Dylan’s parents and so many sixties progressives hoped to overcome. Lethem has written of his actual family, “The souring of utopian optimism in the mid-seventies, a culture-historical cliché, was for us true, and personal.” Dylan gets into a magnet high school in Manhattan, Stuyvesant, and becomes drawn into a new, more privileged sphere, with mixed feelings about leaving Dean Street and Mingus behind. Then he’s off to his first-choice college in Vermont, working hard to pay for tuition. It’s an intentional wholesale escape from the Brooklyn streets to a thinly veiled Bennington College (which Lethem attended). Dylan thinks, “If a kid from Gowanus goes to the most expensive college in America maybe he’s from Boerum Hill after all. If not Brooklyn Heights.”

Meanwhile, Mingus gets mixed up with a tough kid from the projects who hazed and frightened Dylan as a boy, the kind of kid who might have thrown that rock through the window in Desperate Characters. Mingus skips school for years at a time, holed up in his room cooking for himself on a hot plate to avoid his only parent, who’s upstairs in the kitchen getting high. The boy Dylan once idolized, Mingus gets into harder drugs with intent to distribute, builds up a rap sheet, and winds up at a dead end. Despite Dylan’s hard-won escape, his recollections of his Brooklyn childhood keep pulling at him like undertow—as Lethem’s own memories have done, it seems. Like many of his Brooklyn forerunners—Henry Miller, Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin—he excelled enough at a young age to leave the trials of the place in his wake, but he came back to tell its story.

Lethem’s previous novel, his breakthrough hit Motherless Brooklyn (1999), depicted a somewhat different slice of borough life in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Similarly vivid and alive, this brainy detective novel takes place in much the same area, specifically Boerum Hill and the adjoining Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, with stop-offs elsewhere. But here Lethem trains his focus on the Italian locals who hold some sway over the territory, even in the face of the arriving brownstoners. A guy named Frank Minna picks out four of the five white kids in an orphanage in a desolate stretch of downtown Brooklyn and takes them under his wing. He’s a low-level dealer in stolen goods who later sets up a detective agency that fronts as a taxi service, with the orphans as his worker bees. Minna needs minions for his shady purposes, and the kids need a parental figure. One of them, Lionel Essrog, is an unusual boy and an even more unusual narrator: he has Tourette’s syndrome. His words spill out in barrages of clever puns and profanity. Minna, a believer in tough love—with the emphasis on tough—initiates him and the other “Minna Men” into an Italian Brooklyn realm that lines Court Street and the surrounding area.

Minna’s Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings. The barbershop, where he took us for identical haircuts that cost three dollars each, except that the fee was waived for Minna—no one had to wonder why the price of a haircut hadn’t gone up since 1966.… The barbershop was a retirement home, a social club, and front for a backroom poker game. The barbers were taken care of because this was Brooklyn, where people looked out.

No one who really counts on Minna’s Court Street has a job in Manhattan. And everyone seems to know everyone else from way back, because they grew up just around the corner. Older men sit out on their stoops together, or on lawn chairs on the sidewalk, trading stories and jibes.

Minna’s mother, Carlotta, a taciturn but nurturing woman, is an “Old Stove,” a cook who works in her own apartment making Italian dishes for people who swing by to pay for a plate of homemade food. Minna is a small-time mobster, but he’s gotten himself into deep trouble involving a couple of aging dons—last names Matricardi and Rockaforte—who own a brownstone on Degraw Street. He’s knifed in the stomach and killed in the opening sequence. It’s just another Brooklyn murder to everyone but the Minna Men, who set out to solve the case. Motherless Brooklyn is a zippier but less ambitious book than The Fortress of Solitude; in essence it’s a crime novel with a postmodern Tourettic twist. Both books, though, convey a memorable and textured sense of place. In Motherless Brooklyn there is less of a focus on race than there is in The Fortress of Solitude, and social issues play a background rather than a foreground role, but each novel provides a convincing entrée into the overlapping cultural networks that defined the Brooklyn of the time: the world of liberal brownstoners, coming up against the limits of their ideals; the world of Italians with deeper roots in the borough; the world of black kids enmeshed in a tightly knit but restrictive sphere.

Conflict is a steady presence, yes, but through Lethem’s eyes the terrain is distinct from the bleak landscape that L. J. Davis and Paula Fox portrayed; it’s less of a battleground than a mosaic, a mosaic-in-progress that looks different depending on your angle. Where Davis and Fox show the rot at the core of urban America that too often met with a blind eye, Lethem captures a different aspect—also underrepresented—of the story of city life. In his Boerum Hill, always “a zone of mixing,” well-heeled newcomers brought tension and ended up effecting some changes that Dylan’s family would lament. But Lethem’s writing is nuanced enough to avoid casting gentrification in straightforward terms. The evolution of Brooklyn was and remains halting, fragmentary, and uncertain; it resists being slotted into a political narrative. What Lethem brings is an eye for life in the streets—a laboratory of democracy that the suburbs cannot replicate. His work recalls the photography and films of Brooklyn native Helen Levitt, particularly her documentary of 1940s Spanish Harlem called In the Street, a fourteen-minute film that illustrates the lyricism and theatrics that transpire every day, on every block. Lethem’s novels stand in Walt Whitman’s shadow, too, dramatizing the weird tumult and diversity of the American city. Lethem brings out the egalitarian poetry in what happens close to the ground.