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Overview
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston Globe * New Yorker * NPR * PopMatters
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
"A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this." -- Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers" (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780062938824
- ISBN-10: 0062938827
- Publisher: Ecco Press
- Publish Date: October 2023
- Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
- Page Count: 384
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Somewhere between its founding as Breukelen and the contemporary rise of area code 718 as a fashion statement, there existed a Brooklyn worthy of myth. Its eponymous bridge is one of New York City’s most recognized icons. The Dodgers came from there (and left). And its Bugs Bunny accent—well, fuggeddaboudit! The borough has lodged itself in the American psyche, and you didn’t have to grow up bouncing your Spaldeen off the stoop of a ramshackle brownstone to be keenly aware of Brooklyn’s cultural impact. Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, has returned to the scene for Brooklyn Crime Novel. Don’t be deceived by its generic title. Going back nearly three decades to his debut noir-influenced novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, Lethem has never approached the beat looking for just the facts. The action begins in the 1970s among a loosely-knit community living on Dean Street in a neighborhood that is now known as Boerum Hill. Lethem himself grew up in the area in the early ‘70s, so it’s not much of a surprise that kids are the primary cast. For most of the novel, a single “crime” is re-enacted with the regularity of a cuckoo clock chime: a mini-mugging known as “the dance,” in which the losing participant is forced to pay a toll—or “lend” money—to the winner. This happens so frequently that parents routinely send their kids out with “mugging money” and advise them to stash their real bankroll in a shoe for safety. But other, larger crimes are going on as well. Sometimes the kids get caught up in them, and sometimes—as with the gentrification, or rather, demolition of the neighborhood by real estate speculators—they only affect the youngsters tangentially. Lethem unwinds his story through a series of small vignettes: imperfect Polaroids of an imperfect past that slowly coalesce into a photomosaic montage of memoir-meets-myth. You can smell the urban petrichor of a fire hydrant’s spray falling onto a blistering asphalt street; you can taste that first drop of cheesy grease dripping from a folded slice; you can feel the hot shame of a kid being bullied daily on his way to becoming a man. While Brooklyn Crime Novel may not cohere stylistically to the more hard-boiled Gotham underworld of an Ed McBain or Andrew Vachss novel, it’s by no means a chalk outline.
Somewhere between its founding as Breukelen and the contemporary rise of area code 718 as a fashion statement, there existed a Brooklyn worthy of myth. Its eponymous bridge is one of New York City’s most recognized icons. The Dodgers came from there (and left). And its Bugs Bunny accent—well, fuggeddaboudit! The borough has lodged itself in the American psyche, and you didn’t have to grow up bouncing your Spaldeen off the stoop of a ramshackle brownstone to be keenly aware of Brooklyn’s cultural impact. Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, has returned to the scene for Brooklyn Crime Novel. Don’t be deceived by its generic title. Going back nearly three decades to his debut noir-influenced novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, Lethem has never approached the beat looking for just the facts. The action begins in the 1970s among a loosely-knit community living on Dean Street in a neighborhood that is now known as Boerum Hill. Lethem himself grew up in the area in the early ‘70s, so it’s not much of a surprise that kids are the primary cast. For most of the novel, a single “crime” is re-enacted with the regularity of a cuckoo clock chime: a mini-mugging known as “the dance,” in which the losing participant is forced to pay a toll—or “lend” money—to the winner. This happens so frequently that parents routinely send their kids out with “mugging money” and advise them to stash their real bankroll in a shoe for safety. But other, larger crimes are going on as well. Sometimes the kids get caught up in them, and sometimes—as with the gentrification, or rather, demolition of the neighborhood by real estate speculators—they only affect the youngsters tangentially. Lethem unwinds his story through a series of small vignettes: imperfect Polaroids of an imperfect past that slowly coalesce into a photomosaic montage of memoir-meets-myth. You can smell the urban petrichor of a fire hydrant’s spray falling onto a blistering asphalt street; you can taste that first drop of cheesy grease dripping from a folded slice; you can feel the hot shame of a kid being bullied daily on his way to becoming a man. While Brooklyn Crime Novel may not cohere stylistically to the more hard-boiled Gotham underworld of an Ed McBain or Andrew Vachss novel, it’s by no means a chalk outline.