Brooklyn crime novel

Lethem (The Arrest, 2020) returns to Brooklyn, his signature setting and preoccupation, in the latest of his empathic, elaborate, and affecting variations on crime fiction. In this intricately excavated, breathtaking tale of imperiled childhood in a fitfully gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, street shakedowns are so common, parents provide children with "mugging money." Hopscotching over the past six decades with tangential forays into the deeper past, Lethem's self-critiquing narrator recounts the misadventures of the Dean Street boys, some Black, some Jewish, some with firm anchors in the neighborhood, others the offspring of hippies turned DIY renovators sprucing up brownstones and dreaming of racial harmony. The boys struggle to survive, precipitating shenanigans or finding themselves trapped in absurd, mortifying, or terrifying predicaments. One attempts to serve as a "secret emissary" between the races; others are nerds, romantics, book-fanatics, "endurers and abiders" in a world of burgeoning graffiti, skateboards, comics, and CB radios in which each block is a front in a war over race and class, insiders and outsiders, forming a "fourdimensional puzzle." Amid the churn and the narrator's reflections on his discomfiting mission to illuminate painful truths, Lethem considers a continuum of crimes, aligning, for example, white urban "pioneers" with those who violently seized Native American lands. With Brooklyn as a microcosm of human folly and strife, Lethem's virtuoso, many-faceted novel is trenchant, hilarious, wrenching, and tender.

The parts are better than the whole in Lethem's textured if scattershot latest (after The Arrest), an episodic look at crime in a Brooklyn neighborhood from the 1930s through 2019. The first chapter, "Quarters, Part 1," set in 1978, features two 14-year-old Boerum Hill white boys using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces, creating "surrealist anti-money." Their story line is only resolved hundreds of pages later, after diversions involving a panoply of characters, including one known as "the Screamer" and another called "the Black kid" or "C." There are vivid vignettes, such as "Ice Cream Truck, Known Con-Artist," wherein a child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979; and "Guy Who Stuffs Flyers into His Bag and Says Keep Walking," in which a 20-something man from Brooklyn tries to make it as a bookseller in 1991 Manhattan, where he's surprised when a younger man approaches him on the street and doesn't try to mug him. Near the halfway point, Lethem jokes he may have lost his audience along the convoluted paths he's created; the narrator, whose identity is withheld, asks, "Anyone still reading...?" It's a bit too meandering, but fans will be pleased to find Lethem still knows his way around a New York City street scene. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Oct.)

The award-winning Lethem makes a puzzling return to the scene of an earlier novel. The title of Lethem's 13th novel stirs memories of his comic-noir treasure, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), but the clear antecedent here is The Fortress of Solitude (2003); the new book stands as a kind of sociological survey of the urban street life that underpinned Fortress. The crimes involved stem largely from a real estate revolution starting in the 1960s that transformed run-down parts of Brooklyn into desirable residential areas. Lethem focuses on the same Dean Street that featured in Fortress. The narrator, who is from the neighborhood, cites the white "pioneers" who venture into mainly Black areas and renovate old buildings. With vague thoughts of fostering integration, they end up forcing their school-age boys--girls and women are scarce here--to endure getting their pocket money regularly stolen by Black youths from nearby housing projects, an intricate ritual called "yoking" in Fortress and here termed "the dance." The book consists of brief chapters with recurring characters, like the two boys who cut up quarters in a funny scheme that won't be resolved for hundreds of pages. Much of the narrative touches on youthful pastimes and traumas, from muggings to skateboards to graffiti, Spaldeens, shoplifting, and sex. The crimes range from actual ones, like theft and rape, but also implicated are poor parenting and property inflation along with the nabe-jolting sins of gentrification. The title notwithstanding, the book is at best an interesting alternative to a conventional novel. Maybe, with its dizzying array of local color, it's a memoir gone rogue, as is a lot of fiction. The narrator says "it is about what a small number of people remember" and how that knowledge "wishes and doesn't wish to come out." When it does, it's Fortress, or it's this. An entertaining, challenging read that may appeal mainly to Lethem fans and scholars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.