Daniel Fuchs was known to me only as the writer of the screenplay of Criss-Cross, a noir that epitomizes "gritty." Or perhaps grimy. I was not aware that Fuchs began his writing career with three Brooklyn novels, the first of which is Summer in Williamsburg. It's a novel that hits home, because Fuchs was born in 1909 and grew up in exactly the same part of Brooklyn, and in the same circumstances, as did my father, who was born there in 1904.
The novel comprises a single summer of tenement life and it's not optimistic or cheerful: "people in tenements lived in a circle without significance, one day the duplicate of the next until the end, which occurred without meaning but accidentally." Fuchs' Williamsburg is filled to the brim with anomie, petty criminals, violent teen gangs, multiple suicides, harridan wives and unfaithful husbands, ungratified sexual longings, business failures and consequent poverty. Even a fatal fire. In some Brooklyn novels, it is through books and reading that a character stumbles upon a clue to another and better world; not in this one. Fuchs' tenement world is claustrophobic and imprisoning. And yet, Fuchs occasionally offers a touch of poetic language -- sometimes even breaking the novel's "fourth wall" and intruding a bit of inventive authorial charm into the narrative. Redeeming moments, for the most part, but few and far between.
Other elements that might offer hope to a hopeless world: athletics, either participatory or spectator; religion, not a shred, even though almost all of the characters are Jewish; music; any sort of aesthetic concern. No beauty in Fuchs' Williamsburg.
I wonder how my father managed to survive his many Williamsburg summers without bitterness and with such a cheerful, optimistic demeanor. Why was he not soured and jaded by his grim environment? Or perhaps Williamsburg had its particular glories while Fuchs had an eye only for nastiness.
Yesterday, while reading this book, my browser took me, by chance, to a travel site that advertised a stay at a 4-star hotel in Williamsburg, "New York's coolest neighborhood." Fuchs (and my father) would have been flabbergasted. "Coolest neighborhood."
And so, it appears, the whirligig of time continues its whimsical way.
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