From my birth in 1939 until I fled to Ithaca in 1956, I lived on East 9th Street, in a section of Brooklyn that had no other name than "Flatbush." But all is flux, as Heraclitus said in a very different context, and now the undistinguished neighborhood of my youth has been upgraded to pretentious "Kensington." Moreover, the adjacent section of Flatbush through which I early morning shambled to fabled Erasmus Hall H. S., consisting of a large stock of handsome old Victorian homes, has also been re-christened. It's now "Ditmas Park."
Ditmas Park is where Emma Straub's novel, Modern Lovers (2016) situates itself. It is, she claims, "the only neighborhood in New York City that felt like the suburbs." A sentence of praise or an instance of wicked irony, one might ask?
Suburb or not, Modern Lovers does not take place in the Flatbush of my youth. Yes, streets retain their familiar names (Rugby, Argyle, Stratford, Newkirk, Ocean Avenue). In fact, one of the modern lovers, a fiftyish wife and mother, works out of a real estate office at the corner of Cortelyou Road and East 16th Street, exactly where old Mr. Hart used to repair the fragile gears of my three-speed. But all is yuppified. None of the children in this novel go to PS 217 or PS 139 or Erasmus (in fact, these anchors of my old neighborhood go unmentioned). Instead, the young 'uns attend expensive "Whitman," an elite private academy. The young lady who is at the center of the story has both a 'mum" and a "mom" -- a circumstance that no doubt occurred 70 years ago, but no one would have talked about it, at least openly. It's Flatbush, all right, but where are the Italians and Irish and the Jews? A decade ago I toured PS 217 and couldn't help being struck by the "diversity" of the student body -- Turks, Syrians, Russians, central and south Americans, Asians both east and south, and of course Afro-Americans. These folks don't appear in Modern Lovers. Nor do the ubiquitous Hasids. No wonder Emma Straub likes the slice of Brooklyn that she describes as suburban. Here's a Brooklyn novel that's more Updyke-y than Fuchs-y.
Modern Lovers tells a warm, approachable, sound, humorous-to-slightly-satirical story. It's modern, in the sense that the lovers aren't young and aren't searching for mates; instead, they're middle-aged and trying to repair troubled marriages. I don't doubt that Modern Lovers hits some readers' bull's eyes -- even if it misses my tired old target. For me, it was a story of considerable sociological interest -- an instance of how the decades have transmogrified my Flatbush into hip Ditmas Park.
At the end of the novel, the entrepreurial ladies start a new restaurant, Hot and Sweet, which bakes perfect apple turnovers and supersedes that old frayed Cortelyou Jewish deli.
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