Dr. Metablog

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Martin H. Levinson

Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer, Growing up in the Fifties (2011) is most decidedly of the latter group. But what a thin and disappointing piece of work it is!!  Gosh, were we all quite so shallow! Levinson's book displays no sense of life's complexities and contradiction and ambiguities. Perhaps it's because he didn't or wouldn't read -- no exciting trips to the Brooklyn Public Library in this sterile memoir. Nor even to the movie palaces.  

The best word for Brooklyn Boomer is, I'm sorry to say, superficial. Also padded.

Also unoriginal. 

Plus the account of public school "assemblies" is shamelessly cribbed from a 2006 entry on this very blog.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Marty Glickman

 In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on the left wing. Swish."

Until a couple of days ago, I did not know that Marty Glickman had written (in an "as-told-to" kind of way) an autobiography called The Fastest Kid on the Block (1996), and that, believe it or not, one copy of this book is among the holdings of the Michener Library of the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, Colorado -- and is now in my very own hands. A warm thank you to UNC and to Interlibrary Loan.

Glickman was not only an announcer; he was also a student at fabled P S 217, my own not-so-"alma" mater, which he attended from first through sixth grade. He was born in 1917 so that would be in the 1920s. He was, get this, the fastest kid on the block in my very own neighborhood. 

He was not just a voice but an athlete, best known as a two-way football player at Syracuse University. He was also a top of the class sprinter who once ran a hundred yards in 9.5 seconds (the great Jesse Owens held the world record at 9.3). In 1936, Glickman was scheduled to run the second leg of the 4 x 100 at the Berlin Olympics.  He was scratched at the last minute for reasons that are still murky, but Glickman's opinion, and mine, is that Adolf Hitler didn't want a Jew to win a medal, so he had Goebbels whisper to Avery Brundage, who was the head of U. S. Olympic committee, that Glickman not be allowed to run. (Brundage was a notorious racist, misogynist, and Jew-hater, known as "slavery Avery." (There's an unverified report that Brundage spoke at the February, 1939, Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden; it would nor have been out of character for him to have done so.)

Glickman is philosophical about not being allowed to run in the Olympics. It would have been good to show his grandchildren his gold medal, he says. I myself am indignant for him.  

Once, when I was still a Brooklyn yoot, a rumor swept the P S 217 schoolyard that "Marty Glickman is going to be here this afternoon."  He appeared, but all that I can remember is that he spoke to a knot of kids. I remember nothing more.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Barry Menikoff

I met Barry Menikoff a couple of times. The first time was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and the second time when he was a visiting professor here in Boulder. A Robert Louis Stevenson specialist, he was; I've had a fondness for RLS from my childhood, and I've read a substantial percentage of his voluminous works, so we had something to talk about. Menikoff was then teaching in Hawaii and mighty anxious to find his way back to the mainland.

I knew nothing of his childhood except that like me he was a Brooklyn boy. Then, a while ago, I heard through a mutual acquaintance that he had written a memoir of his childhood and youth. And so he has. It's called Stone Mother, and it's privately printed but available on Amazon, and it's a damn good book that might with a few judicious edits have been a successful commercial publication. 

I used to tell my friends that I was the most naive boy in the history of the known universe ever to arrive on a college campus. But now I have a competitor. Menikoff knew a lot of things -- principally how to survive the death of his mother and the disappearance and neglect of his father, so he was not without resources. Socially, he was behindhand, and in terms of books and intellectual life, he was nowhere. It was quite an achievement for him to get from Brownsville to Brooklyn College and then on to a successful career as a teacher and scholar. 

I think that what I liked best about this memoir is its honesty.  It tells the truth and by doing so creates a strong, credible picture of Brooklyn life back then,

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Barry Manilow

The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as a flow of "I did this, then I did that; I was great."  The dullest prose; I don't think there's so much as a metaphor in the entire book.  Gosh, I searched high and low for genuine feeling, for insight or learning, or for complexity of vision. No dice. How could such an unreflective, shallow being have achieved so much?  Been so popular, so highly regarded, so famous.

I can't say that I'm very familiar with Manilow's music, but I'm pleased to learn that he produced Bette Midler's debut album, The Divine Miss M. "Delta Dawn" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" were midlife favorites that I've been pleased to revisit today (with the assistance of officious Alexa).

Brooklyn influence? Manilow seems to be a bit ashamed of his origins. At age 20, he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. "As we drove away, I said to myself, 'Good-bye, Brooklyn. Thanks for everything. I'm never coming back.' And I never did."  The only clear evidence of his Brooklynity is that he named his beloved dog "Bagel."

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Pete Hamill

Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was born in 1935, and I in 1939), our lives were o so similar and yet completely different. But that's the way things were in complex, composite 1940s Brooklyn.

The title of Hamill's memoir establishes the differences. It's well-named -- A Drinking Life (1994) -- and it is saturated with liquor and Irish bars and elbow-lifting and most especially with Pete's father's uncontrollable and disabling alcoholism. Yet just a few blocks over, in my part of Brooklyn, alcohol played no part whatsoever in my own family or my life in the neighborhood. I would not call an autobiography of my own An Abstinent Life, because we weren't teetotalers and there was always a glass of Scotch to offer to guests, but we hardly ever touched the stuff ourselves. It wasn't until much later in life that I came to realize that my father and I were genetically incapable of digesting alcohol. I've written about this peculiar phenomenon here.  

Equally in contrast was Hamill's early education. The poor fellow was enrolled at Holy Name of Jesus, a Catholic parochial school where one of his teachers was the "snarling vicious Brother Jan, a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and bent nose" -- your classic sadist -- who derived his joy in life by whipping with a thick ruler the bare hands and butts of defenseless boys. I myself learned to read and cipher at P.S. 217, a public elementary. At 217, we had teachers both gifted and incompetent but no deranged monsters and no corporal punishment. I can remember being bored at school, but not terrified. Not terrified of the teachers, that is -- among the students we had our fair share of bullies and sociopaths.

Hamill's Park Slope family took Roman Catholicism seriously but he himself was not an enthusiast. Although he loved the costumes and the incense and the majestic hymns, and although he confesses that the loved the "cartoony name" of the Holy Ghost, he was, right from the start, an instinctive atheist. My Flatbush family proffered us nary a single drop of religious information or indoctrination or training. I myself had never attended a single religious service in either synagogue, church, temple, mosque or tabernacle until 2021, and then only because it was New Orleans and we heard that Ellis Marsalis had volunteered to improvise a few measures on the piano. Hamill was a atheist by dissent; I was one by inheritance. 

Nevertheless, Hamill and I shared a great deal -- mostly, I think, in the form of popular culture. Ring-o-levio, spaldeens, stoop ball. Where else but in Brooklyn was a "do-over" a "hindoo?" And baseball. Hamill remembers that an uncle confided to him that "the Dodgers are the greatest thing in the world." He delights in reciting a litany of familiar Dodger names: "Augie Galan, Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Henk Behrman, Hugh Casey." Except to a select few of us, these names are meaningless random syllables, but to those who were children at a particular time and place, they are poetry in its purest and most sublime form, each name a luscious mouthful of pure pleasure. Syllables that will forever bond Hamill and me to the end of the chapter. Syllables that transcend this transitory sublunary existence.

Like me, Hamill was a great lover and collector of comic books. Both of us savored heroes such as Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel jr. and the Human Torch and the Green Lantern and Plastic Man and the Sub-Mariner and Wonder Woman and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill. Hard to believe but there are those who think that Freddie Freeman is only an all-star first baseman, but Hamill and I know better.

And also like me, Hamill found his way the public library where he measured himself against Jim Hawkins and Edmond Dantes and Sydney Carton and D'Artagnan. Tough competition. 

Sometimes, Pete Hamill leaves pop culture behind and delves into his own personal psychology. Here's a paragraph of unusual sincerity and one that touches at least tangentially on my own experience. It appears in a discussion of the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. (I should mention that I read everything of Stevenson's that the McDonald Avenue Library possessed.)

 "I sensed (says Hamill) that I was my own version of Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be the Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets, at the same time I was driven to be the Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, an earner of money for the family. The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and resisted Brother Jan, the Good Boy served Mass in the mornings and read novels in bed at night."

In retrospect, I realize that I shared  a bit of Hamill's doppelgangerism. In real life, I was a conforming Jekyll; but in my heart, in my soul, I was a fierce dissenter. Lots of anger, lots of unfocussed passion. I didn't much act upon my Hydeness, except for the occasional adolescent pilfering and the meaningless fights. But how else to account for the violent dreams -- especially the regularly-repeated nightmares where I bashed in the heads of unidentifiable adults with a heavy shovel?  And buried their bodies in my father's backyard garden underneath the hybrid teas? 

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Robert A. M. Stern

I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography -- which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed?

Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like Stern himself although he grudgingly grants that he was a successful dean of architecture at Yale. His critiques of Stern's buildings are unfriendly and a bit wicked: of Yale's two newly-constructed colleges, Filler claims that "first-year students might imagine that they've wandered into a themed Disney resort called Academialand." The Comcast Center in Philadelphia, he says, is of "surpassing banality"; the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas "resembles a branch bank in a suburban shopping mall." Moreover, Filler is is both scornful (and possibly envious) that Stern married into lavish wealth (his wife was a Gimbel heiress). Is it wit or is it bigotry to deride Stern's progression from a working-class Brooklyn Jewish family to a big time Manhattan success as a typical "rugelach to riches story?"

It was when I learned that Stern was a Brooklyn boy that my interest was provoked and I trotted over to the Boulder Public Library to procure a copy of Memory and Invention. I doubt I would have read the book from cover to cover except for its neighborhood relevance. Robert Stern, it turns out, was not only a local lad but he was born in exactly my year, 1939. He attended public schools and had hoped to attend Erasmus Hall High School, which would have made him my  classmate, but, he claims, he lived outside of the district and so was shunted to Manual Trades High School (famously featured in the grimy novel and film, The Blackboard Jungle). It was a surprise to me that he grants a sentence to one of his junior high school classmates, the "diplomat" Matthew Nimetz, whose name I remember from my four years at Erasmus but whose person, as far as I can recall, I never encountered. I have to doubt that Stern was districted out of Erasmus. Manual Trades was a school that students chose, like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech. Stern misremembers. He probably decided to cast his lot with Manual Trades because it was reputed to be a "hands-on" school. It's doesn't much matter: he would have been just as unhappy at Erasmus. He craved Harvard and Manhattan and notoriety and money, and none of the local schools would have filled the bill, certainly not EHHS.

Although the lengthy accounts of Stern's buildings might enlighten and inspire a specialized readership, I myself found the book dispiriting. There is lots of information about commissions procured by sucking up to the mighty and a heck of a lot more about infighting among the high-flying architects than I needed to know. In addition, the book overflows with self-congratulation and is replete with assiduous and triumphal name-dropping.

It's not for me to judge Stern's achievement, but I cannot disagree with his contention that architects should be fully steeped in but not restricted by the architecture of the past. I gather that Stern is a "neo-traditionalist' and Filler, his reviewer-critic, a "modernist."  I cannot say how many buckets of talent (Filler would say "none!") that Stern brought to his game, but however many they are, they are only drops in an ocean of ambition.  

Despite it all, I was intrigued by Stern's Brooklyn childhood, especially where his history bisects (or veers away) from my own. His grandparents, like mine, are folks of eastern European shtetl origin who struggled without much success to adapt to the new world. They landed in Brooklyn, which Stern seems to have resented. He yearned for "the city," Manhattan. I myself did not sufficiently appreciate Brooklyn, and like Stern, I wanted out. Nowadays, it's embarrassing for me to recall that the one big idea of this Brooklyn "yoot" was to leave the old country, Flatbush, behind. Stern, on the other hand, is unembarrassed: "I disliked Brooklyn--it was a place to be from and get out of (his italics). The difference between us is that he knew that he wanted Manhattan; I didn't know what I wanted, I just wanted to go somewhere else, which I have managed to do, having spent most of my life in the mountain west and in green New England.  

Stern also knows what all of us old Brooklynites know -- that our once provincial and disrespected borough has become a bit hoity-toity. The realtors have taken over. Stern says that his childhood neighborhood "is now alternately called Windsor Terrace and Kensington, but at the time everyone just called it Flatbush."  Which is exactly my recollection. If you had asked me in 1950 what part of Brooklyn I hailed from, I would have said "Flatbush." But now the PS 217 catchment area is called Kensington or Ditmas Park, expressions that I had never heard until the last decade or so.

One curiosity about Between Memory and Invention: unlike every other Brooklyn reminiscence I have ever read, Stern never mentions the Dodgers. Quite a telling omission, I think, if you think about it for a moment. Nothing about either food or sex, either. An uncharacteristic Brooklyn childhood.

Books I Read, 2022

This year's list is incomplete. During the Vermont summer, I neglected to keep good records. My porous brain can't bring to mind all I read in June, July, August, and September. In addition, it's a list of books only, so no periodicals (New Yorker, New York Review of Books), Northern Forests) or newspapers.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Last Gift; Daniel Fuchs, Williamsburg Summer; L. J. Davis; A Meaningful Life;  Marc David Baer, The Ottomans, Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn; J.M. Quigley, Lolita in the Afterlife; Daniel Fuchs, Homage to Blenholt; A J Rich, The Hand that Feeds You;  Alfred Kazin, Walker in the City; Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude; Colm Toibin, Brooklyn; Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies;  Emily Gould, Friendship; James Agee, Brooklyn Is; Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation; Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife; Kyle Harper, Plagues Upon the Earth; Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.; James McBride, The Color of Water; Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach; R. D. Rosen, Tough Luck; David Crystal, The Story of English; Seth Lerer, Inventing English; Paul Auster, Sunset Park; Richard Fortey, Fossils; Jay Neugeboren, Big Man; Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews and Ukrainians; Henry James, Portrait of a Lady; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl; Jay Neugeboren, Imagining Robert; James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis; Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood; Emily Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home; Marie Favereau, The Horde; John Dunn, The Glitter in the Green; Mike Unwin, Around the World in 80 Birds; Douglas Boyd, Plagues and Pandemics; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind; Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs; William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the IV; Pekka Hamaleinen, Comanche Empire; Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; An Italian Impressionist in France, Giuseppe De Nittis; Richard Powell, The Philadelphians; Pekka Hamaleinen, Indigenous Continent; David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language; Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch; Jeffrey Lovich, Turtles of the World; Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance; Tim Birkhead, Birds and Us; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; David Schiffman, Why Sharks Matter.

A "Ditmas Park" Novel

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.

A Brooklyn Memoir

I read Imagining Robert, My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren for neighborhood and neighborly reasons. Its author is a 1955 graduate of fabled Erasmus Hall High School (I was class of 1956). Much of the story takes place in the area of Brooklyn now called Lefferts Gardens. Walkable, or at least bicyclable, from East 9 Street.

It's a sad tale. Younger brother Robert went seriously off the psychological rails in his late teen years. Older brother Jay relentlessly chronicles his brother's lifetime of struggles. It becomes clear that modern medicine does not offer any remedy or hope to people with Robert's illnesses. The system relies on  ineffective drugs and ineffective therapies and what amounts to involuntary imprisonment. It's a painful, discouraging history.

And it's also a good and moving book. Very sincere and very emotional. I confess to dropping an occasional tear.

And yet I don't know whether it's right to expose a loved one to such public scrutiny. I myself wouldn't have made that choice. But I empathize with Neugeboren's tale, inasmuch as I know from personal experience that therapies for some forms of mental decay are no better now than they were during the Darkest Ages.

A Heart-of-Flatbush Novel: Big Man (1966), by Jay Neugeboren

Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance of modern American letters that I had no idea that my near-classmate was the author of 24 books, most of them novels. Big Man was Neugeboren's first novel. 

Close to home? Here are couple of sentences that will shiver the nostalgia timbers of wistful ex-Erasmians. 

I walk down Church Avenue, past the Kenmore Theater. Across the street the old church, used to cut classes and sit in the graveyard....  In front of Garfields's Cafeteria all the guys hanging out with their broads and their puffed hair.... Guys with Erasmus jackets on. I keep walking. Past the firehouse and the Holy Cross schoolyard.

Wow, it's a guided tour of the old neighborhood as it was in the 1950s. Who from Erasmus hasn't sprawled on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church?

The novel revolves around the 1951 basketball scandals, which were world-shaking news at the time. A number of New York City college players (CCNY, St. Johns, Fordham, LIU) fell into the clutches of shady gamblers and were paid to shave points.  A few were indicted and convicted. I wrote a few melancholy and disillusioned paragraphs about the scandals some years ago -- here.

In Big Man, Neugeboren tells the story through the eyes and mouth of a character named Mack Davis, who had been an upcoming star but is now, because he missed a couple of baskets, stuck in a dead-end job at an automated carwash. It's an ambitious conceit and a promising plot. Big Man, I regret to say, is not a very artistic piece of work, but what the heck! Neugeboren was only 25 or 26 when he wrote it and had had only a few years to recover from uninspiring Erasmus Hall English classes. 

I confess that I was uncomfortable that Neugeboren wrote the novel in a black voice. I don't object in theory, because there's no earthly reason why a white novelist can't impersonate a black person, any more than male novelist can't speak as a female (or vice versa), or a young writer speak in the voice of an old. So wny was I troubled? I think it was because the voice that the novelist invented didn't seem genuine. It seemed "literary" -- as though the Davis character had been heisted out of a  blaxploitation film. Occasional inadvertent lapses in the dialect were particularly painful to my ever-sensitive ears.

Big Man reminds me how central basketball was to my adolescent life. I think if I had spent as much time and effort on my schoolwork as I did practicing my foul shots I might have been somebody. But I think I learned as much about life from basketball and its scandals as I did from any other 1950s phenomenon (such as the antics of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy). I'm grateful to Jay Neugeboren for preserving an important piece of my history and especially for bringing the old neighborhood right to the forefront.

Yet Another Brooklyn Novel: Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation (2010)

Girl in Translation is the story of a young, impoverished immigrant from Hong Kong. I may be wrong, but it reads as if it were less a novel than a barely fictionalized autobiography (Jean Kwok, the author, made her way from an unheated tenement to Harvard; Kimberley Chang, the central figure, escaped to Yale.) Mutatis mutandis, and all that. It's a familiar kind of work: a bildungsroman, of course, but also an immigrant novel, a coming-of-age adventure, and thanks to an inartistic tacked-on ending, an H. Alger rags-to-riches saga. Sometimes I felt that I was reading a century-later re-imagining of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, things Irish replaced with things Chinese -- except that there is not a single tree in this novel's bleak landscape, not even a symbolic one. Plus ca change, plus de meme chose.

While it's not original or innovative, nor written with any particular flair, Girl in Translation is nevertheless valuable for the world it opens up to us. Plus it's on the whole uplifting, even if there are some unfortunate moments in which "triumphant" shades over into "triumphalist." 

There's not much to admire about the Brooklyn of this novel; it's an unpleasant place. Manhattan's Chinatown, where much of the action takes place, is no better.

Two Very Fine Brooklyn Novels

I liked Paul Auster's, The Brooklyn Follies (2006) so much that I read it twice. It was even better the second time. Even though it begins scary ("I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn...."), it's a cheerful and warm-hearted novel. Auster's gift is to make barely credible events seem commonplace and normal. So Follies packs in a mute nine-year-old girl who journeys many miles to find her uncle, and then a forger of paintings, a noir-y blackmail scheme, a wacky pseudo-Christian religious cult, a Jamaican transvestite who mouths "Can't Help Loving that Man" at a sad funeral, and so on.

The Brooklyn Follies is a comedy not because it labors at one-liners but because everyone who should get married or at least find a mate, manages to do so by the last page. Plus it's rich in Park Slope locations and lore.

I also enjoyed Colm Toibin's Brooklyn (2009), which is another version of the immigration novel. It's set back in the 1950s but the 50s might as well be the '20s as far as oppressive social customs are concerned. Although the central figure, Eilis, travels to Brooklyn, she never quite frees herself from provincial Ireland or the interventions of transatlantic priest Father Flood. Young, inexperienced, she falls hard for a boy of Italian extraction -- and her doing so turns out to be more of a problem that it needs to be. Eilis must make some important, life-determining decisions, but whether she makes the right choices is left to the reader to decide (I myself think she loses her bearings). It's a lovely, understated, carefully wrought and admirable novel. 

A Contemporary Brooklyn Novel: Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013)

This curiously named novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (no relation, thank goodness), concerns a 30-year-old Baltimorean become Brooklynite who drifts from bed to bed but is incapable of lasting love.

Adelle Waldman takes a scalpel to Nathaniel P[iven] and also to his various lady friends. Her analyses are sharp, incisive and sometimes painfully close to the bone. She is not above devoting paragraphs, even pages, to dissecting a minor event or brief conversation. Sometimes the intricacy of her observations resembles those of Henry James, though I can't remember The Master ever discussing either the scrotum or the anus of any of his characters. Waldman put me in mind of a sentence with which Horatio admonishes Hamlet: '"'twere to consider too curiously to consider so."

Reading this novel, I was relieved that I am not a 30-year-old on the hunt -- and that I never was. There's lots of sex, some of it precipitous, but not much discussion or examples of genuine intimacy. Waldman's landscape is unfamiliar to me -- a foreign culture or, rather, an alien civilization. 

Set in Brooklyn, almost all the action takes place in Williamsburg or environs, certainly within sight of the Manhattan skyline -- although I remember that once or twice characters may have ventured into the Brooklyn hinterland for a pizza.

The author is amusingly aware of the way the new Brooklyn has superseded the old: 

the two groups (i.e. older residents and newcomers) might have existed on different layers of the earth's atmosphere that only from a distance appear to be on the same plane.  A store called National Wines & Liquors, Inc, where both liquor and cashier were enclosed behind bulletproof glass, was not actually a competitor to the much newer Tangled Vine, which specialized in organic and local wines and exhibited the work of area artists at its Thursday-evening tastings.

Which reminds me that I started to read but failed to comprehend a novel called Class (2014) by Francesco Pacifico in which Williamsburg was regularly referred to as "Willy." Again, I ask, what would Daniel Fuchs think?

The more of these novels I read, the more Brooklyn seems like a multiply layered palimpsest -- one culture imposed upon another, generation after generation.  My own Flatbush neighborhood, now upgraded to "Kensington," was farmland right through to the end of the 19th century, then a suburb for prosperous old Protestant families, next a haven for Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants and now an ethnic stew of Hasids, Turks, Arabs, Russians, and South and Central Americans of all kinds but also with an strong admixture of Tangled Vine dinks, yuppies and midWestern computer geeks. It's a complex piece of urban Americana -- one facet of which is well-illustrated by the story of unhappy Nathaniel P.

A Contemporary Brooklyn Novel by Emily Gould: Friendship (2014)

Friendship is definitely an urban novel, but there's little in it that is particular to Brooklyn. Certainly not to my Brooklyn. It's a modern, contemporary coming-of-age novel, but, unlike prior-century works, adolescence is delayed or postponed, because the two thirtyish women about whom it revolves would have solved their problems when they were a decade younger if they weren't so rich and spoiled. It's healthy that they try to maintain a profound friendship in a world of meaningless temp jobs, bad boyfriends, inchoate ambitions, voluntary poverty, and impulsive and irresponsible sex. 

It's an amusing novel, well-plotted but written without much in the way of flair or style. Not weighty. Perhaps I was a little put off by the indulgences of first world difficulties. 

For one of the characters, Williamsburg was a "hotbed of youth and culture." For another, it was a "hotbed of European tourists and restaurants with thirty-five dollar entrees." Wow, Williamsburg. It's hard to imagine how Daniel Fuchs would have reacted. Is there another part of the U. S. so fundamentally altered in a couple of generations?

Love

Some years ago, I wrote about meetings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle, a biennial gathering of my immigrant grandmother's family and also of her many cousins, spouses and descendants. I recalled that Youthful Me objected to being dragooned into attending these sessions. I also confessed that I hadn't a glimmer of understanding of what those meetings meant. Here's what I wrote: 

What I didn't know, and is so obvious to me now, was that I was much more important to them than they were to me. That I was "doing well in school" were words that they dearly wanted to hear. It was for my generation and for me that they had braved the Cossacks, sold the farm, deserted from the Russian army, left backward White Russia  or the Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new and utterly foreign world. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," get an education, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.

It is still painful to admit how little I had appreciated these diminutive and ancient but very brave people.

As it happens, I was not the only person to come to the same conclusion.

In A Walker in the City (the city is the Brownsville section of Brooklyn), the distinguished man of letters Alfred Kazin had long ago (1951)made the identical point:

My [immigrant] father and mother worked in a rage to put us above their level; they had married to make us possible. We were the only conceivable end to all their striving; we were their America.

Kazin proceeded to analyze his parents' marriage (he's a generation older than I so his words are relevant not to my parents, but to my grandparents and those of their Chafetz generation). "Love" became his subject. As I type his words, I think of Joseph and Sonia, Isaiah and Etta:  

Our parents, whatever affection might offhandedly be expressed between them, always had the look of being committed to something deeper than mere love. Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy.; they were arrangements. 

Powerful words, I think. Their marriages were "arrangements" -- certainly not the touches of sweet harmony.

Not "love." Love was not for such as his parents (or, to continue the argument, my grandparents).

I am perfectly sure that in my parents' mind, love was something exotic and not wholly legitimate, reserved for "educated" people like their children, who were the sole end of their existence. So far as I knew, love was not an element admissible in my parents' experience. Any open talk of it between themselves would have seemed ridiculous. It would have suggested a wicked self-indulgence, a preposterous attention to one's own feelings.... They looked on themselves only as instruments toward the ideal "American" future that would be lived by their children. 

I have the same sense about my forebears. I never heard any of them use the word "love" and I don't think it would have been a comprehensible value for them. To fall in love, to be in love, was not their expectation. Their aim was more elemental: simply, to survive.  

Moreover, not only did they not recognize romantic love, they also, as far as I can remember, attached little importance to "happiness."

What an oddity!  They had left the dark backward of eastern Europe, lands of dearth and pogroms and cholera, and traveled to a country in which the "pursuit of happiness" was inscribed in its founding documents. But their aim, I am absolutely sure, was not to achieve ephemeral happiness; their aim was to put a roof over their heads and put food on the family table.

Life and liberty, yes; the pursuit of happiness -- an utterly alien concept.

Brooklyn Novel??

Re: Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation (2014). "Shimmering." "Breathtaking."  "Radiant, sparkling with sunlight and sorrow." "Powerful." "Glitters with different emotional colors."  "Each line a dazzling perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart."

That's what they say. How about "undisciplined," "faux-poetic," "self-indulgent", "unreadable." Which is what I say.

Whatever happened to my gritty Brooklyn?  When did it become so absurdly soft?  During gentrification, when the corner candy store turned into chi-chi fern bar?

It appears that Offill is from North Carolina and lived in Brooklyn for "a while." Not long enough to make an impact.  

The "chiseled arrowheads" may have been aimed for my heart, but they missed their target by at least a sewer and a half.

One More Brooklyn Novel: Fortress of Solitude (2003)

I grow all weak-in-the-knees sentimental when novelists write about such icons of my childhood as spaldeens and stoopball.

Such delights abound in the first half of Jonathan Lethem's novel Fortress of Solitude. The novel's Boerem Hill (newly upscaled from Gowanus) in the 1970s was as rich in such street games as my Flatbush in the 1940s and 50s. Nevertheless, it' can't be said that these elements of nostalgia redeem Lethem's huge undisciplined sprawling novel. Fortress of Solitude is crazily inventive, profuse, uncontrolled. I have rarely read a novel by a respectable author so in need of a dictatorial editor. Surely, there's enough material here for four or five fine novels, each of which would deliver more bounce and impact than this door-stopper. If Fortress of Solitude were a building, it would be called overdecorated; if it were a piece of music or a film, it would be overproduced. 

Some of my Flatbush cohort like to think that 1950s Brooklyn was a paradise for children. I am not of that opinion. To me, Brooklyn was frequently menacing when it wasn't just plain boring. The so-called "melting pot" was a cauldron a racial animosities. But it wasn't all bad -- there were the Dodgers and the camaraderie of the schoolyard. The public schools were crowded and disorderly, but there were great teachers and enthusiastic students. Not so in dystopian Fortress, a lord-of-the-flies world of vicious adolescents, incompetent adults, and dysfunctional government. Far worse than I remember; and worse, I think, than the reality.  

The author of Motherless Brooklyn, a much finer novel, presents us this time with two motherless youngsters, one white and one black, who through thick and thin maintain a deep abiding friendship. But alas the novel veers into territory that some might call magic realism, but to me was neither realistic nor magical nor even remotely credible no matter how much disbelief I tried to suspend. To read the last embarrassing third of the novel was a sad chore.

I don't think that I have ever read a substantial and ambitious novel that paid so little attention to female characters. Where are the ladies of Boerum Hill?  Not only are the mothers missing, but the occasional inadvertent woman who wanders unto the page remains an unrealized cipher, a nothing.

Not Another Brooklyn Novel: The Hand that Feeds You (2015)

I was steered to A J Rich's The Hand that Feeds You by a pair of websites that listed books set in Brooklyn, but I'm sad to say that there's almost nothing of Brooklyn in the novel -- a considerable disappointment to expectant me. It's a murder mystery in which various places in and around Brooklyn are mentioned, but in fact the novel takes place in a cliched fictional city in which murders are committed, red herrings are liberally strewn, police are not very bright, and the actual perp is lo and behold revealed in the last chapter.

I'm not a great reader of crime fiction, but I found this one "suspenseful" and "gripping." Against my better judgment, I swallowed it in one gulp.

I would have liked it even more if I had any affection or even interest in dogs, because in The Hand that Feeds You, the mystery is whether it was Morgan Prager's or Billie Badgirl-Richbitch's dogs who ripped out scamming boyfriend Bennett's throat. The novel might also have been more up my alley if protagonist-narrator Prager had been able to form warmer bonds with humans than with canines. The novel concludes with Prager receiving a chaste peck from her human crush and a sensual roll in the grass with her devoted doggy. Borderline perverse, in my opinion. But what can be expected of a novel in which dangerous "pitbulls" are re-branded as "pitties."

It's odd and something of a curiosity that scenes in the novel are located in Rangeley and Oquossoc, the only towns in rural Maine with which I'm even remotely familiar.

Another Brooklyn Novel: A Meaningful Life (1971)

I had never heard of L. J. Davis until I searched out his black-comic novel, A Meaningful Life.  It's about a young man named Lowell Lake from Boise, Idaho who moves to Brooklyn (as did the author himself) and buys a decrepit mansion in a newly gentrifying section of Bedford-Stuyvesant that was eventually to be dignified and upgraded into Boerum Hill. In his endeavor to repair the building, everything that could go wrong, goes wrong -- and does so in inventive, unpredictable ways.

If it's a satire, as it's sometimes called, A Meaningful Life is not gentle, Menippean or Horatian, but, rather, far beyond the outer limits of Juvenelian. It's nasty, and sometimes falls into just plain ugly.  It reads less like a novel than as an extended turn by a stand-up monologist or comedian. Plot and character are regularly sacrificed to jokes. It has the saddest ending of any novel I can recall reading

Lowell Lake is afraid of "Negroes" and doesn't much like Puerto Ricans or Jews or gays (whom he calls "fruits," and "fags") or old people, and he, and the author, indulge themselves in brutal stereotyping. 

It's one of the bleakest books I've ever read, and, if you hold your nose, one of the funniest.

A Second Brooklyn Novel by Daniel Fuchs: Homage to Blenholt (1936)

Of the ten or so novels that I've read since I began this project, Homage to Blenholt is certainly the most regional and the most "Jewish." It is positively marinated in local color. Even in the first few paragraphs, we encounter the "dirty cobbled streets" of Williamsburg, a milkman's plodding horse, the subway and the trolley, "gutters," "seltzer," and a "stoop."  Kids play Johnnie-on-the-pony, punchball, and ringolevio. There's a pickle man and a hot corn man and a peddler selling imitation pearls. Even when characters are not kvetching outright, they speak in a thick dialect that ladles English words onto Yiddish structures and inflections. 

The thin but adequate plot concerns young Max Balkan, who yearns for a more glamorous, more powerful life. -- but every reader soon realizes that despite his ambitions he's doomed to a life of slicing pastrami behind the counter of someone else's delicatessen. Max admires Blenholt, a corrupt politician whose graft has earned him a shiny suit and an extravagant funeral, -- but in his more romantic moments he dreams of being an Alexander, a Caesar, or, his favorite role model, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, the Scythian shepherd who rose from poverty to become the scourge of God and conqueror of Persia.

In the novel's finest phrase, poor Max's unromantic mother dismisses her son's fantasies: "Tamburlaine, Schmamburlaine." 

The bell of nostalgia rang most powerfully with the appearance of a word, well known to me but no doubt unfamiliar to most readers. The word is "Forverts." It was my task, on Sunday mornings, to buy and deliver a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward to my Yiddish-speaking grandparents, who lived around the corner on Coney Island Avenue. So with 50 cents in hand, I purchased the Times and the Eagle for my parents and for my grandparents, the "Forverts." Until Homage to Blenholt, I had not seen or heard that strange foreign word in 65 or 70 years. My thanks to Daniel Fuchs.

I should add that, like Balkan, youthful me was dazzled by Tamburlaine. Marlowe -- a young man's poet -- was my first serious literary love. He offered me romantic escapism of a high order. But I was far too unimaginative to see myself as the conqueror of the known world. For me, it was quite enough to appreciate Marlowe's exotic landscape and still unsurpassed poetry. 

Still Another Brooklyn Novel: Motherless Brooklyn (1999)

Jonathan Lethem nominally sets Motherless Brooklyn in downtown Brooklyn, but it's more accurate to say that it takes place in the world of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. Or, to be even more precise, in the Land of Noir. It's a textbook example of superior detective fiction, with all the trappings: a clever gumshoe (who, of course, gets himself bopped on the head), a bad girl, two (count 'em two) car chases; a mysterious international crime cartel (on loan from Ian Fleming), a scary assassin, seedy all-night joints, endless stakeouts, even a police detective who's always just a step behind our guy. It's so self-consciously, unapologetically derivative -- less plagiary than homage. One character even quotes Sam Spade: "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." The novel is suspenseful, clever, and occasionally witty.  It kept me engaged and guessing, so I have no complaints. Of course I couldn't follow the intricacies of the betrayals and counter-betrayals, but then, I never can.

It's a Brooklyn novel in the sense that it recognizes the astonishing provinciality of the borough. Lionel Essrog, our detective, thinks of New Jersey and Connecticut as exotic territories. Most of the action is specifically located in downtown Brooklyn, which happens to be a neighborhood that I know rather well. The investigators have their office on Court Street, where I often visited my father's law offices, first at 125 Court and later on the 13th floor of a tall building at 66 Court (the floor was listed, believe it or not, as 12A, so as not to alarm the triskaidekaphobic). Also mentioned is Joralemon Street, where Dr Irving Pollack, my smooth-faced orthodontist, painfully tightened the metal braces on my teeth every other week for the entire duration of my childhood and youth.

Motherless Brooklyn seems to be designed for the big screen. In 2017 a version appeared that was written and directed by the rather brilliant actor Edward Norton, who also plays Lionel Essrog. On a whim, we rented and watched the film last night. It's an engaging film, very handsomely rendered. I watched it, I'm afraid, with a chip on my shoulder, because I came to it with the novel fresh in my mind and resented the liberties the film takes with the novel. In fact, after just a few introductory scenes, Norton left the novel behind. Instead, he crossed it with the Towne-Polanski Chinatown. It's a mistake, but not a bad one, because if your intention is to imitate a film, you might as well imitate an excellent one. Into the film, Norton imports a series of elements that are utterly foreign to the novel. There's a dictatorial character who is modeled on Noah Cross, a child of mysterious origin similar to the daughter of Evelyn Mulwray ("she's my sister and my daughter") and a contrived plot device that brings us deep into impenetrable Harlem. I'm sorry to say that Motherless Brooklyn, the film, doesn't escape the gravitational pull of Chinatown.

Another Brooklyn Novel: Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)

I read the first fifty pages of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and then decided, No More. It's an ugly, brutal book, not one that's going to offer me either instruction or pleasure. I read two chapters -- the first about the murderous gang wars and the second the transsexual who dies of an overdose of benzedrine. Then I looked up the wiki article and realized that I was about to come face to face with "the novel's most notorious scene, in which a young prostitute is brutally gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking and is left for dead in a vacant lot." Sorry, not for me.

Not much about Brooklyn either in this grim novel; no local color, though the story is reputed to be set in Sunset Park or Red Hook. 

Selby crosses William Burroughs (whom I also can't read) with Jack Kerouac. Plus innovative grammar, confusing punctuation, and inventive orthography. 

Not my cup of tea. Sorry, life is too short,

More Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg (1934)

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. 

Novels Set in Brooklyn: Desperate Characters (1970)

Paula Fox's Desperate Characters feels to me less like a novel than a short story, or perhaps a set of short stories sutured together. It's comprised of a series of incidents that concern a married couple and like many fictions in the short story genre, resists closure or resolution. Though it's a miniature of a novel, it's still a gem.

The principal characters, Otto and Sophie, come to the end of the story just about where they started -- not miserable but not happy either. They are immigrants to an incompletely gentrified, downtown Brooklyn neighborhood. Their house -- all pocket doors, cedar floors, highly polished Victorian furniture even a Meissen cat dish -- as well as the houses of their neighbors are vulnerable to violation. Otto and Sophie, and their friends, are attacked by the sort of intrusions that are familiar from horror films -- the bite of a stray cat, a threatening phone call, a stone thrown through a window, unwanted visitors, vicious inexplicable vandalism, mysterious goings-on in the house next door. These attacks on the home are intermittent but unending; in fact, the last image in the book is of a self-inflicted wound -- an interior wall splotched and stained by the black ink of a thrown inkwell. Stasis, not progress.

Should I have been surprised that the Brooklyn novels that I have now read are so concerned with the acquisition, improvement, integrity, and preservation of the homestead?

To tell truth, I have been a bit startled -- but I should not have been. Brooklyn has always been the most mutable and fluid of cities. Outsiders -- Irish, Italians and Jews in my part of Flatbush, as well as southern Blacks searching for the warmth of other suns, West Indians, Russians, Hispanics from central and south Americas, Asians of all varieties, and nowadays midWesterners -- arrive and alter the neighborhood. For the worse, according to the prior inhabitants, and for the better, according to the new arrivals. It's a repeated and perpetual dance -- and certainly one that was a feature of my own family history.

My immigrant grandparents never had the resources even to imagine the purchase of a home. They were renters of a cold-water sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg. Nor had they owned property in the old country, where they were even poorer. I imagine that when my parents purchased the house in which I was raised (in 1936, for $4500) they were the first in my ancestry dating back to the spear and atalatl eons ever to own a piece of real estate. 

Re-reading these Brooklyn books has reminded me how important that home on East 9 Street in heart of  Flatbush was to my parents. And why my father, in his last years, solitary, crippled by arthritis, but intransigent refused to leave it though it would have been much more sensible and convenient to live elsewhere. He was determined to die in his own precious home, and he did so.

Here's a picture of 539 East 9 Street, a big old undistinguished Victorian, taken sometime around the 1939, the year of my birth. The second and third stories were rented; we lived on the ground floor. The house, long since demolished, lives on in my memory. 

Especially in my nightmares, where at least once a month, I defend myself against the savage bows and arrows, the cavalry rifles, and wild dogs that attack the property.  And wake up in a sweaty terror.

Novels about Brooklyn: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

Well, one might ask, how goes the reading-Brooklyn-novels project?  

I've been taken by surprise. Solely by the luck of the draw, just because the books were available at the public library, and without planning or intention on my part, my first three novels all had the same focus: coming-of-age-as-a-girl-in-Brooklyn. First, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (TGB) about a Irish-German girl in the period around WWI, then Another Brooklyn (AB) about a Black or African-American girl in 1970s Bushwick, and yesterday, Brown Girl, Brownstones (BG,B) by Paule Marshall, written in 1959 but neglected and then rediscovered during the 1970s. BG,B focuses on young Selina Boyce, daughter of immigrants from Barbados, who was raised in a West Indian neighborhood somewhere between Fulton Avenue and Crown Heights.

The three novels, and their three heroines, share common concerns. In all three, an intelligent young girl, a reader, tries to achieve selfhood in a challenging environment. The young girls come from families that are led by strong mothers and are compromised by weak, failing fathers. Religions (Catholicism in TGB, Nation of Islam in AB, and a dictatorial new religion led by "Father Peace," whom I take to be Father Divine, in BG,B) are unhelpful and damaging.

Today's novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is the most detailed, informative, and moving of the trio. It's a substantial, rich, highly-detailed, and I would say old-fashioned novel about self-discovery. It used to be said that "every modern writer's first novel should be titled "my horrible adolescence.'" But BG,B is more complicated than the stereotype. It's an "immigration novel" about the conflicts between the foreign-born parents and the Brooklyn-born daughter. It's also a story of regional interest, very strong in depicting the peculiarities of Brooklyn culture.

Barbadian-Americans are depicted as an entrepreneurial class, upwardly mobile, anxious to get ahead. The first step is to acquire a brownstone and become a landlord rather than a tenant. And yet young Selina rejects her aspiring mother, whom she sees as hopelessly materialistic. She fears the success of a move to the boring suburbs -- a familiar 1950s theme.

BG,B is a novel about race, and, in my opinion, hits its stride in the last few chapters when Paule Marshall analyzes bigotry. There are a few pages that either anticipate or follow the powerful critiques of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. And Richard Wright. I suspect that it's such pages that helped bring deserved attention to Brown Girl, Brownstones.  

Novels Set in Brooklyn: Another Brooklyn

I read, first with irritation but eventually with appreciation, Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson. If I had purchased the book, rather than borrowing it from the Boulder Public, I'd be peeved, because it's more of a novella or long short story than a fully-grown novel. Only 165 pages of minibook size(8" x 5"), with spacious margins, large font, and double or triple spacing between frequent one-sentence "paragraphs." The whole could be compressed into 30 normal book size pages. I felt cheated because I want my words worth. But quality should not be measured by quantity, or Mrs. Trollope would be twenty times as good a writer as Jane Austen. Jacqueline Woodson is apparently a very famous novelist, but you wouldn't know it by me, for I had never heard of her, so out-of-date I am. It's a poetic, I think, novel, about "growing up girl in Brooklyn" (white flight Bushwick to be precise) in the 1970s. It's not dense with detail, so each incident has to do a lot of work. It concerns four young girls, each frustrated by the surroundings. The narrator says, "Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat," but I don't think the novel makes good on that stuck-in-the-craw assertion. It's not, in my opinion, a regional novel; it's a coming of age story with a perennial theme: how do we get out of this constricting space: "Everywhere we looked, we saw people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was something other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn."

A paragraph that resonated with me, for as an adolescent I myself know only one thing: "I need to get out of here."

Novels Set in Brooklyn: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise?

How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?  It's certainly the best known novel with the noun "Brooklyn" in its title. I've known about it all my life and just never got around to looking at a single page. Did my parents, always tentative about sex, warn me off because the novel has a few frank passages. Or was it anti-Brooklyn snobbery?  As a young person, I wanted to read about far off places -- Pitcairn Island, nomadic central Asia, and the Africa of Rider Haggard, -- certainly not familiar grimy Brooklyn. At the McDonald Avenue branch of the public library, there were many well-worn copies of of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sitting on the shelf -- which I ignored and, if I remember correctly, disdained.  

What did I miss?  Tree is not much in the way of a fiction. There's nothing like a plot, only a series of loosely-related episodes, and except for the central figure, not much character development. It's a barely-disguised autobiography. Francie Nolan, tracked from birth through her escape to, believe it or not, Michigan!!, comes from a grindingly poor family ("food insecure" before the term was invented). Much of the first few hundred pages is the barebones account of the struggle for sustenance (and lodging). There is so much emphasis on overcoming lack that Tree almost seems to fetishize or celebrate poverty. 

So much scrabbling for the next meal is hard to bear, painful to read. It's especially painful for me, because Betty Smith, born in 1896 in Williamsburg, preceded my father, also a native of Williamsburg (born in 1904) by only a few years. He came from an immigrant family as poor as poor can be, and some of the stories that he told me about the impoverishment of his youth echo and sometimes exceed Smith's. The essence, therefore, of this "novel," is familiar to me, perhaps entirely too familiar.

One blot upon the novel is its casual bigotry. Irish characters sometimes go to "Jewtown" for clothes or food. Jewish characters are gross stereotypes. But what can be expected from a popular novel of the 1940s, when the radio offered us, day after day,  large doses of Amos and Andy, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs. How we guffawed at ethnic "humor" in those unenlightened days!  

Nor was I happy about the novel's Brooklyn chauvinism. For example: 

""There's no other place like it," Francie said.

"Like what?"

"Brooklyn. It's a magic city."

"It's just like any other place."

"It isn't. It's mysterious here in Brooklyn. It's like -- yes -- a dream. The houses and streets don't seem real. Neither do the people."

I wish the novel offered some corroboration for the claim of Brooklyn's magic and mystery. If it was there, I didn't find it in this grim novel, nor at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues where I first came to awareness.

The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is the so-called 'tree of heaven," ailanthus altissima. Smith has chosen it as a symbol of resilience, for the tree of heaven can thrive under the most inauspicious circumstances. I, for one, can remember playing on the roof of one of those six story apartment houses so common in our neighborhood, and noticing an ailanthus growing right out of the asphalt. I was astonished. But I wish that Betty Smith had chosen a different tree to invest with meaning, because the ailanthus is, frankly, a "trash tree."  It's generally considered a noxious weed, an invasive species. It grows rapidly but is short-lived. Its wood is soft and useless. It suckers vigorously and eternally, pours forth strong alleopathic chemicals upon its neighbors, invades subterranean sewers and pipes, is extremely fecund, and stinks. It is known to gardeners and foresters not as the "tree of heaven" but as the "tree of hell." It's not a tree that often finds itself celebrated in fiction. Nor in pastoral. Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was a city of magnificent oaks, maples, sycamores and elms. My people, my fellow Brooklynites, deserve a more distinguished avatar than the tree of of so-called heaven.

Some will remember that T. S. Eliot once referred to the tree that grows in Brooklyn as the "rank ailanthus."

What We Read in the Fifties: The Amboy Dukes

During my Erasmus Hall High School years, the hottest of all "hot" books was Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes. It was official doctrine that a single oblique glance at the inflammatory cover of this paperback could transform a well-behaved kid into a murderous, reefer-crazed, oversexed hooligan. Simply to read about the "juvenile delinquents" who populate The Amboy Dukes was to wander into a criminal twilight. A guy definitely did not want his mommy to know that he had heard of this book, let alone possessed a sticky contraband copy.

What was all the fuss about?  Why was the book condemned all over America and even banned (for a while) in Canada?    

Here's a paragraph that was much brooded upon in the local schoolyard. (I've since learned that some 1950s moralists condemned it as pornographic -- and perhaps they were right.)

They pushed onto the bus, and Frank watched Black Kenny and Mike get a nice-looking broad between them and give her a rub. Mike and Kenny hemmed the girl between them, skillfully pocketing her to prevent her escape. In her eyes there was loathing and fear of the two hoodlums, who did not look at her but nevertheless pressed against her lasciviously, pinioning her against their rigid hot bodies. Mike pushed against the girl's buttocks, thighs, and legs, while Kenny pressed against her stomach and breasts. The girl wanted to scream, to cry out, but she was afraid....

Ugly to be sure, abusive, sexist, nasty, but still rather tame by later standards. It's an effort of will to remember that during the Eisenhower years, words such as "breasts" and "buttocks" were not uttered casually and that their appearance on the printed page was rare and incendiary. But I don't think it was the language alone, or even the stark portrayal of adolescents in heat that rattled polite society. It was the intrusion of viciousness in the tame 1950s father-knows-best twin-bed universe that provoked the reaction. That "nice-looking broad" whom Mike and Black Kenny molest was, or was imagined to be, some respectable family's sister or daughter. Just as the two hoods thrust themselves against the young woman, so The Amboy Dukes flaunted itself in the face of respectability. The proper middle class went to great lengths not to acknowledge that brutes such as Black Kenny and Mike were their next-door neighbors. The Eisenhower era lived in denial; there were some things that everyone knew but of which no one spoke. In The Amboy Dukes, Shulman spilled the beans. 

That's why The Amboy Dukes fascinated the guys who hung around the P. S. 217 schoolyard. Unlike our parents, we couldn't choose to deny the existence of psychopaths such as Black Kenny and Crazy Shak (the novel's rapist and murderer). Guys like that smoked and spit on every street corner and disrupted many of our classrooms. We had to negotiate with violence or with the threat of violence every day. To read The Amboy Dukes was oddly refreshing; it validated the daily reality of teen-agers who weren't gang members.

Moreover, the novel had a strong vicarious appeal. While my friends were trying to manage their hormones, keep up with their schoolwork and occasionally get in a good game of basketball or stickball, the Dukes were cutting class, punching out their teachers, smoking dope, and getting laid. Reading the novel let us share in some of that other-side-of-the-track forbidden fruit. But it allowed us to participate safely. The Amboy Dukes, like so many such scandalous publications, is at heart a cautionary novel. Frank Abbot, the central character, is a bad guy but he's appealing and not irredeemable; he goes too far, gets in over his head, and winds up dead -- a warning to all of us. The Amboy Dukes allowed "normal" kids to enjoy the novel's transgressive moments and still return safely to the nest.

Although The Amboy Dukes sold millions of copies, I couldn't find it in any of the libraries that I use. Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to buy a tattered, yellowed-pages-unglued 35-cent 1949 Avon paperback. The object itself is a piece of history. On the cover, a woman with flaming red hair resists the embraces of a dark and handsome young man. Their facial expressions (he: lustful; she: fearful) are highly melodramatic, but the pair are dressed conservatively, as though they've just returned from a day of yachting. Also on the cover are a couple of claims to literary merit: "The one book that tells the inside story of juvenile delinquency no other novel has told before." And an appeal to the moralists: "This book is emphatically a reading 'must'" --Edwin J. Lukas, Executive Director, Society for the Prevention of Crime." Finally, in almost unreadable tiny print, "This book is specially revised and edited for Avon Books" -- an admission that leads me to guess that the paperback mass edition expurgated some words or events that were deemed too strong for the kids who bought the cheap edition and concealed it inside their official three-ring binders.