A multicultural microcosm: Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed

Would readers approaching this novel (although novel might not be precisely the right word) without any indication as to the authorship recognise it as the work of Jonathan Lethem? It doesn’t have kangaroo gangsters packing heat, or sentient miniature black holes, or marine drills converted into nuclear-powered limos. It is not set on an alien planet, or in a parallel universe, or inside a simulated game. There are a few hints. It is set in Brooklyn and has a vaguely geeky feel to it; but tonally it seems very different to Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude. Instead of vernal exuberance there is autumnal wistfulness, but certainly not sentimentality. It opens with two boys engaged in chopping quarters into quarters for no apparent reason except that it is summer and ‘everything will be nothing like what it was ever again’. By the end, this ‘superbly pointless thing’ does have a function, but takes a roundabout route to reach it.

This is a kaleidoscopic work, darting between characters and held together by the narrator, who occupies a very peculiar point between omniscience and befuddlement, insight and stupefaction. He teases foreknowledge and admits ignorance. The text presents itself as a kind of academic survey of crime, Brooklyn, micro-history and demographic change, although there are plenty of stylistic flourishes. Was there a race-related surge in violence that caused the ‘white flight’? Is it nostalgic to conjure an Edenic Brooklyn as a multicultural experiment or was it always zones of trespass and ghettos, imposed and self-imposed?

Most of the characters have nicknames or epithets, not names. This does not render them generic – in fact the opposite. It also allows for a smart device in that two characters in different time frames can turn out to be the same person.