1978 and two 14-year-old whiteboys are creating dubious art by usinga hacksaw to cut multiple quarters intopieces. A child who's just bought ice creamfrom a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylightsidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time,a couple of blocks over,a kid gets caughttrying to shoplift an adult magazine froma Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Blackteenager and his white friends square upto a rival Italian gang over the right to playhockey in the street. In 1977 a white kidcraters a baseball right in the centre of aCuban guy's windscreen. And so it goes. On the streets of Brooklyn,the faces of thechildren change but the patterns remainthe same: sex; boredom; friendship;violence; a million daily crimes committed,some small,some unimaginably big.But the real action is away from thestreets,played out behind closed doorsby parents; cops; renovators; landlords;gentrifiers; those who write the headlines,the histories,and the laws; those whoaward this neighbourhood its name andcontrol its shifting demographics. Acrossthe decades,buildings are developed andhomes are razed; communities come inand muscle other communities out; thepast haunts the present and perspectiveschange,so that perpetrators sometimesbecome victims,and victims sometimesbecome the worst criminals of all...Written with kaleidoscopic verve anddelirious wit,Brooklyn Crime Novel is abreathtaking tour de force of a quarterof a city and the humanity it contains,andan epic interrogation of how we fashionstories to contain the uncontainable: ourremorse at the world we've made
Publisher: Atlantic BooksISBN: 9781805460404Number of pages: 384Weight: 650 gDimensions: 250 x 170 x 40 mmEdition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel... I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel,but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read,full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant,genre-defying work will leave certainly a mark.Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy,and as with the oldest crime story ever written,Oedipus Rex,the judge,detective,victim,and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving,fiercely intelligent,and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time.I love and admire the way Lethem's always pushing at the edges of the form. He'so in command of the material,both of the subject and the language,that it sometimes feels as if he's improvising on it,or even floating free of it completely,the way a jazz musician might. The humour's wonderfully corrosive,and there's always a sense of the strange mixed with an undercurrent of outrage and tenderness.If Dean Street could talk,Brooklyn Crime Novel would be its voice,and it would serve up a half-century of Brooklyn's dirt-fractured multicultural dreams,waves of gentrification,'black mayonnaise'-while confessing its many crimes,from shoplifted magazines to blockbusting to murder. An intricate,spellbinding tour of the soul of Brooklyn as it casts off Manhattan's shadow.Brooklyn Crime Novel is like a sidewalk studded with diamonds - individual moments in life documented as vividly as that,the reader walking along with the characters through a borough,through buildings and streets and bedrooms,through lifetimes in an American place. Jonathan Lethem has layered a universe here,in a devastatingly meticulous document,a tender yet unsentimental remembrance for an entire world.
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