Review of Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Harping on race and gentrification on about every page, employing a sledgehammer when a lighter touch would’ve been appreciated. 

The old-fashioned style is quaintly meta, with a grossly omniscient narrator who seems fond of gangsta slang. As in some of his other novels, the male protagonist is blasé about indiscreet homosexual encounters, while simultaneously projecting machismo, that adolescent revulsion/ fascination with sex combined with an inability to understand its purpose, value, or risks, which results in a cringe succession of Hollywoodized scenes wherein the exigencies of the flesh are pampered with the same absurd repetitiveness as the socio-political tone. There is little acknowledgement from the didactic narrator that any progress has been made, that human beings are capable of anything more than a perpetual generation of moral slime. The perspective is gratingly naive. Its young adult characters act and perform for one another the way bullies, punks, and Avant-garde wastoids did in bygones eras—how they pick fights for pocket change, slap people around in order to ‘look cool’ or seem tough when any one of them would starve to death if they had to depend on their own so-called brains or abilities for any appreciable length of time. Are we supposed to nostalgically recall such unamusing rogues from our childhood days, who spent countless thousands of hours strategizing how to shoplift and tag buildings and smuggle smut into their toxic bedrooms, all while listening to them cry about the unendurable unfairness of the possibility that people with tangible money might live nearby them and walk the street for whole minutes unmolested. There is so much molestation between these pages that it ceased to be entertaining. There is a point where satire gives way to boredom, where the suspension of disbelief derails. I subscribe to the seeming minority which still believes it is possible to walk down the street without getting mugged. Instead, the characters have to carry mug money everywhere they go.

I much adored a few of this author’s books, and he’s written in several different modes. I prefer his whimsical imitations of Philip K. Dick. This book had a lot of points to make, but I felt it could have made them more eloquently, without the distractions of despicable characters doing nothing new in unredeemed arcs of greed and selfish indulgence. The language is also not particularly vivid. I enjoyed one scene where a woman guilt trips the man mugging her. You get the sense of this survival trait, probably endemic to Brooklyn, where no on backs down, and there were a few good examples of the hackneyed mentality that life is domination, and of this notion I consider false that adolescence is the most beautiful or meaningful period of one’s life. Not the way these characters live it though.