Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem. Ecco Press, 384 pp., $15.
It’s hard to write about urban history without taking stock of fictions. Maybe that’s why Jonathan Lethem’s latest book is called Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023): less a title than a microgenre, the kind that one might find gracing a used bookstore display, comp lit syllabus, or thematic Criterion program. This implicit reference to noir—which influenced Lethem’s previous Brooklyn-based novels Fortress of Solitude (2003) and especially Motherless Brooklyn (1999)—is apt since it is perhaps the genre best disposed to disrupt mythic narratives of urban development. As the ultraleft French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette put it in 1982, noir “in its golden age, was fundamentally anti-fascist.”
Lethem grew up in the world he depicts and thus lends his narrator the kind of affective detachment earned from experience. (If this semiautobiographical raconteur had a custom T-shirt, it might read: “I grew up in a Brooklyn commune and all I got was a comprehensive education in gentrif…