Beneath the Carpet, the Parquet

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 gentrification and a warranted skepticism of DIY.”) In conversation with critic Dan Fox, on his newsletter Keep All Your Friends, the author described Brooklyn Crime Novel as “a fiction built on the materials of an oral history.” Its many characters are known not by proper name but by hardboiled epithets: the Screamer, the Slipper, the antiquarian kid, the millionaire’s son. The closest thing to a proper name is C., the most prominent Black character in the story and a mentor of sorts to his fellow Dean Street boys—the juvenile crew whose antics and actions structure much of the narrator’s recollections of Brooklyn. In short chapters that jump forward and back in time, that narrator recounts the story of a neighborhood in the throes of change over six decades. Some chapters are set in a particular year (“1976, “1977,” “2019”), others in less secure temporalities (“in the time before certainty disintegrates”), while some just refer to themselves (“joke”). The ravages of public disinvestment followed by the ravages of private reinvestment—the slow violence of gentrification—are told through concatenations of tense, often sticky situations: A Black resident argues with a white optician over whether the smudge on his glasses is permanent; cops give each other hand jobs in their car (according to local urban legend) by the “microcosmic industrial wasteland” around the Gowanus Canal; a landlord with muttonchops shares eviction tactics while passing around joints to his tenants; hippie parents watch C. play with his white friends while waxing self-righteous about having marched for civil rights. The latter are the so-called brownstoners who bought dilapidated homes in Boerum Hill in the 1970s and started to mold them into the precious commodities they are today. Not all those practicing urban homesteading during the period were primarily interested in making a buck. For the Harlem Renegades, a Puerto Rican group that salvaged buildings in East Harlem, it was a way to stake a claim to their neighborhoods and social space. However, as Brooklyn Crime Novel shows, cultivating autonomy through property is a slippery slope when capitalist exchange rules supreme.

Providentially, I read Lethem’s novel alongside the critical geography anthology Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (2021). “Refusing the presumption that land commodification is inevitable or that marketization or neoliberalization are inexorable forces,” the collected texts, editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake write in their introduction, underline “the continuous work of legal, regulatory, and narrative fictions that go into the making of land as a commodity and that enact and sustain the property relations that underpin linked value projects.” Like Ghertner and Lake, Lethem wagers that to tell the story of urban development, displacement, and capitalist spatialization, one should lean into the land and the literary fictions that reproduce it. Indeed, as the Wheeze (formerly “the antiquarian kid,” now the barstool philosopher of downtown Brooklyn) might remind us between pints of beer and outbursts at yuppie scum, this neighborhood—down to its topographically deceptive name, conjured in 1964 by Boerum Hill Association founder Helen Buckler—only came into being because people bought into “the old lady’s fiction.” “You can’t grasp reality from within a fiction,” the Wheeze tells the narrator. But Brooklyn Crime Novel doesn’t pretend to offer reality, something equally elusive to reformist and novelist alike.

Brooklyn Crime Novel isn’t so much a love letter to his native borough (as the author said of Motherless Brooklyn), but it is about love in Brooklyn—whether homoerotic encounters between the various Dean Street boys or the care with which C. teaches his white friends how to comport themselves on the streets. Without spoiling the ending of the book, I’ll just paraphrase Fred Moten and say that love is violent. Violent love also makes itself evident in what Lethem calls “the dance,” a slow, mutually assured choreography that is essentially a mugging predicated on a delicate coordination of coercion and consent. The dance generally transpires between young Black kids and young white kids; the white kids have mugging money in their pockets and spending money in their socks. The gentle muggers leading the dance know this but tend to only take the money earmarked for them. The dance is a form of economic redistribution, legitimized in part by white guilt. As the narrator puts it, in one of the many perceptive lines underscoring the codependency of private and public spheres of reproduction: “While the DIY renovations are going on inside the houses, the DIY reparations are transpiring on the sidewalks out front.”

A lot of urban histories, particularly those that try to tell the story of gentrification, are vexed by two problems. The first concerns time: When was the “before” that preceded the “after” the present is stuck within? “Listen, I understand,” says Lethem’s narrator. “The before is honey colored. It glows. If you go far enough back, you might reach the false oasis. Maybe you can live there.” Take SoHo, for example. The neighborhood’s transformation is typically historicized as follows: A center of manufacturing (labeled productive) was abandoned (labeled unproductive) and then, in the ’60s, occupied by artists who worked to cooperativize/artify it (rendering it so “nonproductive” as to enter the aesthetic realm). Not long after the artists took root, as Sharon Zukin’s landmark text Loft Living (1982) demonstrates, capital arrived under different conditions looking to reinvest—from light industry to Fluxus to Sephora in half a century. But SoHo’s story is in fact a cycle. During America’s Gilded Age, it was a premier shopping district, where the wealthy would traverse the avenues in carriages approached by street vendors (hence the name of the gallery Carriage Trade, which has made its mission to research the connections between cultural production and urbanism). In other words, it’s hard to see the gentrification of the forest through the individual land fictions that we live in. “The word [gentrification], destined later to be glued to these years as a painting is glued into a frame, is already in the air,” Lethem writes of the 1970s. But “the Dean Street boys prefer to stick to what they can see and feel.” Again, he looks to noir for a different attitude toward time:

The second problem vexing many narrators of postwar urban development is whether those few at the top are the only ones who call the shots or whether changes to the urban fabric, for better or worse, also emanate from below. Much ink has been spilled on the consequences of mutual, extraparliamentary, or just survivalist action in compensating for the withdrawal of welfare spending—especially in the age of what some have called “austerity urbanism” or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” Benjamin Holtzman’s book on New York City’s shift toward private-sector urban planning after the 1975–76 fiscal meltdown, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (2021), adds to this literature and includes a chapter on a group of people similar to those who populate Lethem’s fiction.

Holtzman articulates a common social democratic position in arguing that when individual or collective efforts step in to provide what the state can’t (or rather won’t), such efforts can rationalize and normalize austerity. Grassroots efforts like park conservancies and organizations like the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, he writes, “became heralded for demonstrating the importance of private- citizen- and sector- led paths toward urban rejuvenation.” Of course, Holtzman is right to point out that politicians and right-wing think tanks weren’t the only players in the so-called neoliberal turn. The characters in Brooklyn Crime Novel—bohemian parents, civil rights “allies,” sleazy landlords, opportunistic flippers, and other types—were in the mix, though the impact of such actors was modest compared with those of pre-financial-collapse impresario Robert Moses or supply-side spaniels in the following decades when “property price appreciation”—as Melinda Cooper relates in her new book, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance—became dogma. “Just as there were back-to-the-land people,” writes Lethem, “there were back-to-the-city people, the Jane Jacobs army.” These are the people Holtzman might say implemented what he calls “popular marketization,” but Lethem is less interested in measuring their complicitly (“later they’ll be given credit or blame for guile, foresight, calculation”) than in sticking, à la the Dean Street boys, to “what they can see and feel.” In a chapter titled “A Word About the Brownstoners,” he writes:

Like much urban history that doesn’t take land fictions seriously in the way Lethem’s novel does, Holtzman at times unintentionally creates an equivalency between forms of grassroots action rooted in survival—like DIYers who reclaimed their derelict buildings under threat of police violence and eviction—and top-down legislative activities that sought to “beautify” or ameliorate the privations of neoliberal austerity, often in coalition with and at the behest of capital. In Lethem’s historical autofiction from below, we see how people survived in creative ways, and sparked visions of antistatist self-management, even if fleetingly. “Everybody knows about the kid who stole the A train and took it on a joyride,” writes the narrator. “He ran it better than the MTA, he hit all the lights on time, and nobody would have known the difference if he didn’t get caught.” Here, autofiction meets Henri Lefebvre’s autogestion—a term for workers’ management he picked up from the shop floor and expanded to describe various self-organized spatial practices opposed to the top-down fiats of municipal governance.

Near the end of Brooklyn Crime Novel, the narrator and the Wheeze discuss the return of “the novelist”—another proxy for Lethem perhaps—to Boerum Hill after having published a book about their upbringing. They were all Dean Street boys, but only the Wheeze feels he knows the history of the neighborhood well enough to tell it. He proposes they go to Brooklyn Inn, where the novelist is “holding court,” and confront him like the characters do to their author in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973). At the bar, the Wheeze accuses the novelist of what, in his view, might be the most heinous crime of all: “You gentrified gentrification.” DIYers and speculators drew first blood, whether they meant to or not, but it was the implementation and reproduction of land fictions, Lethem seems to say, that really did Brooklyn in.