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A Novel
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers" (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made.
"[An] intricately excavated, breathtaking tale of imperiled childhood in a fitfully gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood... . With Brooklyn as a microcosm of human folly and strife, Lethem's virtuoso, many-faceted novel is trenchant, hilarious, wrenching, and tender." —Booklist (starred review)
"Jonathan Lethem creates a vivid portrait of the borough of Brooklyn over 50 years of profound social and economic change... . Anyone attuned by personal experience to the vibrancy and edginess of New York City life, or who simply enjoys reading about it, will find something to savor here." —Shelf Awareness
"The latest novel from the bard of Brooklyn is a metafictional collage that tells the story of some fifty years in one neighborhood ... . It's funny and wise and weird ... . [a] love letter to Brooklyn." —LitHub
"The energy coursing through Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn Crime Novel is the wild dynamism of youth, unfettered and unleashed daily on the streets of a now-vanished part of New York... .For a writer who has traveled widely and wildly in his work... Mr. Lethem's homing instinct endures. Time and again, in his hard-edged Brooklyn way, he finds himself echoing W.B. Yeats's conclusion that 'Man is in love and loves what vanishes.'" —Wall Street Journal
"Brooklyn Crime Novel surveys the deep fissures that surface when the pull of home is stronger than nostalgia... . What more is there to say about Brooklyn? Lethem's revisionist project ultimately unsays as much as it says. '[C]ertain matters fall into wells of silence without necessarily being lies...,' he writes. 'The street may seem to swallow knowledge about itself, to render certain things unsayable.' But the novel is also an endless declaration of love. Every neighborhood deserves such a discursive portrait, such ruthless devotion and such an audacious book." —Los Angeles Times
"Tracking the slippery, overlapping paths of gentrification and crime are a vast cast of characters for whom time and space bend and retract in this expansive novel." —Boston Globe
"A wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery... .Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form." —CrimeReads
"Going back nearly three decades to his debut noir-influenced novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, Lethem has never approached the beat looking for just the facts... . Lethem unwinds his story through a series of small vignettes: imperfect Polaroids of an imperfect past that slowly coalesce into a photomosaic montage of memoir-meets-myth... . While Brooklyn Crime Novel may not cohere stylistically to the more hard-boiled Gotham underworld of an Ed McBain or Andrew Vachss novel, it's by no means a chalk outline." —BookPage
"Brooklyn Crime Novel's subtle brilliance lies in Lethem's decision, in the tradition of an Italo Calvino or Gilbert Sorrentino, to blast away the ligatures that would bind a conventional, linear novel... . With an untamed, metafictional narrator, Lethem is able to interrogate the brutal truths of gentrification—and what it means to have found success as a writer emerging at such a pivot point in history." —The Nation
"Alternating with agility between the late '60's, the near-present, and the years between, Lethem gives a sharp sense of the poignancies of urban regeneration." —Times Literary Supplement
"Lethem writes in a cool, disaffected, electric style and with deep love for the borough he was both born in and which he has given such rich imaginative life." —Daily Mail
"Jonathan Lethem has become the bard of Brooklyn ... His latest, Brooklyn Crime Novel ... mixes mystery with verbal carnage, while adding elements of metafiction. The result is an entertaining inquiry into the transgressions found in this community... . It's a book that requires your concentration. But it delivers social commentary [and] plenty of laughs." —Financial Times
"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." —Percival Everett, author of James
"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." —James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods
"A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this." —Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
This information about Brooklyn Crime Novel was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
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