Their 'Brooklyn' needs the real borough's rough edges

By Saul Austerlitz  |  February 20, 2008

Brooklyn Was Mine
Edited by Chris Knutsen
and Valerie Steiker
Riverhead, 229 pp., paperback, $15

"You are a New Yorker," Colson Whitehead announces in his magnificent oddball guidebook "The Colossus of New York," "when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." Brooklyn, both centuries old and in recent years reinvented as a bohemian paradise for Manhattan expats, is in the full flush of its own apotheosization, and who better to celebrate its newly rediscovered pleasures than its writers, whose moving trucks, crammed full of thesauruses and galley copies, swell the borough's population with each passing day?

The novelist Arthur Phillips recently joked in The New York Times about "zoning laws that require all novelists to live in Brooklyn," and after leafing through the pages of "Brooklyn Was Mine," the new anthology of Brooklyn-centric essays, it does seem as if writers form the primary voting bloc in Kings County. And if the essays included here are any indication, their attitudes about the place in which they live range all the way from proud to downright gloating. Lara Vapnyar's deeply ambivalent paean to Brighton Beach notwithstanding, "Brooklyn Was Mine" is a mash note to everything Brooklyn: its parks, its manholes, its seltzer deliverymen, its baseball diamonds.

Lambasting the writers in these pages for their faults feels gratuitously cruel, like kicking a puppy. They are all so yearningly earnest in their love for their home borough. But their love, like so many others of a primarily sentimental nature, has a creeping tendency to descend into hopeless schmaltz at the drop of fall's first leaf. And so we are provided with a map of Brooklyn in which whole swaths of the 2.5 million-strong borough are invisible, or rendered in the sepia tones of nostalgia. The Brooklyn that does not match this portrait - the poverty, the racial tension, the rampant political corruption - makes no appearance here. A more appropriate name for this collection would have been "Brownstone Brooklyn Was Mine."

The essays in "Brooklyn Was Mine" are mostly personal, and bear the distinct stamp of two kinds of stories: the nostalgic, in which a parent or ancestor is linked to Brooklyn; or the urban-pastoral, in which Brooklyn becomes the balm that heals wounds, binds families together, and offers a sense of peace lacking in Brooklyn's constant rival, the Yankees to its Red Sox: Manhattan.

Alexandra Styron pays tribute to the lavishly imagined Brooklyn of her father's "Sophie's Choice," and Jonathan Lethem contributes a two-part mishmash, half science-fiction dystopia and half personal memoir.

There are some lovely homes scattered amid the fixer-uppers in the dilapidated landscape of "Brooklyn Was Mine." Jennifer Egan researches the life of Lucy Kolkin, a young woman who worked as a mechanic at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and discovers a kindred spirit walking the same streets some 60 years earlier; and Lawrence Osborne returns to Brooklyn from a year in Bangkok to save his failing relationship, and finds that a bike ride through the Red Hook waterfront, simultaneously scarred and left untouched by urban renewal, is the best salve for emotional pain. The conjunction between the individual and the shared, past and present, the exterior life of the sidewalks and the private life of the interiors, is the aim of most of the writers here, but only a few (Egan and Osborne, and Phillip Lopate, that longtime New York cheerleader, who contributes a typically superb introduction) succeed.

Nagged by a persistent unease at what was missing from "Brooklyn Was Mine," I was relieved to discover that Dinaw Mengestu's contribution, the last essay in the book, captured the truest, least evanescent magic of Brooklyn: "What I had wanted and found in them, what I admired and adored about Kensington, was the assertion that we can rebuild and remake ourselves and our communities over and over again, in no small part because there have always been corners in Brooklyn to do so on." Mengestu, an Ethiopian immigrant with no real memory of his homeland, takes solace in the rituals of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who gather nightly on McDonald Avenue, re-creating their lost homes with a series of small gestures.

All Brooklynites are busily at work re-creating their homelands, be it another country, another city, another neighborhood, or an imagined past, and it is the special grace of the borough that it grants its residents the freedom, and the space, to do so. A corner of Brooklyn - on so little, the stuff of dreams are made.

Saul Austerlitz lives in Kensington, Brooklyn, within walking distance of the Prospect Park Lake.