Description

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who’s just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends square up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977 a white kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guy’s windscreen. And so it goes.

On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change but the patterns remain the same: sex; boredom; friendship; violence; a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. But the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents; cops; renovators; landlords; gentrifiers; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighbourhood its name and control its shifting demographics. Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all…

Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made

Publisher Review

A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel... 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 * 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 The Trees * Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy, and as with the oldest crime story ever written, Oedipus Rex, the judge, detective, victim, and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time. * Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows and The Old Drift * I love and admire the way Lethem's always pushing at the edges of the form. He' so in command of the material, both of the subject and the language, that it sometimes feels as if he's improvising on it, or even floating free of it completely, the way a jazz musician might. The humour's wonderfully corrosive, and there's always a sense of the strange mixed with an undercurrent of outrage and tenderness. * Rupert Thomson, author of Barcelona Dreaming * 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 * Brooklyn Crime Novel is like a sidewalk studded with diamonds - individual moments in life documented as vividly as that, the reader walking along with the characters through a borough, through buildings and streets and bedrooms, through lifetimes in an American place. Jonathan Lethem has layered a universe here, in a devastatingly meticulous document, a tender yet unsentimental remembrance for an entire world. * Susan Straight, author of Mecca *