Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Crime Nobody Talks About


What’s the crime here? Even more to the point, what’s the here here?

Dean Street, Brooklyn, is a sociological jungle - crude, violent, without law. Or rather with only one law - The Street - and the Dance of conflict that takes place there - mainly among the children. These are the Dean Street Boys: “They came into consciousness in a distinct time and place. Later they’d find evidence, deep inside their bodies, of how they’d been formed by certain arguments that time and place was having about itself.” Only they know the rules and pass them through generations. Chaos pervades this time and place - the derelict soil, the pot-holed asphalt, the polluted air, that infamous open sewer of the Gowanus Canal, the surface of which has been known to burst into flame from time to time. “In this absconded zone, you take what you want, everyone knows this.”

But Dean Street is a synecdoche of a larger whole, a non-place called Boerum Hill, which is neither a hill nor anything other than designation someone dreamt up to enhance property values. “Consider, fine people of the jury, the possibility that it is just a fucked-up place… “ Long ago it was a suburban haven from the slums of Lower Manhattan. Then it reverted to that same slum. Now it has been revived, gentrified, spawning entirely new forms of routine violent criminality. It is “A land of negation. A neighborhood called Boredom Hell.”

Then again there’s the larger system, the Borough of Brooklyn, blackmailed into association with the City, that quite literally looks down on it, by criminal threats to cut off its water. The City now supplies Brooklyn not just with water but also police, and schools, and criminal justice facilities. The first is part of the cast in the corrupt Dance of the Street; the second the stage upon which the Dance is rehearsed and passed along to the next generation; the last is the Broadway-equivalent in which the real professionals get their starring roles - right their in the heart of Boerum Hill at the Brooklyn House of Detention (Ghislaine Maxwell recently guest-starred there)

But of course Brooklyn is not untypical of the even larger, and possibly even more criminal thing, called America. Blockbusters, red-liners, quick-buck estate agents have always been de riguerin America. Like Brooklyn, the whole country was usurped in the name of need and greed (the particular native victims in Brooklyn were the Canarsies, the remnants of which are hidden in plain sight). But these crimes have always succumbed to the special American penchant for narrative spin: “The more imaginary an American thing, … the deeper the ache to drape it in the bunting of provenances, lineage, Victorian frills.”

And so, “Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years. Nobody cares that nobody knows.” These, people, these Americans are “people who want to live neither in the present nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.” The American dream was never something to achieve but something to displace reality.

What can possibly hold all this together. Certainly not an idea. Who in “this ambient criminal potential” could possibly consider any abstraction relevant? Shared goals, some higher purpose, an inherent sense of community? Gedaddahere: “The street is the truth... Because this is a criminal world. You wouldn’t want to be on just one end of it, would you? Always the victim, never the perp? Recipient of the memo, taker of the call, unable to shout back? No.” This is the world of Hobbes not Locke, perpetual conflict not mutual tolerance.

What keeps everything together in this political maelstrom is simple: “Shame is the glue binding this universe together” (James Baldwin would certainly agree). There is just too much crime, too much casual injustice, too much consequent misery baked into existence to deal with: “Once you start compiling crime it’s hard to stop.” Casual racism, pervasive inequality of opportunity, institutionalised poverty, overwhelming cultural deprivation are not incidental to the American dream. These things are the reason the dream was invented - to rationalise them as motivating forces. This is the crime, at least according to Lethem, that nobody wants to talk about.

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