The ‘Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist’ Grows Up

Jonathan Lethem had come back to Brooklyn, and I wanted to know why.

One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel.   

I was raised in Brooklyn too, some 15 years after Lethem, and he remains, among my childhood friends and I, somewhat of a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction. He was given a hero’s welcome by the literary establishment after publishing Motherless Brooklyn, in 1999, and again after Fortress. But I say “somewhat” because after that, he left town. Both literally—he relocated to Maine and eventually to the West Coast—and in his literature. We old Brooklynites have a high tolerance for crimes, but we consider desertion one of the most egregious. Though he’s written six novels since Fortress, he has not set another in Brooklyn—until now.

He returned to familiar territory for a number of reasons, but here is one: Over the years, he told me, people were always asking if he’d ever write about Dean Street again, and he always said no. But one day, he blurted out something new: “The only way I would ever do a sequel to was from the point of view of a character who grew up on that street and hates the book,” he said. He imagined that guy thinking the book “got every stupid thing wrong, and blew it, and made a cartoon—a self-pitying cartoon—out of this experience.” It