Jonathan Lethem is best known for his inventive use of genre and elegiac musings on his native borough. In his 1999 breakthrough novel Motherless Brooklyn, its narrator Lionel Essrog’s Tourette syndrome propelled a fast-moving neo-noir with an explosive glossolalia. The title nodded to Essrog’s orphaned status, and his struggle with loss and displacement was embellished with obsessively inventive linguistic flourishes. Lethem’s 2003 bestseller The Fortress of Solitude was also set in Brooklyn, a complex bildungsroman with richly layered references to music, comic books and street art. Twenty years on, and Lethem’s return to his home turf sees the language stripped down and determinedly prosaic. “Keep the light, let alone the honeyed light, from your eyes,” an anonymous narrator insists early on. “Just the facts, man – no painterly effects. We’re here to enumerate crimes.”
Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fictionalised memoir channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes that jump around in time, a fractured and granular narrative with a plurality of vocal tics. In what is more a sociological inquiry than a forensic one, the author interrogates what happened to the neighbourhood he grew up in, and we overhear the collective splutter of the street. The crimes and misdemeanours investigated become plural too, and uncertain, but a single plaintiff emerges: Brooklyn itself. In a time of staggering gentrification a whole community has become orphaned, a victim of displacement and dispossession.
