Lethem on Brooklyn

This isn’t related to Pittsburgh directly but I love the way that Lethem talks about representing Brooklyn.  Here are a couple excerpts:

When I ask about his version of Brooklyn, Lethem replies: “I don’t have a ‘version of Brooklyn’ – Brooklyn’s too big. I didn’t set out to write a great Brooklyn novel, or a Brooklyn novel at all. I set out to write the great novel of Dean Street between Bond and Nevins, on a certain summer’s day in 1972. To think you’re going to write Brooklyn is, for me, a pathetically hopeless position.”

I wonder how the physical streets changed for him once he’d transformed them into fiction. Lethem smiles. “The first day I walked on Dean Street after finishing writing – where, at some level, I think I wanted to exhaust the subject, a kind of torrential outpouring that would discharge the legacy of those stones, and everything I knew about that block – I thought: ‘Oh, I didn’t even touch it. I haven’t even started.’ It had completely slipped out of my grasp. Which didn’t mean I was unhappy with the book, but the relationship between text and the completely intangible essence of this place, which still hovers between my body and the buildings and the streets – there’s still a gulf between those things.”

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But Lethem is not a mourner for the past in the way that traditional Brooklyn nostalgists are – not wailing that people were friendlier back when things were cheaper and more dangerous, or that the Dodgers should never have moved to LA. He observes continuity as much as change. When I say, walking with him and thinking about what he’s written, that it’s interesting how the fabric of a city creates a kind of human fabric, he responds: “Yeah. I guess I’d call myself a kind of addict of that process. Because it’s the unfinished quality that’s surprising. Being able to come back here and feel like it was still alive came from realising that gentrification didn’t mean that it was somehow sealed in amber now, but that frictions and juxtapositions are still being generated here.” He coins a lovely phrase. The Brooklyn that he loves, Lethem says, is marked by “a definitive incompleteness”.