Dylan, as Lethem writes, is uneasy about the transformation of his neighborhood. He wants to reject Boerum Hill, even as he marvels at the changes. As he walks down his block he can “feel the juxtaposition, the crush of time,” the old and the new. His neighborhood now looks like “the set for an idealized movie.” What causes Dylan’s unease with the new Brooklyn of cafes, restaurants, and high-end shops is his understanding of authenticity and its relationship to his identity. How his Brooklyn was replaced with a shinny new one shakes his foundation. Dylan mourns the loss of his Brooklyn and realizes that growing up in Gowanus left him, as he says, with a “rage for authenticity.” In a 2003, New Yorker interview Lethem revealed how his relationship with changing urban neighborhoods mirrors Dylan’s: “I see them [new restaurants etc] through a very complicated gauze of irony, because I can’t help but have this double vision and see the past everywhere.” Maybe you can’t go home again, but maybe you can never really escape home either.
Dylan’s response to the loss of his neighborhood is to a loss of idealized space not community and certainly not people. As the novel unfolds, we see Dylan was almost always an outsider to his neighborhood, which was someone else’s before, and even while, it was his. Dylan, heeding his mother’s advice, is proud to have been from pre-gentrification Brooklyn, to have had some black friends. It is this relationship, even if marginal, to the “real” neighborhood (i.e. black and Hispanic) that allows Dylan to still call it his. Dylan is upset because Gowanus seemed to represent what was real, and now it is gone and where does this leave him. There are people living on his block who have not earned the right, have not put in the time. They haven’t paid their dues. Dylan is the victim, he convinces himself, just like the blacks and Hispanics who have been displaced, because his Brooklyn is gone too. But one suspects his victimhood is less rooted in the neoliberalism or the economics of gentrification. Rather, his is the loss of social capital. After all, they sold their home for a handsome profit and moved on.
Here is the complicated story of all white New Yorkers who grew in the changing urban environment of the 1970s. The childhood past, even if it was tough, was real and defining because the struggles of the city seemed so real. It formed identities and values. It survives idealized in one’s mind as reality changes. Dylan is both victim of the changes and also victimizer. His family moves to Gowanus as the first wave of gentrification begins. They attracted others until the floodgates were wide open. What Dylan remembers is the imagined city of his childhood. But, Dylan’s memories as retold are not about the community, but about his navigation through or over it and his absorption of that culture through remote connections. Dylan, through his proximity to blackness, adopts a form of blackface to develop his persona. At college, unable to fit into a wealthy student body, he adopts blackness as a wardrobe. To fit in he becomes Brooklyn, a white representative of black Brooklyn to kids who didn’t know the difference. “I’d throw Brooklyn down like a dare,” Dylan claims. “I earned my stripe at Camden [the fictitious college] by playing a walking artifact of the ghetto.…” This proximity to blackness is important to Dylan as a set of authentic experiences, but proximity is not the same as immersion or an embrace.
Lethem’s characters show that race matters in complex ways to Brooklyn’s white middle class. One reads Lethem for many reasons. One should be to better understand the complexity of the modern urban experience and the centrality of race. W.E.B. Dubois, writing in 1900, said, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Lethem reveals just how true this statement remains, even if the line is hidden or recast as real estate, revitalization, hipness, or a quest for authenticity. Navigating tight urban spaces, weaving oneself through the city streets requires understanding the rhythms and pulses of the neighborhoods, “street smarts.” This serious anthropological language can’t be learned from books, but rather it is acquired from experience, time and listening closely to the pulse of urban life. It is what Dylan Ebdus thought he earned by living on Dean Street, the authenticity that the new inhabitants didn’t seem to get. But Dylan might have only been listening to echoes rather than the actual music. The knowledge and sensitivity that many never know the difference between echoes and music make Lethem a real New York writer. Sometimes his characters seem to know that they only hear echoes and actual music may be his greatest contribution to urban literature. Lethem understands and is saddened by Dylan’s distant stance and sometimes tone deafness. Other writers might imitate or emulate his Lethem’s style, an echo of an echo, but they have to listen like Lethem more closely for the rhythm to truly know the city.
Reading Jonathan Lethem refocuses our lens on the critical and hidden issues that New Yorkers and other urbanites deal with all the time on the streets. At its core, the issue is about who’s real in New York. But more importantly, it reveals the often hidden dialogs, contradictions and hypocritical stances that are at the very core of urban culture. Lethem does us a service by pulling back the curtain reminding us that we are hearing echoes and not the real thing, and forcing his readers to leave the relative safety of fiction for reality.
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Rumpus original art by André Eamiello.
3 responses
Great piece. As a white boy in Crown Heights who’s read Lethem, it really resonated. I agree that the search for authenticity is an endless search in Brooklyn, with things always changing. I’ve stopped looking and just try to enjoy the ride. The contradictions you’re talking about, and that Lethem highlights, are everywhere. I would say that the issues of wealth, race, immigration, etc., you find and must confront in Brooklyn, are the same all over the U.S. But in the city, they rise and fall at a super-sped pace and at a greater volume.
But what exactly is the alternative? Some form of artificial, cultural conservation (which could be considered enforced segregation in certain situations)? Hemingway, similarly, bemoaned the loss of “authentic culture” in the ’20s. He lionized Spain as an example of an insular and “authentic” society and was deeply troubled by his own desire to live there because he understood that his presence was necessarily a destructive/gentrifying force. I think the fundamental question that we should be asking (and a question that this piece doesn’t fully address) is: What makes something “authentic?” Writers have been concerned about the collapse of “authenticity” (arguably the prime concern of American Modernism) for years and yet “authentic” environments continue to spring up while no one is looking. What makes something authentic? Why do we crave authenticity so much? Why do we seem to perennially feel that authenticity is on the brink of extinction? I’m not trying to create a watered down dichotomy of the situation but it does feel sort of reactionary and short sighted to complain about the evolution of neighborhoods. To me, it feels like once you start “preserving” culture (which is what you must do to prevent gentrification) it most assuredly loses its authenticity. Maybe gentrification isn’t the issue.
Whenever I read things like this about “community”, I always get a bit irritated. So these gentrifiers don’t really know their neighbors in Brooklyn? And I take it we are supposed to say “Shame on them”. But how many people in present-day America know their neighbors? Is the rate of “neighborliness” or “community togetherness” actually any higher in racially homogenous suburban areas? For that matter, is the rate of “knowing your neighbor” or “community togetherness” any higher in non-gentrified slums?
Everywhere in the world, people tend to hang out with their friends. Sometimes these friends live close by, but usually they do not. People tend to make most of their friends when they are young: in high school or college. Creative types moving to NY are generally past this age. So it should be no surprise that they cluster among friends and friends-of-friends rather than going out into the “general community” to meet people. I have a hard time understanding how such a perfectly natural and common phenomenon that occurs in every racial and income group should cause such paroxysms of guilt among middle-class whites. Most likely, the original inhabitants of these neighborhoods are not particularily interested in being friends with the gentrifiers, either. Not because they are racist or neccesarily dislike the newcomers, but because they generally probably already have their own set of friends, too! It takes a great deal of effort to become friends later in life with people who you do not have much in common with. I’m not saying that it can’t happen sometimes—I just don’t think it should be something to feel guilty about if it doesn’t happen.
I also think it is funny how people give racial overtones to the question of “authenticity”. I’d suggest these tortured Brooklyn gentrifiers come take a visit to my very uncool neck of the woods: suburban Prince George’s County, MD. Here you will see a majority-black population wrestling with different questions related to authenticity, such as: what does “urban” culture actually mean if you actually live in a realm of forested subdivisions? I just bring this up to point out that valuing authenticity and worrying about it are by no means the sole province of the white creative middle class—it is something that everyone does these days. Because very few of us live any longer in actual “authentic” communities where people know each other from childhood.
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