The novelist Arthur Phillips recently joked in The New York Times about "zoning laws that require all novelists to live in Brooklyn," and after leafing through the pages of "Brooklyn Was Mine," the new anthology of Brooklyn-centric essays, it does seem as if writers form the primary voting bloc in Kings County. And if the essays included here are any indication, their attitudes about the place in which they live range all the way from proud to downright gloating. Lara Vapnyar's deeply ambivalent paean to Brighton Beach notwithstanding, "Brooklyn Was Mine" is a mash note to everything Brooklyn: its parks, its manholes, its seltzer deliverymen, its baseball diamonds.
Lambasting the writers in these pages for their faults feels gratuitously cruel, like kicking a puppy. They are all so yearningly earnest in their love for their home borough. But their love, like so many others of a primarily sentimental nature, has a creeping tendency to descend into hopeless schmaltz at the drop of fall's first leaf. And so we are provided with a map of Brooklyn in which whole swaths of the 2.5 million-strong borough are invisible, or rendered in the sepia tones of nostalgia. The Brooklyn that does not match this portrait - the poverty, the racial tension, the rampant political corruption - makes no appearance here. A more appropriate name for this collection would have been "Brownstone Brooklyn Was Mine."
The essays in "Brooklyn Was Mine" are mostly personal, and bear the distinct stamp of two kinds of stories: the nostalgic, in which a parent or ancestor is linked to Brooklyn; or the urban-pastoral, in which Brooklyn becomes the balm that heals wounds, binds families together, and offers a sense of peace lacking in Brooklyn's constant rival, the Yankees to its Red Sox: Manhattan.
Alexandra Styron pays tribute to the lavishly imagined Brooklyn of her father's "Sophie's Choice," and Jonathan Lethem contributes a two-part mishmash, half science-fiction dystopia and half personal memoir.
