Explores familiar territory from a new point of view in a style new to him. It unfolds through passages ranging in length from less than a page to a dozen, each labeled and dated. And it leaps between decades and then into liminal spaces that exist across time to cast a light on forgotten exchanges and actions. This kaleidoscopic, fragmentary quality is no lark; it is essential to Lethem’s project ... At first glance, the book’s stark title — coupled with Lethem’s frequent play with mystery tropes — signals that this is a genre novel. It is definitely not ... A brutal question to ask yourself: Was writing a book about your childhood friends and home turf an act of betrayal? ... Lethem lets the ragged edges remain visible. The story’s texture and pacing echoes his message ... The novel is also an endless declaration of love. Every neighborhood deserves such a discursive portrait, such ruthless devotion and such an audacious book.
Has a memoirish aspect. The narrator seems to be peering at events from a distance behind the stiff collar of an upturned trench coat ... These events are told in staccato language and chronological hopscotch ... 'Anyone still reading at this point?' he asks, six words that should probably never be put between covers ... Girls, though, are with few exceptions unapologetically marginal to this zigzagging story, which is about how boys navigate varieties of intimacy and violence ... A book that itself, structurally if not plotwise, is stripped down to the studs. It’s an interesting and affecting experiment, even if it sometimes feels like being flagellated with irony and ironworks.
A crime novel because there's crime in it, but it's also a novel that explores relationships between the cultures and races that make up Brooklyn. It is also a novel about parenthood, friendship, what it means to be a local, growing up, and politics. In fact, trying to break down everything Lethem injected into this narrative would be impossible. The important thing is the end result; a kaleidoscopic, dazzling (hi)story that is at once wonderfully engaging, informative, and one of the most complete and honest love letters ever written to Brooklyn.
Rails against...amnesia ... Sweeping back and forth between decades—and even centuries—this restless narrative of ceaseless acquisition and reinvention alights now on a boyhood love affair that will last a lifetime ... Mr. Lethem’s homing instinct endures. Time and again, in his hard-edged Brooklyn way, he finds himself echoing W.B. Yeats’s conclusion that 'Man is in love and loves what vanishes.'
Despite a couple of bestsellers about the place, he’s perhaps concluded that no fictional narrative or historical essay can quite do it justice. So this time around he’s tried to blend the two, writing a kind of Brooklyn metanarrative. Crime Novel doesn’t have a clear protagonist or rising action; plot-wise it’s a series of scenes ... A host of well-turned, often funny set pieces. There are detailed descriptions of how kids plot to make off with a skateboard or a pizza slice ... Lethem’s conceit also allows him to avoid a hackneyed story about one violent incident defining Brooklyn; the place is simply full of the stuff, layers and layers of it ... Lethem isn’t using Brooklyn Crime Novel to communicate ambivalence — he plainly loves the place. But it does make him anxious, and the anxiety at times makes the prose feel fussy and overthought ... It’s a tough needle to thread, and probably a bad place for newcomers for Lethem to start ... But credit him for being willing to experiment.
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 ... Given his genre-bending proclivities, it’s no surprise that Lethem makes a bold grab at the fashionable mode of autofiction. Adding some deadpan sparkle to a form that can often be flat and drab, he comes up with something truly compelling.
He discards conventional structure in favor of more than 100 brief passages that, taken together, paint a comprehensive, if decidedly idiosyncratic, social and economic portrait of his native borough over the half-century since his youth ... Readers familiar with his work are likely to settle in comfortably here, while it may take others time to feel at home on the Brooklyn streets. But anyone attuned by personal experience to the vibrancy and edginess of New York City life, or who simply enjoys reading about it, will find something to savor here ... Vivid.
Textured if scattershot ... Vivid vignettes ... It’s a bit too meandering, but fans will be pleased to find Lethem still knows his way around a New York City street scene.
A puzzling return to the scene of an earlier novel ... Maybe, with its dizzying array of local color, it’s a memoir gone rogue, as is a lot of fiction ... An entertaining, challenging read that may appeal mainly to Lethem fans and scholars.
