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- - - - SECTION: Section E; Page 1; Column 1; The Arts/Cultural Desk LENGTH: 1221 words HEADLINE: Untangling the Knots Of a Brooklyn Boyhood BYLINE: By DIANE CARDWELL BODY: When Jonathan Lethem was growing up on Dean Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, one of the few white faces in a black and Hispanic sea, he was constantly being grabbed and frisked for his pocket change or bus pass by the neighborhood kids, he recalled the other day. It was the 1970's, before great waves of middle-class homesteaders cascaded through the leafy streets, buying and renovating historic brownstones, back when the few whites living in the shadow of a jail and two housing projects tended to be socially conscious types like Mr. Lethem's parents. The encounters were not precisely muggings, he said, because they were enacted in "the theater of childhood," but instead a kind of racial hazing, and for some of his tormentors a rehearsal for realities later in life. "To be yoked," Mr. Lethem said, using the term he eventually gave the encounters, "was to be involved in a kind of an experience that was in quotation marks from the beginning. It was always: 'Hey you're just my friend, you know this isn't for real, but you're the white boy and I'm the black boy, and we're going to do this. And we're going to do this every day, and I'll see you tomorrow, and I'll take your quarter, too.' " The encounters were furtive and shameful, something he kept to himself. "I didn't know how to go home to my idealistic parents and say, 'The black kids are taking my money,' " he said in the sunny backyard of a Court Street restaurant just a few blocks from the scenes of his ritual humiliations. It is only now, some three decades later, that he has been able to untangle and talk about the experiences he said tied him in knots, a process at the heart of his new novel, "The Fortress of Solitude." Mr. Lethem, 39, who published his first three books while living in California before moving back to Brooklyn eight years ago, became something of a hipster celebrity with his last novel, "Motherless Brooklyn" (1999), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. That book delved deep into the obsessions and codes of the borough's white ethnic groups, but Mr. Lethem shied away from race, the subject he tackles head-on in "The Fortress of Solitude," his attempt at "the great Dean Street novel," he said. The block he grew up on was a petri dish of sorts where it was left up to the children to live out the incomplete transformation of the civil rights movement, he said. The new book is also about his guilt that although he was the minority, the temporary usurper on black turf, he ultimately had escape options his neighbors did not. "I was having it explained to me in that difficult conversation that included having my head put in a headlock that this was my world, and I would be temporarily punished for intruding on certain blocks of my neighborhood, but that the game was rigged, and I had the right skin tone," he said. Not that everything was so charged. Mr. Lethem said his life was rich in culture and inspiration. His father is a painter, and amid the yokings were countless interracial games of stickball and a parade of social activists and artists through his house. His most difficult experience, he said, was dealing with the death of his mother, a social worker and neighborhood leader, from a brain tumor when he was 14, a "howling loss" that he tends to replay in some way in his books. Mr. Lethem made his escape through friendships with adults, trips to Manhattan and eventually enrollment in the High School of Music and Art, where he painted, made animated films and generally nurtured his identity as a young visual artist. He got into Bennington College in Vermont on the strength of his portfolio and a comic about Shakespeare that he created as an application, but abandoned painting for writing soon after. The culture shock of money and privilege proved too much for him, he said, and he left in his sophomore year for California, where he worked in a bookstore and began writing in earnest. Eventually Brooklyn called him back. He had never felt fully Californian, he said, and pined for New York's "intensity and the flavor and the oldness," but he was also able to face the conflicts and anxieties that had driven him away. "Some of the disturbing edge that I at one level fled" had begun to soften, he said, and he was able to sort out "which things were the city and which things were really myself." Critics have described Mr. Lethem as something of a genre bender, a writer taking the conventions of hard-boiled detective novels, westerns and science fiction and stitching them together with a stylized, acrobatic prose. Mr. Lethem sees it a bit differently. "I've never much related to the idea of science fiction, or crime writing or any of the other fixed genres people occasionally wish to fit me into -- they don't seem to me to describe what I'm up to," Mr. Lethem wrote in an e-mail message, preferring to describe his work as "something more like mixing 2-D pop culture elements into 3-D mimetic fiction; surrealism is another word, I suppose." He also said that his comfort in mixing fantasy and realism -- something that shows up in "The Fortress of Solitude" in the form of a magic ring from a lonely drunk -- comes from his father, who "has always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously." The book centers on the relationship between Dylan Ebdus, who is white, and Mingus Rude, who is black. The story, told mainly through Dylan (the "ur-white boy of Boerum Hill," in the author's words), follows them as they grow into manhood, with Dylan becoming a writer and Mingus a drug addict and inmate. Along the way Mr. Lethem chronicles the birth of hip-hop, the flowering of graffiti, the ravages of crack and the gentrification of the neighborhood, which his parents had so opposed. But it is ultimately the contradictions inherent in urban life in a neighborhood like Boerum Hill, called Gowanus when Mr. Lethem was growing up, that fascinate him. Mr. Lethem writes of Isabel Vendle, the novel's ur-gentrifier, as she lies dying in a hospital, "She was all of Boerum Hill's contradictions, crushed together: she was the Schlitz can in the brown paper sack sitting in the plaster-and-marble nook for turning coffins in the curve of a stairwell in the 19th-century town house." Those contradictions are still there. "You know, I was so far from this place for so long and dreamed my way back," he said. "The proportion may have changed, but you've still got, quite honestly, crack dealers a block away from two-star French restaurants." He feels it most, he said, on Smith Street, which was almost entirely Hispanic when he was growing up and a threshold he wanted to get across quickly, not linger on. Now it is a destination for residents and tourists looking to stroll the fancy housewares boutiques or settle into the bars and bistros. "They're still the same Puerto Rican guys in their straw hats on the boxes on the corner of Bergen and Smith on a hot summer day," he said. "On good days that 's what I think the novel was born to depict, is this unsimplicity of reality. On bad days I think no novel could ever get you there. It's too much. It's just too much to say how much the world can change but still stay the same all at once." http://www.nytimes.com GRAPHIC: Photo: The author Jonathan Lethem back in Brooklyn, where he grew up. (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman for the New York Times) LOAD-DATE: September 16, 2003 - - - -
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