The Body of Brooklyn (review)

This collection of 14 essays is an elegant examination of the endless interaction between person and place, and of how they incorporate each other. While the body of the collection is set in Brooklyn, it is a Brooklyn which the author acknowledges as a mnemonic recreation, blurred by memory's editing, and a Brooklyn which the author admits to trying to shed like unwanted pounds later in life. You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, and you can take Brooklyn out of the boy. Sort of. Brooklyn abides. But the Brooklyn abiding in these pages is the Brooklyn abiding in memory.

The body of Brooklyn is aggregate and personal, the weight of the place, its past, a psychic and physical weight. In the title essay Lazar writes about being beaten up daily by his classmates and being singled out for being overweight before his unlikely savior, Vinny, materializes. Lazar recounts divesting himself of the unwanted weight (and later the Brooklyn accent), but Brooklyn remains much as the phantom girth remains. "Instead I learned that evening that my body's betrayal was not limited to obese athletic underperformance, not beginning to understand that I was still working with newer, slimmer material that hadn't had much practice in its new form."

One always remains, to some extent, who one has been. In the tenth essay, "Last Exit to Brooklyn," Lazar recounts how this emerged slimmer self engages in lust and love in an affair that is as much with the Verrazano Bridge as with his girlfriend Wendy. "The bridge, in that time, crystallized as a female form, whereas before it had been so only vaguely."The body has its joys, comedies, indignities, its lusts, appetites, betrayals—from visits to prostitutes to maternally interrupted masturbatory episodes to beatings and athletic failings to its final frailty.

The several essays about Rhoda, Lazar's mother, and her early death due to lung cancer also carry the weight of the past, the body of Brooklyn. Lazar writes, "She died. Brooklyn's body sagged, jaundiced and exhausted." Her death, too, belongs to Brooklyn, this body, part of the cumulative weight of the past and place, but Brooklyn also determines body, the person, the persona speaking through these essays in an accent tinged with Brooklynese despite his trying to divest himself of it.

Lazar suggests that we are not the sum of our past, but we do remain in endless negotiation with it. As he writes of his father and himself, "We liked seeming unsophisticatedly devoted to our backgrounds. But we both also developed rather flat elocutionary styles, slower, dappled with irony, as opposed to bursting with the sarcasm we had grown up with."

While the collection is an autobiography of a family and its members in Brooklyn, it is also a theoretical examination of memory, its inaccuracies, elisions, omissions, redactions. In the opening essay, "White Car," Lazar writes, "Memory wants to understand, yet stagnates when it understands, settling on a verbal and visual picture." This tension informs the entire collection: the need to render the past (and place) correctly and the impossibility of doing so, a personal essayist's dilemma. The essayist writes to know, but the mystery of life persists. For Lazar, whether or not his father was in a white car in 1964 or his mother was propositioned by the melon man ultimately is less important than the process of examination and writing. He writes, "Perhaps the blur tugs at me more than the answer would." The blur's the thing. One of the shortest essays, "The Season of Love," is a paradigmatic study of the ontology of seeing. An intruder challenges the narrator to look at himself in a mirror. The episode raises empirical issues and issues of identity, sexual and perspectival. How do we know who we are? Are we how we are seen or how we see ourselves? The...