Brooklyn Book Festival

Talking Titans

Jonathan Lethem is to Brooklyn as Woody Allen is to Manhattan, as evidenced by his prose and his presence on the podium this weekend at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, You Don’t Love Me Yet, and others, Lethem lived in Brooklyn before it was gentrified and certainly before it went organic. A third-time guest at the festival, he read a passage from Fortress of Solitude peppered with references to his borough’s subway trains, regions, street names, grocery stores, and buildings. Although his gripping novels can—and have been—appreciated globally, it takes a native Brooklynite to truly relate to them and feel membership in the world he describes so adeptly. Questioned about the geographical specifics of his work, he discussed grappling with the debate to write universally or to “name drop.” He clearly chooses the latter, as documenting every detail in terms of time and place is not only his preference, but his self appointed “job,” resulting in a veritable diorama of Brooklyn meant for the audience to explore and enjoy.
—Sarah Rapp

Consequences to Come

Joan Didion happened to witness a few women talking favorably about Sarah Palin on TV the other day, and “something about that is beyond” her, the legendary writer and feminist dryly chirped Sunday evening. In a political panel ominously titled “The Consequences to Come,” The Brooklyn Book Festival gathered four frequent contributors to the New York Review of Books: Joan Didion, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, and Daryl Pinckney, who offered a bleak view of the outcome of the impending election. Only one of the four panelists, Pickney, gave a hopeful message—some of the “consequences to come” discussed by the rest included the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Darwin disappearing from textbooks, and the expansion of the death penalty to minors. Coming from such a distinguished and reputable panel, with data and numbers to support their claims, these predictions were both disheartening and surprising. Despite the depressing content, though, the panelists had wonderful chemistry, bouncing pedantic banter off of one another. Ending on a falsely light note, Dworkin answered one audience member’s panicked plea, “What do we do if we don’t win?” with a cheerful, “Well, better luck next year!”
—Sarah Rapp

Thirsty for Fiction

Three young writers—Charles Bock, Chuck Klosterman, and Ed Park—were featured at an event called “Thirsty for Fiction,” and each had recently released his debut. Charles Bock, whose short fiction has been published in Esquire, read an excerpt from Beautiful Children (a book about teen runaways, Las Vegas, and the adult film world) that follows stripper Cheri Blossom and her jerk boyfriend Ponyboy who is trying to get Cheri to star in hard-core porn films with him. It was surprising to find that beneath all the vulgarities, his writing has substance. Chuck Klosterman was arguably the most well known of the three, having published four nonfiction books including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. His first novel, Downtown Owl, tells the story of three “connected but disconnected” characters in an isolated town of North Dakota, 1983. The excerpt featured Mitch, a high school junior, and Klosterman’s prose charmingly depicted each character’s eccentricities. Ed Park, journalist, blogger, and editor of literary magazine The Believer, wrote his debut novel about the lives of 9-to-5 office workers. Park’s witty commentary on Maxine, the office seductress, Sprout, the obnoxious boss, and the office’s out-of-shape softball team provides a humorous look at the anything-but-mundane life of these office workers. As the authors finished reading, a buzzing crowd bee-lined for their book-signing table. Have three new stars been born?
—Louisa Levy

Inside/Outside

Nathan Englander (The Ministry of Special Cases), Joseph O’Neill (Netherland), and Susan Choi (A Person of Interest), came together to discuss the creation of a reality, self-identification, the difference between familial and national communities, and lives spent on society’s outskirts, while Dedi Felman moderated the panel. Choi reflected on the dichotomy between individual and universal realities through one main character, and discussed her frustration with characters being defined by ethnicity alone. O’Neill spoke to the differences between society’s view of individuals versus the said individuals’ self-perception. Englander emphasized the importance of naming characters and the treatment of simultaneous realities created by different communities or characters. All three writers agreed on family’s role as a measure of self-definition and, more importantly, that the writer remains very much an outsider to the world he or she creates. Englander, in concluding the discussion, declared that life is outside because it is defined by people at the edges of community, without whom people wouldn’t know themselves, echoing a statement true of all of the authors’ works and, perhaps, of literature itself.
—Emily Tamkin

Dream Deferred

Under the huge hanging lamps inside the stately courtroom of Brooklyn Borough Hall, four very different women read from their works and spoke about the notion of identity and struggle in today’s fiction. Inevitably, each spoke about her own unique histories in what resulted, for the audience, in an indistinguishable line between reality and fiction. Eileen Myles went first. Hers was a sexual journey that outlined both the isolating and fragmenting aspects of being gay. Her poetry revealed a fear of being categorized. “Yak, yak, yak, a lesbian speaking,” she read, in her booming voice. Fae Myenne Ng went next with passages from her second novel, Steer Toward Rock. Her first sentence exhibited the starkness of her writing style: “The woman I loved wasn’t in love with me; the woman I married wasn’t a wife to me.” The book discussed the struggle involved in dual identities within the lives of Chinese-Americans living in San Francisco. Terry McMillan read from her unpublished next novel, Getting to Happy, which chronicles the lives of the four female characters in Waiting to Exhale 15 years later. She showed her true colors as a master of combining humor with deep-rooted sadness. Elizabeth Nunez closed the reading with a very short excerpt from her novel Prospero’s Daughter, which she based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Unfortunately, there was little time left for discussion. The crowd soon dispersed after Eileen Myles responded to a general question about identity—that there exists a non-lineality in contemporary society, and that novels respond to that with a fragmented writing style: “Films give you hints on how to do that.”
—Jessica Jeong

PENUltimate Lit

“PENUltimate Lit: Literature and the Small Screen” gave attendees the opportunity to take a break from the lofty literary hobnobbing of other events in order to hear from two writers who have had success not only on the page but also on the screen. A. M. Homes and Richard Price are generally best-known for their fiction, but their work on Showtime’s The L Word and HBO’s The Wire, respectively, has garnered them Hollywood cred and, as Price put it, “beaucoup bucks.”
Homes was more specific about her experience on a television set than Price, who spoke with a mandarin’s vagueness about his screenwriting career. Getting hired on a television show, Homes said, is a particularly difficult feat generally, as the only way to get work is to have worked before. However, Homes was well-known enough for novels like This Book Will Save Your Life that she was able to call her friend, the executive producer, and request a position on The L Word. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she knew the L.A. ladies whom the show’s characters were based on.
While Price seemed more comfortable cracking jokes (asking about Homes’s “brother, P. M.,” and talking about his work on the “aptly titled” Michael Jackson video “Bad”), he discussed how shows like The Wire represent “the golden age of television.” “It’s not TV, it’s HBO, and it’s not HBO, it’s The Wire,” he said of the series whose novelistic ambitions matched those of his books, like Lush Life. While not all attendees had seen the show, they left feeling that perhaps television, with the right writer at the helm, was as worthy a medium as the written word.
—Daniel D’Addario