“What if Brownstone Brooklyn is salted with fakes to begin with? False fronts, a Potemkin village?” For sure, the place (non-place? near-place?) where Jonathan Lethem’s thirteenth novel is set has seemed mythic in many ways in recent decades—though the mirage will shimmer, reform, or even dissolve depending on how you arrived, in fact or fancy, at a diverse locale somewhere south of the western end of Atlantic Avenue. Late aughts, my first time in the US, let alone Brooklyn, I came jet-lagged out of the subway at Hoyt-Schermerhorn and thought: Home at last! A touristic cliché: it all looks so familiar, so comforting. Later I fell asleep beneath an early twentieth-century photograph of the very Boerum Hill row house where I was staying. Half the night a voice screamed from the nearby Wyckoff Gardens projects: “I want my daddy!” It was not clear this was the voice of a child, and by morning my naivety about the area was fading: I see what has happened here.
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