Leaving Brooklyn

Before she spills the central transition of the book, reviewer Brody asks, "I can hardly believe that there are only two reviews written for it in eleven years." Well, my excuse is that I have just now read this short and engaging volume. At age 15, Audrey is more complex than she knows. No, wait. As an adult, Audrey's reminiscences show her earlier self to be more complex. Or maybe it is this: The act of remembering involves restructuring and inventing. And teen Audrey's dual vision continually parallels the idea that memory and fact have only a nodding acquaintance. Constructed memory is not a new theme, but this retelling is fascinating, in some part because a 15-year old's being bounced around by her environment rings true. Audrey is aware of being prodded and manipulated, and increasingly understands that she has--or can have--some personal agency to make things happen. At least that is the way Lynne Sharon Schwartz remembers it.

This is a beautiful book. I can hardly believe that there are only two reviews written for it in eleven years. The writer is wonderful and I wish more people had read her and shared their impressions of her writing. The book is about a young girl with an eye that only sees the border of things. She is legally blind. That eye is used as a metaphor for all that exists with fuzzy boundaries, outside the known and familiar. Her good eye is the known black and white reality. Her fuzzy eye is able to see through things and outside boundaries. Her mother takes her to an eye doctor when she is 15 to have her fitted with a contact lens. The eye doctor become obsessed with her and they begin a heavily sexual relationship. While this might be conceived of as bizarre, the author welcomes it as a way out, a method for the girl to leave Brooklyn. The doctor gives her money to take an acting class where she hopes to learn how to leave. The story is told in the first person. The 'I' and 'the eye' are never distinguished. Upon leaving Brooklyn, the protagonist states, "I left Brooklyn. I leave still, every moment. For no matter how much I leave, it doesn't leave me". p. 145. This book reminds me of homes in New York's boroughs where nothing intellectual is discussed, where adults play cards or mah jongg, and expect their children to go to a City College and fend for themselves.

I've fallen in love with this book. It is skillful poetry about the coming of age of Audrey with the poetic eye. It is about how society cookie cuts its children, to protect them, to cover for the world and thus make it a better place for them, but Audrey has an eye and a mind and heart that knows better. It is about how our parents, our teachers, mean well for us, but leech out the wisdom and individuality, in the process.Lynne Schwartz has captured with the eye of genius a girl who can't help but be what and who she is, and being who one is, is something of a crime whether one lives in Brooklyn or not. It is filled with such life, such unanswerable questions so beautifully and perplexingly stated, as, were we the children we think now we were? Or are those children back there totally alien to us? Were we adults in those children instead of the other way around.This is a book to treasure. It is about everything. Faith and betrayal and sexual depredation and how Audrey goes through the latter by being a book opened and read by herself, because the man who commits the hurt to her is finally revealed as rather dull not terribly bright or anyone to remember at all in other circumstances. Audrey hides her head in her dreams. Pretends that if she flushes the contact lens down the toilet, that this eye doctor will cease to exist.There is a funny altogether true discussion between Audrey and her parents during "Break the Bank" on TV, about God and morality and why was He always wanting parents to kill their children to prove how big a deal He is. There is also one of the wisest discussions of Joseph McCarthy that I've ever read or heard. Oddly it is this mad little man who, because he brings danger and pain to Brooklyn, to people Audrey's parents know and with whom she has connections, tosses her out into the real world regardless of the nestling her parents attempt with her.The female teacher who checks the girls' breast sizes, to ostensibly determine if they are wearing bras before their time is so frightening and maddening and sad. Audrey remembers this and asks herself why she agreed to let the teacher do this to her in such a humiliating way or to do it to her at all. There is trust. People are older and taller than she and the other girls. So what can they do but obey? Someting of this order in its own way happened to me, involving someone in a position of power. I endured it. Did as told. It broke me for a long time. It is indeed perplexing. Why? Audrey asks. And there seems to be no answer.The words are lyrical. The snow fall Audrey hides in and never wants to come out of, into such a maddening world in which her body is not hers but an object of some one else's sad lust--this snow passage is so magnificent, so perfect, that it is a miracle and deserves to be shouted to the world so it would pay attention.An eye that does not see what it should, but is always rearranging, always a dream show, always showing something to her brain no one else can

I loved Leaving Brooklyn, and I think I, like the main character Audrey, am still trying to get free even though I have never been there. Brooklyn is that safe and settled fantasy we were taught to believe in as children and cling to, beyond reason, as adults. Audrey is an outrageous character--ambitious and calculated--fully believable as a fifteen year old. I relate to her and the author's astonishing honesty. Her ability to tell the story of Audrey's thought processes without flinching knocked me down. Such a story! Audrey as narrator is looking back to find herself in the teenager she once was by telling the story of what happened, of what, even then, was a bi-ocular vision of herself and her world, not in the sense of those two views overlapping and creating a single, three dimensional view, but by their failure to merge, and instead their capacity for allowing her to see two worlds about her, the one crisp, perfectly in focus, and the other colorful and blurred and somehow more accurate. It is a very intriguing use of a metaphorical device (the character's right eye, a wandering eye, perhaps damaged at birth, wanders into truth, seeing another real world). Audrey struggles to see what is happening. For example, she cannot believe in the time of McCarthy that such political turmoil can be occuring in Brooklyn. Surely nothing so interesting and controversial, nothing so important could be happening in reliable, predictable, "settled" Brooklyn. By the end of the book Audrey has discovered all sorts of secrets--truths which seemed secret from her as a child, including blacklisted neighbors. In the process, she has altered the truth of her own memories. By telling the story she has created a new story, unlike the one she had before it was told. "...it does not fit the girl I think I was, or the girl I am attempting to reconstitute in the telling, who is perhaps turning out to be not the girl I really was" (45). This is a grown-up look back at childhood,! at the chicken flicker and the teacher who demanded proof girls were not wearing falsies to class, of secret clubs and childhood crushes, of seduction and teenage sexuality. Scary, but wonderful stuff.