"Sea Beach Line" by Ben Lerner, and Farmers' Gin
The book is about Brooklyn in a deep way that people outside might not appreciate. I’ve tried reading more renowned books that purport to be about ‘gentrified Brooklyn’ or something like that, but they tend to be very one-note and obvious. The bad guys are very clearly outlined as purely evil and the good guys are just noble victims of circumstances beyond their control. The authors write like they’re trying to appeal to a jury of social media activists, rather than telling a story with interesting characters.
Ben Lerner’s book Sea Beach Line is nothing like that. It’s about the issues of the haves and have nots of New York City, but the line between good and bad is blurred.
A young man, Izzy Edel, is looking for his father, an irascible outlaw who Izzy remembers fondly, although he seems to be the only one who feels that way. He holds the torch for his dad, firmly believing he is alive somewhere. This leads him to picking up the street vendor job his father left beyond, selling used books. One day he meets a young woman who ran away from a strict Hasidic family, and they fall for each other. In addition to having all the trappings of a noir, it also touches on Jewish mysticism, immigration, race, gender and more. But unlike the books that I don’t like (described above), Lerner’s novel hits on all those topics subtextually, letting the reader figure it out instead of blasting it across the page in neon lights.
I’ve talked a bit before about books that take place in New York and make me reminisce about my younger years bopping around the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Sea Beach Line did that for me, too, and in fact takes place right around the time I moved here, in 2004. I was on the subway to work a few months ago, when I noticed a landmark that to me symbolized my New York. It’s nothing particularly beautiful or noteworthy, but it stuck with me when I first saw it twenty years ago, and I cannot believe it is still there today.
When you’re on the Q, B or D trains, coming over the Manhattan Bridge, as you exit Chinatown and head out over the open waters of the East River, there’s a building with smashed out windows, little squares of broken glass, that have been filled with newspaper. I swear to you, it has looked the exact same twenty years ago as it does today. In those twenty years, how many buildings have been gut renovated, let alone demolished for luxury condos? But not this one. Someone has kept it the exact same way for decades.
What’s so romantic about a derelict building on Chinatown? Before I moved to the city, I helped a playwright commute from a train station in Connecticut to his class he was teaching at a university. He invited me to see a play he had written and directed in the city. It was a simple, one set play with only two actors, and it was very dark. The plot concerned a man and woman, in the throes of addiction, holed up in a Lower East Side tenement with newspaper curtains to keep out the light. Do you see where I’m going with this? The play was a gut punch. The characters were hardly heroes, the story was bleak and sad, but it was also poetic and beautiful. So when I was on the Manhattan Bridge soon after seeing the play, and I noticed that real life window, I imagined that characters like in the play lived there.
Lerner’s book makes even the darkest parts of living in the city seem beautiful in a roughewn way. It also deals with fathers and sons and grandfathers and granddaughters; generational guilt and trauma and memories. I don’t think my grandfather ever even visited New York City, but it made me think of him as well, because of the way it deals with immigrants’ experiences and what it’s like to be the child or even grandchild of someone who came here from abroad.
My grandfather had a place in New Hampshire that we would go to on summer weekends to swim in the lake and waterski. Even after he passed away, my family kept going up there. I brought friends up there, girlfriends; my wife has been there. Once my brothers and I had all moved out of state, though, my dad and aunt decided to sell it. It was the sensible thing to do, but it was very hard to say goodbye. It was hardly a fancy place. It’s what people like my childhood neighbor, a blue collar guy who worked the nightshift, would call a ‘camp’. My grandpa and grammy called it a cottage. There was no heat, and you couldn’t drink the water because it came undiluted straight from the lake where we drove motorboats in. I think what depressed me the most about leaving was looking through the closets and drawers and finding glass jars full of nails that my grandfather–who had died nearly 20 years earlier–had put there. His hands had touched them, and they hadn’t been moved for decades. Clothes that my grandmother had probably folded decades ago, but that we just never got around to throwing out. I remembered the last time my grandfather was able to visit the cottage, he couldn’t go out on the boat, so he stayed behind and took a nap on the porch. While we were on the boat, I had fun but I kept getting this terrible fear that when we came ashore, he would have passed away in his sleep. He was both living and dead for me while we were out on the lake. This had happened before, when he had first had his stroke a few years before, which had weakened him so badly. We were on a plane (from Alaska of all places… but that’s another story for another time), and I was sobbing in my seat because I knew he might be gone by the time we landed, but there was no way of knowing one way or another until we did.
The day we said goodbye to the cottage, I sat on my father’s lap and cried. I was in my early thirties, but I sat in his lap like a little boy and cried because this place would never be ours again, and it would never be the same.
Even when Lerner (or the playwright I talked about, for that matter) writes about the darkness and pain of living in the city, you can tell he also still loves it here. I think what disturbs me about people from outside asking if NYC is “safe” isn’t just the leering racism underneath the question but that it is so the opposite of what they think. Brooklyn is one place I feel especially safe. I feel like we are together in a bit of a bubble that shields us against a lot of the evil in the world. There’s suffering here too of course. I’m not saying there isn’t. But it’s also a very beautiful place that fosters community and friendship across race and class and gender. And I actually get nervous whenever I leave it.
We were out on Sunday for Father’s Day, but it was also Eid al Adha so there were a lot of Muslim people in our community that were celebrating. A man was handing out candy and balloons and he gave a balloon to Sophie. This Southeast Asian Muslim man gave a balloon to my little Jewish Armenian French Canadian daughter, because even though he must have known she didn’t celebrate, he recognized her as part of the community just as she did, of him.
This is Brooklyn. This is my home. This is where we belong.
This week I’m going to France! But for drinks I’m still on my martinis. I bought a brand called ‘Farmers’ which is supposedly super organic and everything. It makes a difference, though! With a little fancy vermouth, and mixed super super cold, it’s delicious. Highly recommend.