Lazar, David. The Body of Brooklyn. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. 180 pp. Jennifer Roberts
aegis 2006 104 roberts
With obvious homage to Montaigne, Orwell, and Hazlitt, writer David Lazar brings the formal essay back to contemporary readers. Lazar’s The Body of Brooklyn is a compilation of personal essays, a series of witty, personal, and digressive self-studies of Lazar’s youth in Brooklyn during the 60s and 70s. The reader is treated to everything from juicy tidbits of sexual awakening to the uncomfortable and wrenching trials of being an overweight child, to confessions so raw and honest that one would think them too embarrassing to admit. The title essay of Lazar’s book deals directly with the body and its betrayals. Lazar states that he was husky—a word used to soften the reality of his obesity—and “weaned absurdly late,” not being fully potty trained until six (27-28). Once Lazar lost weight, the troubles with his body did not cease, but only shift into a disloyalty of another shape. Lazar explains his complicated relationship to his body as, “being possessed by aliens, who had stepped in to fill the vacuum left by my not-so-dear departed fat cells” (27), and lamenting that “[y]ears of therapy, years of thinness, years of spending time, romantically or sexually, with highly attractive women, have had, in some ways, little effect on my body’s mind” (29). Lazar’s confessions are not tempered but intensified by his skillful writing techniques. Through dense sentences and prolonged reflections, Lazar brings the reader on a journey into his memory as he explores the mind’s ever-confusing remembrances and attempts to make some sense out of his life. Lazar’s philosophy that sentences should be structured with the “density of poetry” is evident and consistent throughout each essay. In one of his essays, “Movies Are A Mother To Me,” Lazar relies on the metaphor to pull the reader into a dramatic and poetic remembrance of his mother: We returned from the hardware store and the air was as heavy as it gets—when it seems one is carrying it place to place only to lay it on top of another heavy layer of air that one must carry someplace else, as though we were trying to build castles in the air with cinder blocks or were the grain to the air’s millstone…[t]he sky flashed on the dark day as if a cosmic light switch were clicking on and off, and the rain came down in sheets for five minutes. (86). Lazar’s unhurried sentences require the reader to slow down, to savor each word for its bitter or its sweet fullness. Coupled with Lazar’s love for dense sentences is his apparent love of digression. At times Lazar trumpets his digression, and at other times the reader finds herself deeply immersed in new territory before even realizing it. One such essay, “Further Father: Remembering John Waterman,” deals with Lazar’s relationship to his father by examining one of
