5 minute read
The Body of Brooklyn Jennifer Roberts
aegis 2006
roberts
Lazar, David. The Body of Brooklyn. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. 180 pp. Jennifer 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
his father’s pseudonyms, John Waterman. Waterman was Protestant persona developed for business purposes. Lazar writes:
My father particularly liked invoking some variant of the flat Mid-western or generically Southern accent for Waterman…As I grew older, I would sometimes wince at what seemd so accentually stereotypical as to be unbelievable. And I wondered at my father’s inner workings, what the accent internally, when he invoked this floating persona and the voices that accompanied it. (74)
The reader wonders, too, about the importance of the pseudonym, what it means for a Jew to create a perceived banal, non-ethnic persona to conduct business, what it means for a father and son. But, we have to wait as Lazar sprinkles the essay with digressions into reflections on his grandmother, his Brooklyn accent, his multi-ethnic neighborhood where Protestants were considered “freaky,” before tying it all back to John Waterman. Though there are times when the digressive technique lingers too long, and the reader starts to wonder if she were reading a new essay, for the most part, Lazar executes digression expertly, bringing the reader through the muckiness of memory and back to where she started with new insight into the author and his subject. I liken the need for digression to the embracing of the dust that spots our memory. Digression is needed to work around the dusty memories, see through them. When asked about the pictures in his photographic essay “Some Images: Toward a Photographic Mishnah” that ends The Body of Brooklyn, Lazar announced that he doesn’t mind dust and particles spotting old photographs. “Dust represents time.” Dust is memory. Digression is the attempt to understand memory. Readers beware: for those who wish to read a straightforward, point-A-to-point-B story, The Body of Brooklyn could prove frustrating. Density, and a style that can languish in digression for a lengthy period of time may not be for everyone. One reader of The Body of Brooklyn announced that Lazar’s book was one of the first that she could not read while watching television, though I imagine Lazar would find the comment a compliment; Lazar’s writing demands one’s full attention as well as an encyclopedia, dictionary, and a classic movie guide. Lazar is a smart read. That said, his love of movies permeates each essay. With references to Orson Welles, Arabian Nights, The Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, George Maharis of Route 66, and Jean Hagen from Singing in the Rain, all contained in one essay, one begins to think she has missed out on important cultural experiences. The reader can either leave drained and overwhelmed or ambitious and head out to the local video store for the complete collection of classics beginning with Horsefeathers. Lest you think that Lazar takes himself too seriously, there is certainly enough cheekiness and irony, a distinct New York Jewish humor that prevails throughout each essay. As he explains in the introduction, “A book of autobiographical essays without irony is like a swimmer without sun block. Too much uninhibited exposure” (xii). Lazar is unafraid to expose us to relived embarrassments, analyzed relationships, and a life full of ruthless irony. Mostly, Lazar is unafraid to challenge his reader, urging her to live vicariously through his reflections, laugh at his shtick, and reach for her compilation of reference books. The Body of Brooklyn is a book meant to be read and reread with patience.
