Jacqueline Woodson’s Adult Novel Captures 1970s Brooklyn (original) (raw)
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Fiction
Jacqueline WoodsonCredit...Juna F. Nagle
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- Aug. 18, 2016
ANOTHER BROOKLYN
By Jacqueline Woodson
175 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $22.99.
“This is memory” is the refrain of “Another Brooklyn,” Jacqueline Woodson’s haunting new novel. Woodson, the recipient of four Newbery Honor awards, has written her first adult novel in 20 years, returning to the Brooklyn setting of “Autobiography of a Family Photo” (1995) and her recent award-winning memoir, “Brown Girl Dreaming.” These works form a triptych of bildungsromans taking place in the author’s hometown and tracking her generation’s coming to adulthood. But in “Another Brooklyn,” the subject isn’t as much girlhood, as the haunting half-life of its memory.
August, an Ivy-educated anthropologist, returns home for the funeral of her father. Her scholarly work centers on burial rituals around the world, an attempt to unravel the mystery and pain of loss. Mourning threads through this elegiac tale. August’s Brooklyn story begins 20 years earlier, in 1973, when she moves to the borough following the death of her mother.
Eleven years old and deep in denial about her mother’s fate, August found comfort and acceptance with a clique of girls whose lives wound around one another’s in a series of complex knots. “Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.”
That word, “beautiful,” appears in the text many, many times — to describe August’s father, the drug addict next door, lost mothers, random strangers and of course, one of the girls. This insistence is willful, a declaration that despite the blight of the 1970s, the children playing with hypodermic needles like toys, the menace of Child Protective Services and the ever-present threat of pregnancy and sexual abuse, there was beauty, even amazing beauty; the repeated word becoming a defiant, poetic incantation.
The late 1960s and 1970s are a turbulent period in American history, and the girls’ lives intersect with a range of national and international horrors. The starving children of Biafra, the Son of Sam murders, the great blackout of 1977, all are the setting against which the girls come of age. And the Vietnam War and its domestic reverberations loom large. The battlefield death of her Uncle Clyde hurled her mother into madness. Former vets, hooked on heroin, nod off in corners. August’s upstanding and responsible father returns from the war with only eight fingers, a reminder that even if a man comes home alive and sane, he is not whole.
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