Jonathan Lethem on Brooklyn. Through British Eyes.

Motherless Brooklyn Author Jonathan Lethem gave an interview to the Observer (a British paper), on subjects ranging from Manhattan to writing to Dean Street. I must confess that I've always found Mr. Lethem a bit whiny, and it is hard to find a hipster who does not enjoy his work, but it's interesting to read how another culture gets it information about Brooklyn. The article does also do some serious journalist felating of Mr. Lethem.

Some highlights:

"This whole neighbourhood has become centred on the kind of middle-class families that were just one very small minority element then,"

"The dirty word hovering over all this is gentrification – "a Nixon word", as his parents saw it. The mother in Fortress of Solitude teaches her son to be proud of calling the neighbourhood Gowanus, rather than the nearby, more chi-chi Boerum Hill"

"As a teenager, Lethem left. He went to Bennington College in Vermont"

And my favorite:

"I didn't set out to write a great Brooklyn novel, or a Brooklyn novel at all. I set out to write the great novel of Dean Street between Bond and Nevins, on a certain summer's day in 1972."

via Curbed.