Go East, Young Writer

NEW YORK —  Open a new novel by an up-and-coming American writer these days and you may well find a photo of an attractive thirtysomething on the inside flap, accompanied by a thumbnail bio that goes something like this: So-and-so went to this writing colony, won that prize, published a story in the New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn. Not Los Angeles, not Boston, not Iowa and certainly not Manhattan. Brooklyn.

With its weather-aged Victorian brownstones and shady, tree-lined streets, Brooklyn has had its smattering of literary history, attracting the likes of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Norman Mailer and, more recently, Paul Auster.

But over the last few years, Brooklyn has become a teeming mecca for emerging writers, leaving the traditional ink-stained precincts of Manhattan--the Village and the Upper West Side--to gather dust like remaindered overstock. Manhattan, of course, still has its George Plimptons and remains the center of the publishing universe. But, more and more, those literary coming-out parties thrown by the Paris Review and Random House are being thrown for writers, who, at the end of the night, climb into taxis heading for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The borough--which warily incorporated with its noisy neighbor, Manhattan, in 1898--is a huge metropolis in itself. But Brooklyn’s writerly population is clustered in a relatively compact patchwork of neighborhoods offering the quiet comforts of exile while being a reassuring 15-minute subway ride from the big city. In the loosely adjoining districts of Park Slope, Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill, a surprising percentage of America’s notable younger writers--including Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Ames, Bliss Broyard, Maud Casey, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem and Myla Goldberg, to name a few--have settled down to work, procrastinate, raise families, and, as Brooklynites tend to do, talk about Brooklyn.

“I really love living here, and I’d rather live here than other places,” said Susan Choi, author of the widely praised 1998 novel “The Foreign Student,” inspired by her father’s experience of emigrating from Korea to the Deep South in the 1950s. Choi made the leap to Brooklyn three years ago, moving to traditionally Italian Carroll Gardens from what she calls the “non-neighborhood” of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights.

With Manhattan becoming increasingly overrun with megastores, Choi found in Brooklyn an atmosphere more like old New York than Manhattan itself. “There’s a Death of the Neighborhood thing going on in Manhattan,” Choi explains. “Everything there now seems mass-produced and glossy, like something you could find at a shopping mall. There’s no indigenous character anymore.”

And with more than a million people crowding into Manhattan’s 22-odd square miles, that glossy feel is getting pricey. The average one-bedroom in core Manhattan (south of Harlem) rents for about $1,970. A similar place in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill would go for about $1,250. With about 2.3 million people spread out over 72 square miles, Brooklyn has a little more room for neighborhoods to develop their own charm.

Upon moving to Carroll Gardens, Choi encountered a vibrant neighborhood full of venerable family-owned butcher shops, bakeries and cafes. She also found that her Manhattan friends were suddenly all clamoring to visit--or even to follow her lead and hunt down a spacious, cheap apartment with a garden, something that simply doesn’t exist anymore across the river. “It’s Brooklyn envy,” Choi muses. “When I lived in Manhattan, I scorned people who lived in Brooklyn and never left the borough. Now I’m one of them.”

Is it simply economics and the desire for elbow room that drives writers across the bridges into Brooklyn? David Knowles thinks so. Knowles is the author, most recently, of “The Third Eye,” a playful yet troubling novel about a guy who leases a SoHo apartment so he can spy on an unsuspecting female subletter. These days, people are known to sell their SoHo lofts and relocate to Boerum Hill, not far from where Knowles and his wife bought their apartment in a converted Brooklyn Law School building two years ago.

“I moved to Brooklyn for financial reasons,” Knowles admits, mentioning his 2-year-old son, Eli. Even so, Knowles suggests that the preponderance of writers in Brooklyn has created something of a literary atmosphere--if not quite a community--that goes beyond cheaper rents. “My favorite experiences with fellow Brooklyn authors are seeing the ways in which we all procrastinate: How we hang out and drink coffee when we should be writing, or take aimless walks along Smith Street.”

Brooklyn is also experiencing an influx of young artists. The Williamsburg and Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhoods have become growing bohemian enclaves.

But Smith Street, Boerum Hill’s revivified Main Street, is ground zero in the elevation of Brooklyn from nice, mellow place to live to urban destination. The treeless, ugly-duckling street was once home to sleepy emporiums selling religious icons, and Dominican social clubs where elderly men played pool and dominoes. Then, in 1996, a shop called Astro Turf opened here, selling mid-century kitsch furniture to the recent arrivals: young, Ivy-educated new-media and publishing types, and, along with them, fiction writers fleeing Manhattan.

Gentrification Makes Locals Queasy

In the ensuing five years, Smith Street has exploded with new businesses. There’s now a bona fide Herman Miller dealer not far from Astro Turf selling high-end Eames furniture; a thriving crop of French bistros, Asian-fusion joints, and sushi bars receiving regular coverage in the New York Times Dining In Dining Out section; and a popular coffeehouse called Halcyon where deejays spin throbbing electronica, and local writers give readings.

The recent wave of gentrification and entrepreneurship makes some of the locals queasy. But Lethem, whose 1999 novel “Motherless Brooklyn” is, in some ways, a love letter to Boerum Hill, waves them off. Unlike most of the writers who live here, Lethem is actually from the ‘hood. He grew up on Dean Street and, after time away at college and in San Francisco, now makes his home three blocks from the townhouse where he spent his childhood.

For Lethem, a National Book Critics Circle Awards winner, the Smith Street boom is nothing new. “People bemoaning gentrification in the narrow window of the last few years--I just want to laugh them into silence,” he said. “I remember when this neighborhood was Puerto Rican and black. The underpinnings of these changes go back to the 1970s.” Lethem adds that the multicultural legacy of Boerum Hill, which also saw a flourishing of gay and hippie settlements in the ‘60s and ‘70s, is, sadly, all but invisible to newcomers.

Ironically, however, some of them are lured to the area by Lethem’s writing. Fans of “Motherless Brooklyn” have been known to get off the F train on Smith Street in order to take a gander at Ziad’s, a nondescript deli that figures in the book.

Despite the gentrification debate, for Lethem, “Brooklyn is the most exciting part of New York City right now.” Although he can’t think of a single younger writer he knows in Manhattan, he finds it odd to consider the concept of a community of Brooklyn writers because, like the new restaurants along Smith Street, there’s just too many of them. “Maybe if there were only 10--but it’s more like 50.”

Several of those 50 or so have found their digs with the help of Allan Gerovitz, a writer-friendly apartment agent at Marilyn A. Donohue Real Estate in Cobble Hill. “I just love the creativity it brings to the neighborhood,” Gerovitz said of the influx of writers. “Writers need to have a peaceful place to work, and that’s where I come in--to give them a place to think.”

Writing Instead of ‘Doing the Scene’

Gerovitz is something of a rare bloom, a savvy real estate agent who talks like a literary critic, showing genuine passion for the work of his clients, including Choi and Rick Moody, author of “The Ice Storm.” Gerovitz even keeps a prized letter from Moody on the wall of his office.

While he insists that Brooklyn with its relative quietude is perfect for writers, he also notes that a “loss of innocence” has accompanied rising rents, a change in spirit that he compares to the upper-middle-class crisis of the soul depicted in “The Ice Storm.” For his part, Moody left Brooklyn in 1998 for remote Fishers Island, N.Y., citing the increasing distractions of the borough and New York, in general.

But writers such as Jenny Offill still cling to the idea that Brooklyn offers a serene environment for their work. According to Offill, whose first novel, “Last Things,” was nominated for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize in 2000, “People who live in Brooklyn live here because they want to get their work done instead of spending all their time doing the scene.” For her, Brooklyn offers a fellowship of writers--she cites her parties at the spacious apartment she rents above Gerovitz’s office, her stint at the local bookstore, and Lethem’s gatherings for writers at the nearby Brooklyn Inn bar--and an important writerly resource: solitude.

“When I lived in the East Village,” Offill recalls, “it was so easy to get distracted. Out here, there’s enough to do, but it’s not overwhelming. I’m much happier coming home here.”

Similarly, Lahiri, who won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her debut story collection, “The Interpreter of Maladies,” escaped to Park Slope from a noisy, cramped East Village apartment last September with her husband, an editor at Time magazine. She thinks it’s possible for Brooklyn to maintain its charm without being overrun: “So many people do want to live here, but it’s always going to be less than the number of people who want to live in Manhattan.”

Settling into an apartment looking onto the green oasis of Prospect Park, Lahiri began to find a connection between the laid-back pace of Brooklyn and the romantic exile she experienced at the Work Center writing colony in Provincetown, Mass., on the tip of Cape Cod.

As she takes a break from working on her first novel, Lahiri makes Brooklyn sound like a honeymoon: “When I first moved out here, I felt like I was in love. I had that falling-in-love feeling you get when you’re so enchanted by where you live. That hadn’t happened to me, ever.”

For Lahiri, the minor deprivations of outer-borough life--no late-night restaurants, scant shopping--are more than made up for by a full-service neighborhood lending library, afternoon tea with writer friends such as Choi and chance encounters with local heroes such as Auster. But still, isn’t it really just about economics? “I can’t imagine moving back to Manhattan,” Lahiri said, “even if I had $5 million.”