Leaving Brooklyn

April 1, 1989
Not as complex or inventive as Disturbances in the Field , this slim, nostalgic novel reincarnates, from a contemporary adult narrator's perspective, post-WW II Brooklyn, where conformity, sensible relationships and coherence wage an age-old battle against passion and creativity. Legally blind in one eye, 15-year-old Audrey fancies that her wandering eye, ``restless, bored with the banality of what is presented . . . escapes to the private darkness beneath the lid, with the wild dancing colors.'' Like Audrey, Schwartz possesses a secret vision that allows her to pursue a ``rampant longing to peer beneath the surfaces of things'' and locate the mythology at the core of the quotidian. These trademark talents, revealed through lyric, silver-tongued prose, compensate here for the ubiquitous eye analogies, wobbly plot contrivances (contact-lens novice Audrey admits ``a horror of inserting foreign objects into my body'' and several pages later plunges into a liaison with ``the eye doctor'') and a device--more artificial appendage than daring technique--that self-consciously merges memory and revision, fiction and autobiography. Author tour.

September 1, 2007
Schwartz's 1989 coming-of-age novel snagged both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. For protagonist Audrey, her hometown of Brooklyn, NY, represents the suppressed world of her parents and her 1950s childhood. Though she was born with an eye impairment, it is not until she finally travels across the bridge to Manhattan to see a specialist that she truly grows up and is able to shuck off her past. Substitute any other outlying region of any other big city, and the story still works.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.