The 10 Most Classic Brooklyn Novels
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
The 90-year-old Fox might be best remembered for her Newbery-winning books for young readers if it weren’t for this gem, the first Brooklyn gentrification novel, about a couple living in a brownstone in a shady part of Brooklyn (Boerum Hill). Essentially, it’s about a woman who gets bit by a stray cat and spends the rest of the book worrying that she has rabies, a subtle and clever metaphor about privilege, guilt, and urban life in the second half of the 20th century. “When we moved to Brooklyn,” she told the Times last year, “I witnessed an accident: A Puerto Rican boy had been riding in the back of a glass truck and a piece of glass fell on him and killed him. I went to the funeral. I thought about how progress takes victims, always. The glass was being put into a middle-class house. Privilege unconsciously causes the harm of others.”
