There goes the neighborhood
Naima Coster’s “Halsey Street” is a consistently surprising first novel — surprising in its stylistic assuredness, in its moral complexity and in its emotional power.
It didn’t have to be so. After all, the novel’s elevator-pitch summary — a young black artist who doesn’t make art moves back home to a gentrifying Brooklyn to care for her failing father — sounds predictable, exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a writer with Coster’s bio (raised in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, MFA from Columbia) to write.
Indeed, I suspected that I knew where things were headed from the get-go. Our main character, Penelope, would meet some terrible gentrifiers; she’d gradually get back into art; she’d slowly reintegrate into the Bedford-Stuyvesant community; and all would end happily — or, at least as happily as a novel that takes on such subjects (race, the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism) can end.
And many of these plot elements in fact do appear in “Halsey Street.” Penelope does meet some terrible gentrifiers, and she does come to a rapprochement with her old neighborhood — the “mix of run-down apartment buildings with eroding fire escapes, and regal brownstones clustered in blocks of colors” she had fled for Pittsburgh before the novel’s opening. “Halsey Street” even ends, just as I anticipated, with Penelope painting a new work whose formal freedom, “hurried and loose and aglow,” matches our heroine’s own journey away from emotional crampedness to a new lightness of being.
So, if this is all so expected, what makes the novel so successful? In a work of literary realism like “Halsey Street,” it’s not so much novelty of conception as skill of execution that matters, and throughout Coster’s elegant writing lends even the expected elements interest and significance. Penelope is a deeply, complicatedly imagined character: sexy and smart, sometimes generous and sometimes mean, confident in her eroticism (“She usually picked men based on how smitten by her they seemed ... whether she thought they would want her to take command in bed”) yet prone to self-sabotage. All of which is to say, Penelope is exactly the kind of character you want to spend time with.
But where “Halsey Street” most impresses is in its sharp and sophisticated moral sense. Take the issue of gentrification. In lesser hands, this could become — in many works of contemporary literary fiction, does become — ham-fisted or preachy. Coster’s treatment, though, is always gracefully done. We don’t get a fictional “take” on gentrification. Rather, we get a story that makes the phenomenon meaningful through its narrative integration.
At one point, for instance, Penelope meets Marty, a figure who seems straight out of gentrifying central casting. A “white man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans,” he speaks as those who want to posh things up always do: “There’s no telling what this neighborhood could become — a new Chelsea, an East Village, an Upper West Side. Right now, anything is possible. This neighborhood is a blank canvas.”
That last phrase, “a blank canvas,” is where Coster makes things interesting. It’s the verbal equivalent of the literal erasure that is happening on many street blocks in Brooklyn. Penelope’s father, Ralph, largely gave up on life after the world gave up on him — or, at least, on his Bed-Stuy record shop. Once celebrated as a site of black cultural pride, Grand Records is now Sprout, a “small upscale supermarket, with aisles of canned food and broth in boxes” whose owners had “painted over the exterior so that it was lime green now.”
The details, like the “broth in boxes,” are exactly right, and the lime green paint job quietly connects to Marty’s “blank canvas” comment, to Penelope’s artistic interests, even to Ralph’s similar attempts to cleanly paint over a messy past.
Ralph’s obsessive re-narrating of how he and his community have been betrayed ignores crucial facts; as Penelope admits, “We had trouble with the store long before those Seattle hippies priced us out.” It also ignores the complexities of gentrification: “Every block in Bed-Stuy was its own universe, the changes coming at a distinct pace on every street, but Ralph didn’t see the difference . ... For him, if the shop was over, the neighborhood was, too.”
This self-centeredness ironically resembles the self-centeredness of the gentrifiers, who imagine that what is good for them must be good for all. Neither gentrifier nor gentrified has a monopoly on moral righteousness in “Halsey Street.”
There’s much else to admire in this first novel, including Penelope’s mother, Mirella, whose story — she moves back to the Dominican Republic after Ralph’s injury — alternates with Penelope’s. For both mother and daughter, an easy narrative (the past and its pains can be escaped) gives way to a more fraught one.
“Halsey Street” regularly rejects simplicity for complexity. Like Woolf said of “Middlemarch,” this is a novel written for grown-up people — the most surprising and satisfying element in a continually surprising and satisfying debut.