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Summary
Summary
"Platzer's take on race, religion, class, and politics--all the subjects you're not supposed to discuss--is sure to get people talking." -- Vanity Fair
Do the Right Thing meets The Bonfire of the Vanities , in this "thrilling debut novel about marriage, gentrification, parenthood, race, and the dangerous bargains we make with ourselves" (Ann Packer, New York Times bestselling author) set over the course of one cataclysmic day when riots erupt in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.
Aaron, a disgraced rabbi turned Wall Street banker, and Amelia, his journalist girlfriend, live with their newborn in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the most dynamic and historically volatile neighborhoods in New York City. The infusion of upwardly mobile professionals into Bed-Stuy's historic brownstones belies the tension simmering on the streets below. But after a cop shoots a boy in a nearby park, conflict escalates to rioting--with Aaron and his family at its center.
Pulled into the riot's vortex are Antoinette, devout nanny to Aaron and Amelia's son; Jupiter, the single father who lives on their block with his son, Derek; Daniel, Aaron's unhinged tenant in their basement unit; and Sara, a smart local girl, broiling with confusion and rage. As the day unfolds, these diverse characters are forced to reckon with who they are and what truly matters to them.
With "the mordant wit of Franzen, the dazzling smarts of Roth, and the compassion of Tolstoy" (Rafael Yglesias, author of A Happy Marriage ), Platzer conjures a sharp-eyed, fast-paced, and empathetically rendered narrative about a changing neighborhood and its residents, as they struggle to raise children, establish careers, and find love, fulfillment, and meaning. Bed-Stuy Is Burning offers a window into an array of complex lives and deftly wrestles with the most pressing issues of our time with unflinching focus, wisdom, and hope.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Platzer's earnest and well-meaning, if superficial, debut novel centers on a single day of unrest in Brooklyn's rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvestant neighborhood. Aaron, a former rabbi forced to abandon his synagogue in the wake of a loss of faith and (more critically) an ethical misstep, his girlfriend Amelia, and their infant son are among the vanguard of wealthy young white families moving into this historically black, architecturally rich neighborhood. Days after a police shooting of a preteen boy, racial tensions come to a head, and Aaron and Amelia find themselves and their historic brownstone in the crosshairs of their neighbors' previously restrained resentments. The perspectives of secondary characters-including Aaron's antisocial white tenant, their black nanny, the N.Y.C. police commissioner, and others-are ostensibly included to provide a diversity of voices. In reality, however, these multiple perspectives primarily serve to showcase the narrative's lack of depth and failure to engage with social issues and urban complexity on anything more than a surface level. Perhaps readers largely unaware of discriminatory policing, economic injustice, or economic displacement will find the narrative enlightening, but those hoping for the novel to really grapple with these issues will be largely disappointed, as it descends into melodrama instead. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The city is burning indeed in New Yorker contributor Platzer's debut novel, sometimes with fire and sometimes with much-compounded shame.Aaron was once a rabbi, at least until he got caught with his hand in the synagogue's bank account, desperately trying to settle a gambling debt that involved organized crime, death threats, and suchlike mishegoss. Now, supposedly on the straight and narrow, though filled with epic doubts"Belief had never been at the core of his rabbinical path," Platzer writes, though Aaron is fully certain of an inner rottenness that has kept God from stepping in on his behalfhe is the father of a baby son born to his girlfriend, Amelia, who writes service journalism pieces well below her capabilities. As the book opens, Aaron, now an investment banker, is contemplating just how fortunate he is to have found his way to this placethis place in life, that is, but also Bed-Stuy, in a beautiful home with nice neighbors. Others are not so lucky: a 12-year-old African-American boy is slain by a police officer in a nearby park, an event all too close to real life for so many citizens of Brooklyn and other cities. As protests and upheaval shake the streets, Amelia is called down for white privilege, Aaron gets caught up between cops and kids, and their carefully reconstructed life threatens to fall apart. Platzer is very good at doling out details of Aaron's tightly wound character and Amelia's reciprocal doubts, finding redemptions for both that, though not unlikely, do have a certain deus ex machina feel, given the distances each has to travel. In a story tinged with biblical allegory, Platzer also serves up some delicious set pieces for his supporting players. One of the best of them involves a young black woman recently escaped from arrest at an anti-police demonstration and wandering from store to store in the neighborhood trying to cash an improbably large check that she's come into. (And therein hangs a tale.) She can't, less because of the broken handcuffs trailing from her wrists than because she doesn't have proper ID. Notes a bemused clerk, "And they tell me gentrification isn't changing the neighborhood!" Expertly paced, eminently readable, and a promising start. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A gamble once cost Aaron his life as a rabbi, but without his penchant for risk taking, he wouldn't now be a successful financial manager and the new owner of a vintage brownstone on the most beautiful block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Platzer's debut takes place mostly over the course of a single day, on Rosh Hashanah, following a weekend when a 12-year-old, unarmed and black, was shot 10 times and killed by police. When Aaron heads to the subway on Monday morning, local teenagers are forcing their own arrests by jumping turnstiles in protest of the senseless killing. Demonstrations remain peaceable for only so long before violence threatens, cops react, and the angry crowd moves en masse, with Aaron and his girlfriend Amelia's brownstone, a symbol of the neighborhood's gentrification, as their first stop. Platzer, a writer and educator who lives in Bed-Stuy, is aiming high here, addressing race-related violence, the Black Lives Matter movement, gentrification, and other volatile topics. He succeeds in presenting multiple perspectives of dramatic yet familiar situations.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN AN OP-ED LAST YEAR for The New York Times, the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge posed the question: "Should everyone get to create the art they feel called to make?" This was written in response to the novelist Lionel Shriver's keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival, in which she argued that charges of cultural appropriation were censorious and limiting to a writer's imagination. Greenidge identified the problem with this line of thinking: It is mostly deployed as a request to be inoculated from criticism, while also failing to consider the power dynamics of a society invested in the dominance of whiteness. The question is not whether white artists can write nonwhite characters, but can they do so with the kind of empathy that comes only from reckoning with their own investment in whiteness? "It can be really, really, hard to come up against your own blindness, when as a writer, you are supposed to be a great observer," Greenidge goes on to say. "It can be terrifying to come to the realization that it is totally possible to write into this blind spot for years. Whole books, in fact whole genres of fiction, make their home in this blind spot." Unfortunately, "Bed-Stuy Is Burning," a debut novel by Brian Platzer, makes its home in that blind spot, even if its author was trying to do otherwise. The story is ostensibly about the relationship between Aaron, an ex-rabbi turned investment manager with a gambling addiction and a diminished faith in the God he once served, and his girlfriend, Amelia, a freelance journalist and new mother who loves Aaron but has reservations about marrying him. This alone could make for a promising, if familiar, narrative. But Platzer has much grander aspirations. Aaron and Amelia have recently purchased a home in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford- Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, a battleground in gentrification. Along with one of their tenants, they are the only white people on their block and are mostly welcomed by their new neighbors, until the police shoot and kill a 12-year-old black child, and the longtime residents rise up in rebellion. To say that "Bed-Stuy Is Burning" is ambitious would be like saying Taylor Swiftis popular. Platzer takes on topics as big as God, money, parenthood, marriage, gentrification and police violence. But this level of ambition can leave a story unfocused, or worse, focused in the wrong direction. The least interesting characters in any story about gentrification are the gentrifiers, yet they are the ones we spend the most time getting to know. Aaron's gambling addiction takes up whole chapters, while Amelia's dismay at having to write a profile of Jonah Hill receives a thorough unpacking. The history of their romance stretches across the book, while the incident that sparks the novel's central conflict is covered in a few pages. What black characters we do encounter never fully emerge past their plainly drawn biographical sketches. One of these characters is revealed to us as someone who is abusive toward her girlfriend and, later, as an extortionist. More care seems to be given to humanizing a fictionalized version of the former New York police commissioner William Bratton than to some of the black characters who die from acts of violence that go unexplained. The descriptions of nonwhite characters range from lazy and stereotypical ("She was Asian and very skinny") to outright offensive ("The man was Indian. Dot not feather," the extortionist notes). Worse than that is how many characters go without description. These are the black residents of Bed-Stuy, who are in mourning after losing one of their children to police violence. They are given sparse lines of dialogue and even sparser personalities - many of them don't even warrant names. What we know of their stories is that the author has a passing interest in some issues that affect them. By writing such flat characters, when he deigns to write them at all, Platzer turns them into the very thing that Aaron - in a heroic speech befitting a white savior, delivered on the front steps of his milliondollar brownstone - urges them not to become: a mob with no sense of individuality. Drawing from his study of the Torah, Aaron says to the rioting mass of black people gathered in front of his home (one of whom has a gun trained on him for what seems to be no other reason than he has a gun in his possession): "Thus far, you've been Abraham, saying, 'Look at me. Look at my cousins.' You've brought attention to the right grievances, and New York - the United States and the world - will take notice. Things will change now. Police will think twice before shooting. But don't become the mob. ... Don't go too far and go from the hero of this story to its villain." But heroes are understood through their goodness, and up until this point, we haven't been given any sense of the people in this crowd outside of their violent actions. The black people in the crowd whose names we never learn, whose stories are withheld from us, have exhibited goodness only by sparing Aaron's and Amelia's lives. And their motivations for the uprising are understood only through the thoughts of their white interlocutors. Even as Platzer purports to tell a story about political issues in which the most damning consequences come down on nonwhite people, he shows over and over again that he is deeply invested in whiteness and white fragility. The most generous reading of "Bed-Stuy Is Burning" takes its inadequate interest in its black characters as a larger comment on the way these kinds of stories typically sideline black people's narratives. But the earnestness with which the white characters are portrayed frustrates that generosity. If Platzer had devoted half the pages spent on Aaron's inner turmoil over his gambling addiction to the inner dialogue of the young black man who inexplicably assaults a police officer, or to the one who kills another black man, "Bed-Stuy Is Burning" could have made a credible case for white artists mining black life for moving stories. Instead, this is ultimately a novel about black people happening to white people. MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH is the author of "Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education."
Library Journal Review
DEBUT From the front lines of gentrification, income disparity, and racial tension in New York City comes this dramatic first novel that imagines a riot and its aftermath told by those involved on all sides. Aaron is a former rabbi and now successful Wall Street trader who owns a mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with Amelia, a writer, and their infant son. A neighborhood youth has recently been killed by police, tensions are escalating, and when more young people are arrested, a mob forms and targets the nicest houses that are owned by white outsiders, ending up at Aaron's place while he is not there. Several people are shot, and the mob is attacking the house as Amelia and -Antoinette, their nanny, are locked inside, incommunicado. Multiple story threads converge as a standoff takes place on Aaron's front porch. VERDICT The author effectively creates a tense, realistic situation, and although some of the multiple narrators are occasionally long-winded, the prose is energetic, and Platzer is obviously committed to exploring these contemporary urban issues.-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.