The Brooklyn Stories: A Rousing Collection From New York's Most Colorful Borough by Andrew Bernstein
By Dan Sullivan
New York: Hybrid Global Publishing, 2021.
325 pp. $18.99 (paperback)
The Brooklyn Stories by Andrew Bernstein is, as the subtitle proclaims, “A Rousing Collection from New York’s Most Colorful Borough.” Bernstein’s love of and familiarity with the neighborhoods where he grew up contribute to the realism and vibrancy of his writing, and the intriguing characters and fascinating situations demonstrate the broad scope of his imagination.
The lead story, “The Clock Strikes,” is about a pair of brilliant university professors, separated in age by a generation, who had collaborated on numerous writing projects––most recently, a grand-scale historical novel. The work was to be the magnum opus of the older professor’s celebrated academic career, but when the younger man’s fiancée abandons him for the older man, the collaboration comes to a screeching halt. The older man continues to work on the masterpiece alone, but when he learns that he is dying of cancer and realizes he can’t complete it, he appeals to the younger professor for help. He’s the only other man in the world who knows the subject well enough to complete it, but he refuses to help. He still treasures the years they “had worked together, creating independently, critiquing each other’s work. . . . And this dream we had shared––so integral to each it was impossible now to remember who had originally conceived it” (11–12). But, betrayed by his former fiancée and his treasured mentor who “stole” her, he still feels the infidelity like an open wound. He sees himself as a “victim for whom the depth of his passion measured the depth of the betrayer’s guilt” (12).
Everyone who knew how the men had worked together––everyone important in the younger professor’s life––urges him to resume the partnership. The magnum opus had been his dream, too, and it would be a boon to the younger man’s career. But can he forgive and forget? Should he? Can he find a way to do justice to himself, to the woman he still loves, and to the eminent colleague he both resents and esteems?
Such conflicts––involving the passionate pursuit of values––are common themes in Bernstein’s fiction. In “Life Struggle,” a young man strives to finish graduate school and hold onto the woman he loves, despite his beloved but overbearing mother’s rejection of her. In “Making the Grade,” a college professor deals with the anguish of having a secret affair with a student. If their secret became known to the dean, it would end his academic career, but if he defended himself by denying the truth, he would lose the respect of his adult daughter. The story “Paid in Full” features a lawyer who despises “every form of bully, thug, and victimizing creep” (183). He’s had to settle for a less-than-prosperous law practice while proudly building a reputation for defending only clients he genuinely believes to be innocent. When a goon he refuses to defend learns a damning secret and threatens blackmail, the lawyer is confronted with an agonizing conflict that could destroy his marriage as well as his professional reputation.
Conflicts of this type are what make a story, according to the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (one of Bernstein’s primary influences).
She held that plot is the most important element in good fiction and “Since a plot is the dramatization of goal-directed action, it has to be based on conflict; it may be one character’s inner conflict or a conflict of goals and values between two or more characters.”1 In The Art of Fiction, she describes plot as “a purposeful progression of events that must be logically connected, each being the outgrowth of the preceding and all leading up to a final climax.”2
Bernstein’s writing embodies these principles. His plots are well-integrated, and his characters are purposeful. Some are common men, some are unusually flamboyant, but whenever his protagonists face conflicts, they strive indefatigably to overcome them. Some of the conflicts he devises include physical dangers, but even then, it is his characters’ internal struggles––their clashes of personal moral values––that make the stories genuinely dramatic.
As one fiction commentator put it, readers
connect with stories because they dramatize things they care about: love, friendship, achievement, courage, heroism, intelligence, and so on.
Well-crafted works of fiction show us our abstract values in vivid color. They show us we aren’t alone in caring about the things that matter to us; that others see what we aspire to and admire it, too. They also offer new ideals to which we can aspire. This is at once comforting and empowering–– providing spiritual fuel, a vision to strive for, and heroes to emulate.3
Bernstein’s stories consistently deliver in this regard. His heroes are productive achievers courageously doing admirable things. His lovers love all-in, savoring each other’s bodies, work, lives, and aspirations. His plots unfold logically but often feature unpredictable twists that surprise the reader while remaining consistent with the characters and their motivations. His heroes and protagonists are drawn from a wide range of human possibilities: young men shooting hoops in city parks; an ex-Marine high-school teacher; a twelve-year-old Little-Leaguer with lofty ambitions; a brilliant college student balancing protecting her father’s health and helping a troubled friend; a heavyweight boxer with an outsized sense of justice and a closely guarded secret.
Bernstein’s villains are as imaginatively drawn as his heroes. Murderers, mobsters, psychological victimizers, and detestable thugs of all types, they are both believable and palpably evil. Even his incidental characters are so striking that they seldom leave the reader indifferent.
His descriptions are pleasurably appropriate to the character or scene. One can almost feel “the pitiless August sun that now deep-fried the Brooklyn streets to a sultry crisp,” or see “the old growth forest of skyscrapers composing lower Manhattan, blotting the sun but not assailing it, completing it rather, establishing the place in nature of those who built cities” (107–8). And readers can effortlessly picture the streetwise Brooklyn girl Bernstein describes as “dark-eyed, black-haired, pretty as a pin-up, but with a mouth like a sewer cleaner. She was five-foot-nothing and tough as yesterday’s steak” (193).
Though it rarely detracts from the stories, Bernstein occasionally overdoes dialogue or descriptions: “He pulled his hand from her touch, but, to him, it seemed to move in slow motion, as though languishing, creeping feebly through a jug of golden treacle,” for example, needlessly slows the plot (103). And similarly, a father encouraging his daughter to own up to her mother about a secret before leaving for medical school would surely choose simpler words than “I sit with someone who has the capacity to cure human disease. . . . You think such a cause might engender grievous tribulation? You think moral lightweights make such miracles occur? Did spineless poltroons build those skyscrapers across the river––men and women cowering from austere truth?” (110). In a similar vein, some of his fight scenes, though intended to illustrate the hardiness of the combatants, are overdone to the point of making the characters seem superhuman. But such instances are relatively few.
Bernstein concludes the short story collection with a seven-chapter novella, Boundaries of Restraint. The plot is built around a school shooting in which the shooters have “the usual excuses for mass murder––the students were bullying, the teachers unfair, the administrators had expelled them” (245). He presents the story by describing the same events through the first-person viewpoints of three different characters who were caught up in them. All three are high-school staff or teachers, but their varying outlooks on the world color their emotional responses to the events and the actions they take afterward. As the story unfolds, various plot twists prove to be as intense as the attack itself, but ultimately the reader is left quietly satisfied that things end up as they ought to.
In sum, The Brooklyn Stories offers hours of enjoyable reading. Bernstein is a “Jack of all genres,” but his talent with short stories is exceptional. And for readers seeking heroic inspiration, his varied storylines, purposeful plots, and fascinating characters supply it in abundance.