Book Review: Bed-Stuy is Burning

Bed-Stuy is Burning

by Brian Platzer

Atria Books, 2017

Brian Platzer's lean, powerfully-constructed debut novel Bed-Stuy is Burning centers most of its action on one particular address: 383 Stuyvesant Avenue, a three-story prewar building owned by his two main characters, defrocked rabbi and gambling addict Aaron and his girlfriend Amelia, a high-profile freelance journalist. They have a baby son, they have their mortgage payments, they have a couple of tenants who cause no trouble, and they have a conscientious nanny. These two aren't the only main characters – their tenants play roles, for instance, as do single father Jupiter and his son Derek, who grows increasingly bitter about the institutional racism he sees around him every day – but they find themselves at the center of the book's explosive plot development: a twelve-year-old black boy named Jason Blau is shot dead by police in the rapidly-gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in hours the whole neighborhood is roiling with anger and long-suppressed racial and social frustrations.It's the very scenario Aaron most dreads earlier in the book when he's mentally gloating over his little pied-à-terre:

There was still paradise here. And Aaron was in on it. He'd bought the house because it was beautiful and he wanted to spend his life there with Amelia and, one day, children. But he'd already earned 35 percent back on investment in just over a year. Bed-Stuy was the best bet he'd ever made. It was a real risk, and a thrilling one. It took guts to be surrounded by people who didn't look like him, in a neighborhood without the amenities he was accustomed to, but it was worth it. As long as New York City remained desirable – and Manhattan stayed an island without extra available real estate – the only way he could lose was a spike in crime to scare off new gentrifiers.

The unassuming bloodlessness of all this is the most daring thing Platzer does in his debut, and he does it so often and so smoothly that you're sailing along at page 100 or so before you realize that virtually all of the interesting people being so brightly and engagingly described are themselves faintly revolting. And in many ways the most revolting character in the book is gentrification itself, creeping everywhere, soldiered by people just like Aaron, who pat themselves on the back for willingly surrounding themselves with people who don't look like themselves, especially if it gets them a nice return on their initial investment. There's a breathless cleanliness in Platzer's depiction of how thoroughly disconnected the world of Aaron and Amelia is from the world of young Derek, a world boiling with rage at the stepped-up “stop and frisk” policies of the omnipresent police:

“Stop and frisk is a political tool, victimizing one group of people so another group feels protected. It's humiliating hundreds of thousands of people, for what? In stops, weapons are found less than two percent of the time, and sure they say that's because people don't carry anymore, but everyone knows that's bullshit. Was there any evidence of Jason fucking Blau carrying last night before he was shot ten goddamn times? No. None.”

Readers of Bed-Stuy is Burning will be surprised by some of the third-act reversals Platzer has in store for them, and some of the novel's gestures at semi-happy endings feel more like concessions to Hollywood than concessions to reality. The narrow confines of the specific plot, the hints of still-visible stagecraft, are, remarkably, the only tip-offs that this is a debut novel. Bed-Stuy is Burning is a thoroughly readable novel regardless of these tip-offs, an impressive beginning to this novelist's career.