Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Bed-Stuy Is Burning
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.brianplatzer.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Brian-Platzer/2095132524 * http://www.startribune.com/review-bed-stuy-is-burning-by-brian-platzer/432972423/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016046073
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016046073
HEADING: Platzer, Brian
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100 1_ |a Platzer, Brian
670 __ |a Bed-Stuy is burning, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Brian Platzer) data view (“Brian Platzer has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in The New Republic, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English at the Grace Church School in Manhattan”)
PERSONAL
Married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A.; Johns Hopkins University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Middle school English teacher, New York, NY; cofounder, Teachers Who Tutor NYC. Also taught English in Thailand.
WRITINGS
Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, New Republic, Salon, McSweeney’s, and New Yorker.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Platzer is a novelist and English teacher based in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. He teaches English at a middle school in Manhattan. He is cofounder of the educational company Teachers Who Tutor NYC, a tutoring company in which all the tutors are experienced classroom teachers who hold master’s degrees. As a writer, he has contributed to publications that include the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Internet Tendency, Salon, and the New Republic. Platzer holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Platzer traces his interest in writing and literature to his junior year of high school, when he first read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “It was the first book I wanted to work hard to understand, and that combination of work and pleasure is still key to how I go about my own writing,” Platzer stated on the Shelf Awareness website. “In trying to defend the novel to my friends, I thought for the first time that I might have a special relationship with literature—that I might want it to play an important role in my life.”
In his debut novel, Bed-Stuy Is Burning, Platzer explores the difficult issues surrounding gentrification in Brooklyn’s historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Protagonist Aaron is a former rabbi who was dismissed from his synagogue after an incident involving misuse of the synagogue’s funds for gambling. Since this unpleasant experience, he has become a wealthy financial professional. He lives with his girlfriend Amelia, a journalist, and their infant son in a brownstone they recently bought. They are part of the increasing number of wealthy white homeowners who have moved into the Bed-Stuy area, causing concern and frequent resentment among the neighborhood’s older residents.
When an unarmed black twelve-year-old boy is shot and killed by local police, the stress and resentment of the neighborhood finally boil over. Peaceful demonstrations ultimately turn violent as a wave of angry protestors surges through the neighborhood. As the mob moves forward, they converge on Aaron and Amelia’s brownstone, essentially laying siege to and invading the building as a symbol of the racial and economic pressures they’ve experienced. With his property at risk and lives of his family endangered, Aaron must confront not only his angry neighbors but the reality of the conditions that have brought them to this point.
Platzer “delves into the personal psyches of Bed-Stuy residents in a wholly unique way. The strength of the novel comes from the unflinching and nuanced humanization of a systemic issue. Brian isn’t just writing about the big bad concept of gentrification, he’s telling his own lived experience, as well as the experiences of his neighbors,” observed Brooklyn Rail writer Liz von Klemperer.
“Bed-Stuy Is Burning offers a suspenseful, well written, and empathetic story filled with wit, wisdom, and hard truths. It stands as an examination of people caught up in today’s urban realities,” commented Renita Last, writing on the Jewish Book Council website. Platzer “succeeds in presenting multiple perspectives of dramatic yet familiar situations,” observed Annie Bostrom in a Booklist review. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the debut novel “expertly paced, eminently readable, and a promising start.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Annie Bostrom, Review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning, p. 48.
Brooklyn Rail, July 14, 2017, Liz von Klemperer, “Bed-Stuy’s Many Faces of Gentrification,” interview with Brian Platzer.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning
New York Times, August 11, 2017, Mychal Denzel Smith, “Bed-Stuy Is Burning Takes on Gentrification in Brooklyn,” review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2017, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning, p. 35.
ONLINE
Advice to Writers, http://www.advicetowriters.com/ (September 5, 2017), interview with Brian Platzer.
Brian Platzer Website, http://www.brianplatzer.com (February 19, 2018).
Electric Literature, https://www.electricliterature.com/ (July 6, 2017), Bradley Sides, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
Jewish Book Council Website, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (February 19, 2018), Renita Last, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (February 19, 2018), review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (July 19, 2017), Steve Donoghue, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (July 11, 2017), Steve Nathans-Kelly, review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (June 2, 2017), review of Bed-Stuy Is Burning; (February 19, 2018), “Reading with … Brian Platzer,” interview with Brian Platzer.
Brian Platzer has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.
In addition to writing and teaching, Brian is co-founder of Teachers Who Tutor | NYC, New York City’s only tutoring company where all the tutors are classroom teachers with master’s degrees.
Reading with... Brian Platzer
photo: Lauren Silberman
Brian Platzer, author of the novel Bed-Stuy Is Burning (Atria, July 11, 2017), has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.
On your nightstand now:
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Transit by Rachel Cusk.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Starting when I was probably six or seven years old, my father--over the course of a few years--read me all 14 books in original Oz series by Frank Baum. I remember almost nothing of the plots or characters, but the novels were important to me and somehow grander than the television or movies I was watching. The stories felt significant to the characters, to the universe, and to my father, and I don't think I ever fully lost that sense of a novel's potential grandness.
Your top five authors:
Somerset Maugham, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Ann Packer, Kazuo Ishiguro.
Book you've faked reading:
So many! I went through an embarrassing, ugly, dislikable period during my senior year in college when I acted as though I'd read everything. It led to miserable conversations I had no reason to be in. I've never read a single novel by Dickens or Turgenev or a Brontë, and I've reached a place in my life where I can freely admit it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. Lately I've gotten fewer skeptical looks when I call it a masterpiece and his best work, which has been nice, as I too often insist that people--from high school kids through grandparents--read it. Its structure of returning to an optimistic past from the perspective of a disheartened present, is perfect, and I've never seen the highs and lows of passion so powerfully rendered.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Blindness by José Saramago. The simple white on black on white combined with the title promised something smart and terrifying. The novel over-delivered.
Book you hid from your parents:
I hid 1984 by George Orwell, because I'd stolen it from a high school friend. David Crawford. He wasn't even really a friend. He was just a kid who seemed smart and had girls interested in him. He left the book on the floor at school, and I took it home. It was the first thing I'd ever stolen. Since, I've stolen many things: candy, tennis rackets, sweaters, a frozen turkey, small cars, my best friend's wife. No, just kidding. I've still only stolen that book. My parents wouldn't have known by looking at it, but seeing it filled me with shame. David: if you're reading, thanks and sorry.
Book that changed your life:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. When I've returned to it lately, I've found it a bit too precious or stuffy, or maybe unnecessarily obscure. But when I first read it for English class junior year of high school, I was amazed. It was the first book I wanted to work hard to understand, and that combination of work and pleasure is still key to how I go about my own writing. Also, everyone else in the class hated it. In trying to defend the novel to my friends, I thought for the first time that I might have a special relationship with literature--that I might want it to play an important role in my life.
Favorite lines from a book:
"When I think about that moment now, standing with Tommy in the little side-street about to begin our search, I feel a warmth welling up through me. Everything suddenly felt perfect: an hour set aside, stretching ahead of us, and there wasn't a better way to spend it. I had to really hold myself back from giggling stupidly, or jumping up and down on the pavement like a little kid. Not long ago, when I was caring for Tommy, and I brought up our Norfolk trip, he told me he'd felt exactly the same. That moment when we decided to go searching for my lost tape, it was like suddenly every cloud had blown away, and we had nothing but fun and laughter before us." --from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
It's the best nostalgic description of young love, without stating the love directly, that I've read.
Five books you'll never part with:
City of Glass, the first book of the New York trilogy by Paul Auster; The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson; and David Crawford's copy of 1984, because though I never loved the book, its presence reminds me that I am, at heart, a criminal.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. I had no idea what I was in for when I picked up that novel. At the beginning, it feels so normal. And then it unravels far beyond anything I could have imagined.
BOOKS JULY 14TH, 2017
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INCONVERSATION
Bed-Stuy's Many Faces of Gentrification:
BRIAN PLATZER with Liz von Klemperer
Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Brian Platzer
(Atria Books, 2017)
Brian Platzer’s debut novel Bed-Stuy is Burning is to Brooklyn gentrification and police brutality what The Day After Tomorrow is to climate change. In it, a housing project is literally set on fire during a mass protest. Tensions reach a climax when a group of predominantly African American protestors march to a brownstone recently purchased by white gentrifiers Aaron and Amelia. The couple is forced to confront the racial and socio-political tensions that have been brewing in their backyard as the rallying cry “three eighty three Stuyvesant, 422 Macon, 371a Mac-Dounaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George Andre,” tears through the neighborhood. The chant is a list of real life homes and businesses that have been taken over by gentrifiers in recent years.
Brian and I both live within walking distance from Saraghina Restaurant, so that’s where he suggests we meet to discuss his book. I arrive early, and, as a waiter leads me to a table, I begin to understand why Brian chose this establishment as a symbol of gentrification: cloth napkins are folded atop tables made from reclaimed plywood. A personal pizza runs around $15 a pie. I take a seat and look around at faces that resemble my own. Diners are in their mid-20s to early 30s, and predominantly white. I’ve lived in Bed-Stuy for almost six months, and I know my place in the borough’s landscape. I’m a gentrifier. My presence here contributes to the displacement of my neighbors, and it’s my responsibility to think critically about it. That’s why I was drawn to Brian’s book. He takes an unflinching look at the dynamics within my own neighborhood while deftly resisting clichéd character tropes. By putting everyday people in a high stakes scenario, he explores the raw implications of gentrification and race relations today. Gentrification has become a buzzword, and several books about Brooklyn gentrification have come out
in the last two years alone. Michael Woodsworth’s Battle for Bed-Stuy and D.W. Gibson’s award winning The Edge Becomes the Center, for example, offer firsthand reportage and historical perspectives on the phenomenon of rapid gentrification. Brian, however, delves into the personal psyches of Bed-Stuy residents in a wholly unique way. The strength of the novel comes from the unflinching and nuanced humanization of a systemic issue. Brian isn’t just writing about the big bad concept of gentrification, he’s telling his own lived experience, as well as the experiences of his neighbors. When Brian arrives we order coffee and dive into both Brian’s real and imagined version of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
Liz von Klemperer (Rail): How did you start writing this book? What was the initial inspiration?
Brian Platzer: I moved into the neighborhood about seven years ago. I’d been living in Clinton Hill with my wife, and we knew we wanted to have kids and couldn’t afford to stay. We looked around a lot of neighborhoods and were drawn to the tree-lined neighborhoody architecture in central Brooklyn more than that in north Brooklyn, and we realized that if we rented out two of the three units, we could just barely afford an entire building. We bought our home when people—and I mean gentrifying people—were still more intimidated by this area, and for a 10th of a price as a comparable building in the West Village or in Park Slope, we could buy a brownstone. We collected all our savings and took out a loan and just managed to afford it. We live in a duplex in the middle and rent out the bottom floor and the top floor.
Rail: Wow, that’s uncannily similar to your protagonist’s scenario.
Platzer: It absolutely is. In terms of the structure of the book—in terms of where I put characters—it’s not only uncannily similar: it’s identical. I imagined a fictional world within the contours of my daily life, where tensions were ratcheted up a lot.
Rail: But you’re not a lapsed rabbi turned Wall Street banker, like your protagonist Aaron, right? [Laughs]
Platzer: Nope, I’m a schoolteacher [Laughs]. On the way to teach every morning, I’d say two of five days a week, I saw kids, not much older than my students, handcuffed and pressed against the metal fences going down to the subway station. This was before Commissioner Bratton came in with his broken windows theory of policing. Stop-and-frisk was still in place. Regardless of its effectiveness, living the day-to-day of it was clearly horrible for the kids being stopped, questioned, and frisked. I had the sense that the police didn’t like it much, either—that it was their job to perform this task and handcuff these kids and publically embarrass them. And to the commuters every morning, there was a different kind of impotence. We saw it all the time, hated it, and had no authority to stop it, although it was ostensibly being done for our benefit. I had the sense that everyone involved was deeply uncomfortable. It was hard not to imagine what would happen if tension rose a bit more, or if there was another police act of unwarranted violence. So I started reading into the history of riots, and I read about the Rodney King riots, the Watts riots, and Harlem riots in 1964 that spread into Bed-Stuy for a few days. At the time I didn’t realize it, but the history of riots in America is primarily the history of police brutality and reactions to it. I started reading about the policing of Stop-and-frisk, versus broken windows policing, versus community policing, and I read academic works and oral histories about gentrification in general and about Bed-Stuy specifically. I also read Commissioner Bratton’s autobiography because he’s so instrumental in broken windows policing. I didn’t want to come at it from the perspective of a naïve gentrifier, as I very much was.
Rail: In the introduction to the book, you voice your status as, to some degree, an outsider or witness in the context of racial police violence. You write, “I really didn’t want to mess this up.” I’m interested in how you navigated that feeling. I also think the ultimate product of this tension manifests in the care you took to encompass a variety of the perspectives. Your characters are nuanced, and none of them have a stereotypical bent.
Platzer: Yes, there were two categories I didn’t want to mess up. First, I didn’t want to tell a story that was blind to half of the experience—which I feared would be the natural story for someone like me to tell. Much of the fiction I’ve written before this has been in the first person, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t tell any type of real account from any one person’s story, whether it be the gentrifier, which would be the most natural perspective for me, or any other single individual. The other mistake I didn’t want to make was to fall into cliché. To say, here’s the ignorant gentrifier, and here’s the oppressed minority—because I wanted conflict to arise from interactions between humans as opposed to between types.
Rail: Towards the end of the book you explore the desire on the part of your white, “liberal” characters to interact with their community and to be supportive, but also their lack of desire to engage in a way that would compromise them. For example, Amelia wants to form a relationship with Sarah, a young high school drop-out, but it’s in a convoluted way. Her own self-interest is the primary concern.
Platzer: I think that’s how I kept myself honest. I wanted to keep in forefront in my own imagination everyone’s self-interest.
Rail: Yeah, I think that’s how you avoid the classic white savior trope that’s so unfortunate and cringe-worthy.
Platzer: I also tried to be aware of not wanting to commit a crime that’s almost as bad as a cliché, which is the reverse-cliché. You see this when writers don’t want their minority character to be an uneducated, simple character, so they make him or her incredibly sophisticated and manipulative. To get out of that mindset, I tried to present people who are out for themselves as much as possible, as I think all human beings are. My personal interests are, first, the well-being of myself and my wife and my sons, and, after that, that of my friends and my community, and only then am I interested in the greater well-being of the universe. This was the first check on keeping my characters real. I wanted to make sure they cared about the things they’d actually care about, even if this made some of them less likable than others. The second check was my neighbors. What enabled me to write the novel with some degree of confidence was the sincere friendships and relationships that I have formed on my block over the last six or seven years.
Brian Platzer
Rail: Right, you also said in your introduction that you conducted research and talked to people. What was that process like?
Platzer: It was for the most part casual. My research was months of reading and getting into the history, politics, and literature. The next step was the years of natural conversation with everyone on my block. These interactions came from Fourth of July barbeques, gatherings like my kids’ birthday parties, and mostly just hanging out on our stoops. My family was jokingly referred to as the diversity on the block for the first couple years, and then once we had kids, we were folded into the fabric of the families who have been here for sixty, seventy years. We became participants in the natural conversations about how our neighborhood was changing, and how we’re supposed to raise our kids in terms of their relationship with the police. How do the changes in the neighborhood benefit us, and what does “us” mean? Who benefits from the new coffee shops, and how do these amenities potentially become detrimental to the renters on the block, whose rents are increasing dramatically? How do rising rents create tension with the owners on the block, whose real estate value is increasing as fast as the rents are rising? Being a part of that conversation both lets me organically participate in what matters to my friends’ and neighbors’ lives, and it has taught me so much about the way people across race, class, and religion live their lives. For example, we had real conversations about how people felt when Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island. I also hung out near the Boys and Girls School and asked questions. I’ve been a high school, middle school, and college teacher for more than a decade now, so I’m comfortable going up to kids and asking what they think. The book came together naturally. It wasn’t as though I arrived into the neighborhood as an anthropologist. I moved in, made friends, was attracted and confused by certain aspects of my new home, so I started writing characters, the characters started playing off each other, and soon enough I had the beginnings of a novel.
Rail: Most of the characters are fictional, but you also blatantly have some real people like Bill Bratton and Ta-Nehisi Coates. You combine fiction and reality in a way I don’t normally see, which is very compelling.
Platzer: I appreciate your saying that. The reason it felt natural to me is because the geography of the novel is so real. I discuss real restaurants, real streets, and real subway stations, and in some ways public figures are a part of that geography. Initially I only had Bratton incidentally in the novel, on the radio, I think, and then being mentioned by the police as a kind of puppet-master figure. But I became increasingly fascinated by the human being who was manipulating the neighborhood from on high. Bratton specifically interests me because he talks about policing in a computerized, fairly distant way. But he’s just a guy! He’s been divorced a bunch of times, he travels around the world, and like everyone else, he has a complex inner life. He was there during the Crown Heights riots, and he would be there during the fictional riot in my book. He is as important to the fabric of this moment as the teenager who is caught in the middle of it. For me to tell this story as completely as I wanted to, I had to include the people with the least amount of power, as well as the manipulating agent on top. But I also didn’t want to make him a faceless monster. I wanted to humanize him as much as I could. I had a real neighborhood and a real city and a real police force, so it seemed more compelling to me to create a real Bratton than to write a thinly veiled version of the man.
Rail: As someone who lives in Bed-Stuy and can definitely relate to and identify these characters, it was interesting reading it in my apartment and then looking up and feeling that I was living in the setting of the book. It informed my perspective of where we physically are right now. Beyond my reaction, what do you hope people in a wider context will take away from this novel? What do you hope people in a wider context will take away from this novel?
Platzer: I hope it extends to people dealing with comparable issues in cities around the country. I hope people get a sense of the tensions among real people who are forced to interact with one another, and who choose to interact with one another, and try to find love and meaning and money and sex and kids and happiness along the way. Gentrification isn’t only when people with a little more money move into a neighborhood and displace others who have lived there for years. That’s certainly an important aspect of it, but there’s also an entire web of nuanced interactions that an op-ed, for example, can’t fully capture. There’s a whole world that too many people aren’t aware of.
CONTRIBUTOR
Liz von Klemperer
LIZ VON KLEMPERER is a Brooklyn based writer and succulent fosterer. Her work has been featured in The Rumpus, Lambda Literary, Electric Literature, and beyond.
Brian Platzer
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 AT 12:06AM
How did you become a writer?
Between high school and college, I took a year off and taught English in Thailand. I spent a lot of time by myself, and I was very lonely. I was homesick in that way where loneliness and boredom combine to slow time, so I sought ways to rush the days forward. I took walks and made note of everything I passed, I drank myself to sleep, I went to the local Wat and tried to meditate, but the only times I relaxed and felt good—when instead of tricking myself through an hour, I was happy to extend it as long as possible—was when I was writing.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
James Baldwin, Dave Eggers, Ann Packer, Rafael Yglesias, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, Kazuo Ishiguro, Robert Stone, David Simon, Lake Owego Camp, my Bed-Stuy neighbors, and the teaching of Rod Keating, Lisa Stifler, and Alice McDermott.
When and where do you write?
I write new material at home, in my tiny office, surrounded by my books, looking out onto Stuyvesant Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I edit the pages first on the screen, and then I print them out and edit them by hand on my commute into Manhattan to teach middle school English.
What are you working on now?
A new novel, tentatively titled HEAL ME. It’s about the friends and family of a man dealing with a mysterious neurological condition and the difficulties of living in Trump’s America.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Yes. I’m suffering from it now. I’ve lost the thread of my book, nothing feels as though it should inevitably occur, and I’m stuck and miserable. This afternoon, I’ll print the whole thing, read it through, and try to figure out if I’ve made any mistakes or if there’s an obvious and entertaining way these pretend people would act next.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Write every day, if possible. Never leave off at the end of a scene, but go on to the next scene so the next day’s work has already begun. Causality, causality, causality: if possible, each event should feel like the inevitable consequence of previous events.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Find a topic/person/subject that really interests you, and write until you’ve finished the arc of a story. Then go back and spend much more time revising than you’d spent writing. And then, write every day, if possible. Never leave off at the end of a scene, but go on to the next scene so the next day’s work is already begun. Causality, causality, causality: if possible, each event should feel like the inevitable consequence of previous events.
Brian Platzer is the author of BED-STUY IS BURNING, which has received rave reviews in Vanity Fair, NBC, the WSJ, the New York Post, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.
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Print Marked Items
Platzer, Brian: BED-STUY IS BURNING
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Platzer, Brian BED-STUY IS BURNING Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-1-5011-4695-4
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 behalf--he 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 place--this 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 antipolice
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Platzer, Brian: BED-STUY IS BURNING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934348/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7088e633.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934348
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Bed Stuy is Burning
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Bed Stuy Is Burning. By Brian Platzer. July 2017. 326p. Atria, $26 (9781501146954).
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.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Bed Stuy is Burning." Booklist, June 2017, p. 48. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8de8a69e.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582676
1/27/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517112606464 3/3
Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Publishers Weekly.
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p35+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Brian Platzer. Atria, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-15011-4695-4
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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bed-Stuy Is Burning." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 35+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491575264/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=50d9f6ef.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575264
‘Bed-Stuy Is Burning’ Takes On Gentrification in Brooklyn
By MYCHAL DENZEL SMITHAUG. 11, 2017
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BED-STUY IS BURNING
By Brian Platzer
326 pp. Atria Books. $26.
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.”
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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 Swift is 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.
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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.
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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 million-dollar 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.”
A version of this review appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: There Goes the Block. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Bed-Stuy Is Burning: A Novel
Image of Bed-Stuy Is Burning: A Novel
Author(s):
Brian Platzer
Release Date:
July 10, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Atria Books
Pages:
320
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Paul LaRosa
Novelists are not immune to what’s going on around them and clearly author Brian Platzer, who lives in the largely black and gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, has drawn on his own life in his first novel.
At the center, there is a white couple—Aaron and Amelia—with a baby living in a black neighborhood or, perhaps more accurately, as Amelia feels, they are invading the black neighborhood with their own privilege and money. This is well-trod ground if you live in virtually any large city but novelist Platzer attacks it as though it’s a revelation.
Protagonist Aaron is a former rabbi who lost his job because of his addictive gambling. He stole/borrowed the temple’s funds to place a large bet, won, and returned the money the next day but the head rabbi doesn’t much care. Win, lose or draw, it’s the stealing/borrowing of the funds that earns Aaron the ax.
But don’t feel too badly for Aaron. He’s got a talent for making money and becomes a financial guy. His wife Amelia is a celebrity journalist who desperately wants to stop writing what is her bread and butter: fawning profiles of celebrities. She aspires to greater things. She wants to write about the gentrification and inequality of her neighborhood.
She gets her chance one explosive day when the local populace riots and invades her brownstone. For various reasons, the police are absent and things get progressively worse. This is the beginning of the fatal flaws throughout this novel.
As everyone knows, fiction must be believable. The idea that the entire New York City police force—35,000 officers strong—would not have enough resources to protect its citizens in brownstone Brooklyn against a home invasion that goes on for hours is ludicrous.
Not to mention that gunshots are fired inside that house and a man is left lying dead in the doorway. Another is dead outside. Still, no police.
Instead, we’re expected to believe that Aaron can calm down the angry mob outside his house by quoting Bible passages!
If you can abide this fantasy, maybe the insulting plot devices to come won’t bother you either. In Platzer’s book—no matter his supposedly heightened sensitivity—nary a white person is injured but two black men are shot to death. Someone needs to be sacrificed for all this violence.
On top of that, Amelia buys her way out of trouble by handing a poor black teenage girl a check for $50,000. When she has trouble cashing the check, Aaron comes to the rescue—he gives the teenage girl $130,000 in cash. Blood money for his bad conscience you see.
The teenage girl’s life becomes fodder for Amelia who achieves her dream of becoming a crusading journalist. She uses the girl’s life to highlight the inequality of Bed-Stuy and turns it into a book. The girl eventually writes her own piece for the New York Post letting the world know that Amelia paid her source, a gigantic journalism no-no.
Aaron shrugs it off, telling Amelia not to mind those yellow journalists. They can’t touch her. And Amelia’s agent is positively ecstatic because Amelia’s book is about to hit the bookshelves.
It’s as though social media doesn’t exist. No one will see that Post article, the once and future rabbi proclaims to his wife. “The New York Post,” he [Aaron] said, “won’t be enough to tarnish the reputation you’ve built over this last year and a half.”
Wanna bet? If that dialogue sounds wooden, you’re in for a bunch more. Just listen to the character of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton who is nowhere near as articulate or intelligent as the real Bill Bratton. Or how about when Amelia lectures the Police Commissioner in front of a roomful of cops and journalists? It’s truly cringe-worthy.
The setup of this novel is interesting, but the plotting falls apart, and we’re left with a polemic about the dangers of gentrification. Yeah, we know.
Paul LaRosa's most recent book is a memoir, Leaving Story Avenue. He is also a journalist whose work, including book reviews across a wide range of genres, has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and on CBS News.
Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Brian Platzer
Atria Books 2017
336 Pages $26.00
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4695-4
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Renita Last
Bedford-Stuyvesant is a Brooklyn neighborhood with a storied black history. Until recent years, Bed-Stuy’s reputation had been one of a crime-filled, dangerous, and gritty area. Now, its magnificent brownstones are in demand, police presence has increased, young white families and professionals are moving in and populating the parks and streets, new restaurants and stores are opening, and tensions ensue. Gentrification is happening!
Black families are feeling the pinch and young blacks are resentful of their privileged wealthier neighbors. City politics, policing strategies, real estate values, race relations, and cultures all collide in Brian Platzer’s significant first novel, Bed-Stuy is Burning.
The book focuses on the complex and conflicted lives of six Bed-Stuy inhabitants on one fateful and tragic Rosh Hashanah. These character studies unfold throughout the novel’s past and present narratives.
Aaron has moved with his journalist girlfriend, Amelia, and their infant sonto a beautifully restored Bed-Stuy brownstone. Once a practicing rabbi, Aaron’s lack of faith, and self-defeating personality have led him to work as a Wall Street banker. His gambling addiction impacts on every aspect of his life, yet his social consciousness, training, and sense of justice cause him to have concerns about the events he witnesses in his new neighborhood.
Amelia, who won’t fully commit to marrying Aaron, writes fluffy celebrity magazine pieces in her upper- floor home office.Amelia and Aaron are always second guessing their motives, their lives, and their love.
Other characters include their nanny, Antoinette, a religious single mother whose strong spiritual beliefs have found her leaning toward Islam; their neighbor, Jupiter, who has worked hard all his life, brought up his teenage son by himself and, is distressed by the changes in the neighborhood; and Aaron’s tenant, Daniel, an unmotivated, hostile, and suspicious college professor who is developing a fascination with guns,
Neighborhood tensions rise after a twelve-year-old black boy is shot ten times by police. A demonstration erupts into a riot. Shots are fired and murders are committed. The ugliness escalates, buildings burn, stores are looted, and dangerous crowds assemble. Ironically, the riot finds its epicenter at Aaron and Amelia’s house. The main characters’ lives are in dire jeopardy. The terror that ensues is heart pounding and relentless. The aftermath is subdued, but still terrifying.
Bed-Stuy is Burning offers a suspenseful, well written, and empathetic story filled with wit, wisdom, and hard truths. It stands as an examination of people caught up in today’s urban realities.
Platzer’s letter to his readers explains that the book is a culmination of, “intense debate with my family and friends, of personal observations, academic research, overheard conversations, and countless interviews with my neighbors and fellow Bed-Stuy residents.” This is most apparent in the finely drawn and diverse characters, the authentic rendering of events, and the “feel” of the streets the reader experiences.
The impact of this debut novel is unsettling. While the characters endure darkness, grief, and challenges, there are many unresolved issues and no easy answers.
Bed-Stuy is Burning is an engaging, timely, and provocative read.
A Child's Murder by Police Ignites Brian Platzer's Bed-Stuy Is Burning
By Steve Nathans-Kelly | July 11, 2017 | 4:53pm
BOOKS REVIEWS BRIAN PLATZER
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A Child's Murder by Police Ignites Brian Platzer's Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Brian Platzer’s new novel, Bed-Stuy Is Burning, unfolds with a “ripped from the headlines” feel. This is partly because its subject matter is so topical, exploring urban neighborhoods’ racial and class tensions following the murders of young black men by white policemen. The novel delivers a plausible blow-by-blow of how stop-and-frisk policing in urban areas gives way to police violence—and how angry tweetstorms spill over into physical confrontations.
The spark that lights the fire in Bed-Stuy Is Burning—a black child’s murder by police in a neighborhood park—closely parallels tragedies that occurred with infuriating regularity as Platzer was writing the book…and will occur in the months following its publication. In that sense, the novel is contemporary in its concerns.
But because it portrays a race riot in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Bed-Stuy Is Burning hazards unavoidable comparisons to a movie now nearly 30 years old: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which was largely inspired by racial violence that began outside a Queens pizzeria in 1986.
1bedstuycover.pngPerhaps the most striking divergence between Bed-Stuy Is Burning and Do the Right Thing is the vast class difference at its core. Do the Right Thing dramatizes racial tensions between white store-owners and black residents in Bed-Stuy in the 1980s. Much like the Roxbury and Southie neighborhoods that squared off in the Boston busing battles of the 1970s, the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy and Bensonhurst that clash in Do the Right Thing are essentially racially segregated working-class communities situated in uncomfortable proximity to one another. Bed-Stuy Is Burning, by contrast, captures a formerly all-black neighborhood in uneasy transition, centering on two white yuppies and their infant son, who have recently moved in after purchasing a historic Bed-Stuy brownstone for $1.3 million.
Aaron is a disgraced ex-rabbi racked with spiritual doubt, who lost his job when he was caught using temple funds to pay off gambling debts. More recently, Aaron has cashed in on his loss of faith and penchant for gambling with a job at a Wall Street investment firm. He’s been successful enough to wear thousand-dollar suits and purchase the most expensive house in a trending Brooklyn neighborhood. His girlfriend, Amelia, writes sardonic celebrity profiles for popular magazines. In the disillusioned aftermath of an ugly divorce, Amelia questions the value of her work and her ability to commit to Aaron and their infant son, Simon.
When teenagers take to the streets to avenge 12-year-old Jason Blau’s murder by the police, Aaron and Amelia’s house comes under siege. Barely a borough removed from Garth Risk Hallberg’s 2015 bestseller City On Fire, Platzer’s book lacks City On Fire’s majestic sweep, opting instead for the claustrophobic confinement of riding out a riot inside an embattled Brooklyn brownstone while chunks of concrete carom off the bars on the windows.
Bed-Stuy Is Burning, with its near-cartoonish portrayal of former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton as a self-aggrandizing chief who arrives on the scene determined to contain the conflict within Bed-Stuy, has much to say about underlying institutional problems. But Platzer’s book overestimates the power of individual connection to subdue racial unrest—or at least the capacity of a speech-making white man to sway even the most hostile audience.
It’s not clear if Platzer is attempting anything as grandiose as teaching readers about racism in Bed-Stuy Is Burning. But the pivotal moment in the book comes somewhat implausibly when Aaron reclaims his rabbinical mien (if not his faith in God) to deliver a parable from the book of Genesis to the African-American insurgents at his door.
In its more believable moments, Bed-Stuy Is Burning portrays circumstances in which inherited privilege trumps the absence of overt racism, suggesting that there are gaps good intentions can’t bridge. The book is an engaging, provocative read, even in episodes that strain credulity like Aaron’s sermon on the stoop.
Platzer even delivers a brilliant false ending that complicates the story’s outcome and arguably redeems the whole enterprise. The unexpected second ending brings a sense of balance to the book—not unlike the paired quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X that linger on the screen at the close of Do the Right Thing—concluding Bed-Stuy Is Burning with fitting ambiguity.
Steve Nathans-Kelly is a writer and editor based in Ithaca, New York.
Book Review
Review: Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Bed-Stuy Is Burning by Brian Platzer (Atria, $26 hardcover, 336p., 9781501146954, July 11, 2017)
In Brian Platzer's first novel, one of Brooklyn's last gentrifying neighborhoods is having a bad day. Racially charged Bedford-Stuyvesant's history of shoot-first policing has the locals on edge. Their anger builds when a cop opens fire on an unarmed 12-year-old. The fuse is finally lit when police begin rounding up teens joy-jumping the turnstiles at the Utica Avenue A-train station and then cuffing those who swarm the area to protest. Shouting gives way to baseball bats, guns, looting--until all hell breaks loose.
The news of the riots travels fast on social media, and as Platzer's title announces, the word is out: Bed-Stuy is burning. This is especially bad news for Aaron, who, with his journalist girlfriend, Amelia, and their newborn son, Simon, are the only whites on a block of brownstones already pricing out long-time black owners. Aaron has a gambling problem and was kicked out of the rabbinate for stealing from his synagogue to cover his bookie debts. Now a successful investment banker, he is at the Belmont track when he learns that his family and home are under siege by the furious crowd. In a single violent day, Johns Hopkins MFA graduate and magazine journalist Platzer captures the tension of race, privilege and callous "broken window" law enforcement.
Aaron and Amelia are on center stage of Bed-Stuy Is Burning, but Platzer's novel also includes an ensemble of engaging support characters. Simon's nanny is a devout Jamaican immigrant in the process of converting to Islam. The block's unofficial maintenance super, Jupiter, is a wise migrant from Georgia with an angry teenage son caught up in the melee. He knows no good will come of the rioting: "This was going to define some of these kids' lives. Some would get killed. Others would kill. Reputations would be made. Men would spend the rest of their lives in jail because of this one day." A lesbian teen arrested in the taunting crowd sweep, Sara watches her brother beat down by the police and breaks free to join the rioters in front of Aaron's house. Even NYPD Commissioner Bratton makes an appearance to denounce the troublemakers, with a cameo press conference question from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Platzer paints with a broad brush, but his characters are robust, right down to the food in their fridges or the cut of their frohawks. His story is about more than big social issues. It is about the masks people wear to hide insecurities--masks that are stripped off in the face of violent confrontation. An emotional Sara describes the class division in the neighborhood during a shouting match with Amelia: "You chose this place to live thinking there wouldn't be any consequences. S**t. You think people are just going to welcome you like they're thrilled you moved in? What's wrong with you people?" A bad day in Bed-Stuy is a vivid microcosm of the United States, but the hope Platzer suggests with his characters' healthy unmasking offers optimism for the whole country's days ahead. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: Brian Platzer's first novel captures a violent day in the uneasy life of a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood where the fragility of love, parenthood, class and race is put to the test.
Bradley SidesFollow
Writer and English instructor. Work appears and is forthcoming from Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Jul 6, 2017
In Brian Platzer’s Debut, a City Burns
‘Bed-Stuy is Burning’ delivers a thoughtful commentary on race, privilege, and gentrification
Living happily in an illusion can only be a temporary state. Those things we are hiding from show up — always, like clockwork. Those lies. Those mistakes. There’s no getting away from them. Still, though, we try. Brian Platzer’s debut novel, Bed-Stuy is Burning, shows us that no matter how hard we might try, we can’t ever hide.
“Bed-Stuy is Burning balances the multiple layers of stories going on with great success.”
Aaron, Platzer’s protagonist, has a “lucky” life. He lives with Amelia, his girlfriend, and, together, they have a son named Simon. They fill their home with love and kindness. But family stability isn’t all they have going for them.
Aaron is a successful banker, and Amelia works as a journalist. They are near personifications of privilege. They live in a beautiful home in Bedford-Stuyvesant thanks to a good — very good — investment. Platzer wants us to know exactly how gorgeous the house is:
“The top windowpanes behind Amelia were 1890s stained glass, and they all matched one another. Orange teardrops emanated from a central sky-blue whirl surrounded by golden diamonds. Aaron owned those windows. He and Amelia did together. They owned the stained-glass windows and the original woodwork surrounding them. The wood was mahogany, carved to look like columns holding up a frieze, with little torches surrounded by wreaths carved into the corners. Aaron and Amelia owned this woodwork, as they owned the fireplace tiles around the still-functional gas fireplaces, the sconce lighting, the hardwood floors, the built-in closets.”
Aaron claims to live on the “nicest block in Bed-Stuy,” where even the neighbors are great. Aaron and his family have lives of near untouchable privilege — or so it seems.
Externally, sure, Aaron’s life is golden, but internally, he’s a man searching — for something that I don’t think he would recognize if found.
We learn of his past gambling trouble and how he practiced as a disbelieving rabbi. Now, he lives his life with an undercurrent of uncertainty and questions the very notion of faith. He struggles in accepting that other people stand on their religious beliefs so firmly: “Aaron really did think that no one believed in God. Or maybe it was okay that some people did but not his life partner — not his future wife and the mother of his eventual children.”
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Aaron’s internal and external lives collide when a police officer kills a young African-American boy nearby, and rioters hit his street. The bubble that is Aaron’s perfect world suddenly pops, and Aaron and his family aren’t so safe. He must confront both his neighborhood and its tricky dynamics, consisting of gentrification and various social injustices, as well as face the truth about himself if his story is to be a happy one.
Platzer creates some really beautiful images throughout Bed-Stuy is Burning; however, the larger one, of a man trapped outside the confines of his home amidst great violence and trying to work his way back inside, is arguably the most poignant. It’s in scenes such as this one that the internal and external duality that guides so much of the story becomes nicely realized.
Bed-Stuy is Burning balances the multiple layers of stories going on with great success. Not only are there many threads — going into the past and, then, shifting in the present — with Aaron as I’ve mentioned, but there are a handful of diverse supporting characters, including a single dad named Jupiter and a tenant named Daniel, who make up Platzer’s narrative. These characters help amplify the struggles of Aaron — and the world in which he exists. However, it’s Antoinette, Simon’s loving and riveting nanny, who has an emotional arc regarding faith that threatens to — and occasionally does — steal the novel’s heart. Platzer captures these characters and their stories in a convincing and, ultimately, compassionate way. It’s this kind of delicate handling that makes Bed-Stuy is Burning work so well.
Many reviews will likely mention the timeliness of Bed-Stuy is Burning, but, still, this fact can’t be overstated. Platzer discusses race, privilege, and gentrification. These very things might well define our current year. However, there must also be an acknowledgement of the timelessness he captures here, too. The heart of Bed-Stuy is Burning is about a man who struggles to escape his past failures and face the future. He’s still working on figuring out his identity. He’s lonely. He’s ashamed. But he’s trying — and persevering. It’s quite a triumphant story.
While Platzer’s novel is undoubtedly a good one, the tension does get a bit overwhelming in the second half, and the pacing is a little too quick in sections. The thrills, too, extend longer than necessary. These, though, are minor qualms.
Bed-Stuy is Burning, with its diverse voices and sincere depiction of the fight for social equality, is a mighty fine debut from a writer to watch.
Book Review: Bed-Stuy is Burning
By Steve Donoghue (July 19, 2017) No Comment
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.