Books : Memoir of a Distorted Adolescence in Brooklyn

Leaving Brooklyn by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95; 146 pages)

To the precocious 15-year-old narrator of this novelized memoir, Brooklyn is as much a burrow of the spirit as a borough of New York, and she has no intention of allowing herself to be trapped in its cozy depths. Insular, parochial and full of contented philistines, Brooklyn in the 1950s is clearly no place for a burgeoning writer like Audrey. To relive her parents’ lives among the tree-lined streets of Flatbush is the most terrible fate she can imagine, and her every waking minute is devoted to avoiding the destiny her family most desires for her. To her mother, that means settling down and marrying a suitable young man from an identical background. Even the word settle chills her blood.

An injury to her eye has given her a distorted view of the world, and she makes the most of it, turning a disability into a unique advantage. “The eye was of scant use in seeing what had to be seen in daily life in Brooklyn. It was made for another sort of vision. . . . Its world was a Seurat painting, with the bonds hooking the molecules all severed, so that no object really cohered; the separate atoms were lined up next to one another, their union voluntary, not fated.” That’s precisely the sort of union Audrey seeks in her own life, and her damaged eye becomes the inadvertent means of achieving it.

From earliest childhood, Audrey possesses a special kind of double vision, “not simultaneous. Alternate.” She can close her normal eye and see the world in a secret way, as unconnected components; a view not vouchsafed to anyone else. To her family and schoolmates, the world is all of a piece; to Audrey, it offers infinite possibilities for recombination. This flawed eye becomes the central symbol of the book, not only providing the author with metaphor, but with the pivotal incident that serves as plot.

Clumsy Lenses

When Audrey is 15, contact lenses have just come into use--not the delicate membranes we have now, but clumsy plastic bubbles covering the entire cornea. Her mother, eager to alleviate the one flaw in her otherwise perfect daughter, arranges an appointment with one of the few contact-lens specialists then practicing in Manhattan, and Audrey reluctantly cooperates. The lens is uncomfortable; difficult to insert and remove, but the ophthalmologist is uncommonly patient and gentle. Her initial trepidation quickly vanishes, and soon she’s actually looking forward to her trips across the Brooklyn Bridge to the doctor’s office.

Professional tenderness rapidly escalates into caresses and then into mutual seduction; a progression that Audrey does nothing to stop, accepting the sexual act as passively as she did the lens itself. Her peculiar vision allows her to see these passionate afternoons on the doctor’s sofa as completely isolated from the rest of her daily life, just as she could see “a piece of face or the leg of a table or frame of a window . . . break off and drift away.” Now as an adolescent, she toys with the ophthalmologist the way she used to play with her physical surroundings, an illusion to be summoned and dismissed at will. When she realizes that the man has actually become infatuated with her, she ends the relationship as casually as she let it begin. “He had no right to feel that way about me.”

A Skewed Perspective

Emotionally still a child, she finds a child’s solution by simply flushing the lens down the toilet, but the doctor refuses to be disposed of so summarily. He insists upon seeing her again, and only then does Audrey begin to understand how the world must look to everyone else. By then, of course, she has begun to leave the conventions of Brooklyn far behind, though it will be some time yet before she knows herself to be absolutely out of danger.

Seen entirely from the author’s skewed visual perspective, neither Brooklyn nor the other characters in the book quite come into focus. Schwartz’s relentless use of the eye metaphor eventually deprives the book of the peripheral view necessary to a novel. In the end, “Brooklyn” is everywhere and anywhere; the writer’s family is generic. With the crucial distinctions blurred, “Leaving Brooklyn” becomes solely a matter of losing one’s innocence, something that happens even to adolescents with perfect binary vision.