FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)As a former Brooklynite, I was drawn to this collection of short stories because of its title. But the Brooklyn of “The Muse of Ocean Parkway and Other Stories” is not the Brooklyn that you read about in New York Magazine. This Brooklyn is dark, grim and gritty, and the characters that inhabit it, struggling artists, obscure writers, psychotics and misfits, are decidedly unhip. Instead, they are troubled, lonely, disillusioned, even depraved. Yet they are not without hope, passion and humanity.
Judaism, and the characters’ deep but ambivalent connections to their faith, are central themes in all of the stories. Unhappy relationships between men and women, and disappointing sexual encounters are also well-represented.
The collection’s title story deals with a one-night stand between a writer and a woman who makes her living by swindling her hapless conquests. “Joanna Loves Jesus” tells of a rabbi who must cope with his daughter’s obsession with Christianity. In “Made in China” Karen, a middle-aged daughter of Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivors, struggles to raise her Chinese-born daughter with Judaism, against the wishes of her husband, a Jewish studies professor. In “New Stone City,” Lenny, a failed writer and pothead, causes a scene during his mother’s Passover Seder.
Although some of Lampart’s stories have been published in literary magazines, this is the 65-year-old writer’s first published collection. Lampart is a talented author who deserves serious attention for this work.