Halsey Street

Halsey Street by Naima Coster

Compulsively readable, full of emotional tension and lush, detailed description, Halsey Street is also peopled with remorseless, bitter characters and undeveloped plot threads that trail away into the novel’s vague, evocative darkness. The novel’s complex, overdeveloped plot can roughly be boiled down to the protagonist, Penelope, returning to a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn to care for her father, who has suffered another injury after an earlier fall already limited his mobility severely. Ralph is living alone now that Mirella, his wife and Penny’s mother, has left him to return to the Dominican Republic. Penny is also estranged from her mother, and the two are locked in a torturous dance of depression, desperate longing for approval and attention, unending bitterness, flaring anger. Penny drifts through her world, lashing out constantly and almost senselessly at everyone around her, escaping through expensive alcohol, running, and meaningless sex. Any change Penny may have undergone in the course of the novel is only hinted at on the final page as a future possibility, a cheap resolution that left me unconvinced in Coster’s authorial ability to depict more than one kind of character.

It’s a shame, because Coster is a gorgeous, careful lyricist, and the novel is full of interesting possibilities: within Halsey Street lives a potentially exquisite novel about gentrification, home, memory and change; a painful and searing novel about depression, failure, longing, misogyny; a bleak but expositive look at capitalism, race, existence under oppressive forces, escapism and addiction…but none of these potential novels ever arose from the Halsey Street’s acrid soil, perhaps because they were all attempted at once. Furthermore, the novel dallied in baffling side plots, such as Penelope’s affair with her white landlord, who she seems to feel very warmly towards (until he stops feeding her ego), even as she directs an excoriating hatred towards his wife—though, to me, the two seemed indistinguishable from one another in terms of their roles as gentrifiers and bores. This suggestion of misogyny haunted the entire novel. While the women characters are undeniably strong, they are also subjected to far more brutal judgment by Penelope than she ever turns upon men.

The novel also fails to realize one of its raisons d’etre. At least in the eyes of its many acclamatory reviews, the novel is one that “unflinchingly” faces gentrification, but my reading was simply of a novel set in a gentrifying neighborhood. Brooklyn’s gentrification is accurately represented and inarguably affects Penelope and her family, but it’s hardly faced head-on: while Penelope observes with (righteous) hatred the changes that have been wrought on Bed-Stuy, she never reflects on the neighborhood she used to know, what she misses, how the Bed-Stuy of her youth affected her life growing up. She does recall and long for her father’s store, but this further underscores how Halsey Street is more centrally about family, memory, and the haunting possibility of reconciliation than it is about neighborhood, memory, and the haunting possibility of home.

This was a frustrating read that repeatedly slid from nearly achieving a lyrical pathos to conjuring only an attenuated, bitter hardness. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to: depression, death, alcoholism.

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