The End of an Era: Xochitl Gonzalez’s Last Night in Brooklyn
In the opening pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of opulence and greed, The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, sums up his friend Jay Gatsby’s tragic fate: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
Of course, by now readers know that Gatsby’s death contradicts Nick’s reflection that his friend has “turned out all right.” In a way, his death is fitting, as Fitzgerald, pessimistically no doubt, points to the tragedies that may befall human beings who are seduced by the trappings of wealth and social belonging. Does money necessarily guarantee entrance, much less belonging, within the upper echelons of society? Or, like the Buchanans’ mansion that Gatsby admires from afar, is belonging just a myth, that ever-present mirage that evaporates at the moment of contact?
These questions haunt Xochitl Gonzalez’s latest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn, which is not set in the fictional West and East Eggs of post-WWI New York but features a cast of mainly Black Latinx characters who navigate an urban setting light-years from Carraway’s world. Instead, it’s set in 2007 Brooklyn, on the eve of two disparate but monumental events in US history: the 2008 financial collapse and the historic election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama. Throughout the novel, Gonzalez reminds readers of these spatial and temporal realities that frame the story the narrator, Alicia Canales Forten, tells us over the span of a year. Gonzalez takes us back to a time I remember vividly, when names like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers suddenly became part of my vocabulary alongside others that are now ubiquitous, like Barack and Michelle Obama.
Yet place itself becomes a character that Alicia reveals to us, the Brooklyn of “before” crashing headlong into the Brooklyn that is only a shadow of what it once was. Readers land smack-dab in the glitzy 2007 New York state of mind, replete with references to cocaine and scotch that are purported to be the preferred appetizers for Wall Street stockbrokers. All of this is narrated by our observant and oft-out-of-place protagonist, the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a father “from one of those Black Oak Bluffs families that headed up to Martha’s Vineyard every summer.” This fact of Alicia’s parentage, her being “from the gnarliest, shortest branch on an otherwise very fine and upstanding American family tree,” places her always at a distance from both her paternal family’s wealth and the glitter and glamour of nearby Manhattan.
“Place itself becomes a character that Alicia reveals to us, the Brooklyn of ‘before’ crashing headlong into the Brooklyn that is only a shadow of what it once was.”
Alicia witnesses her hometown borough’s dizzying changes at the same time that she makes her foray into this moneyed and privileged landscape. Alicia’s summer awakening occurs amid the stark reality of Brooklyn’s burgeoning gentrification and the eventual subprime mortgage crisis that dropped luxury condos atop buildings where working-class communities once lived. A struggling copywriter, Alicia is engaged to James, a medical student who promises to provide her with the “right” type of future her mother has dreamed up for her daughter. Yet in the weeks of spring and summer 2007, Alicia finds herself drawn to the world of the up-and-coming fashion designer La Garza, and instead of hopping the sardonically nicknamed Wifey Express every weekend to upstate New York to be with James, she becomes a fixture at La Garza’s legendary parties.
It becomes clear early on that the story Alicia tells us is twofold, the simultaneous “last night in Brooklyn,” as she calls it, and La Garza’s downward spiral in a brutal corporate world that is hellbent on keeping women of color like her out. Throughout the text, Alicia recalls actual former Brooklyn sites and landmarks that have mapped her life’s most important details. As Alicia explains, the Brooklyn of her birth is a far cry from the present, as she tells us in foreboding language: “Whatever you think of Brooklyn now, historically, this has been home for the ones who make what the city takes. The people who drive buses and empty bedpans and waste pails or eke out a living teaching our children. A place where our famous generosity is a trick the mind learns to play to distract from your own lack.” La Garza is also witness to the changing landscape, but rather than be pushed aside, she decides to fight back and build her name from the ground up.
At first, La Garza is legendary, more myth than real, a larger-than-life fashion designer who, like Gatsby, can throw an epic party. La Garza and Alicia cross paths on the night Alicia at last finds herself on the coveted guest list, and it changes the course of her life: “La Garza was, to me then, less a person than the idea of a kind of woman I wished I could be.” Alicia eventually does learn the many truths behind La Garza’s story, and these facts sharply contrast with the rumors that have encircled La Garza’s life throughout her gritty ascent in the fashion world. La Garza conjures false stories of her life precisely because of the pain of her reality, as Alicia explains: “Garza discovered something I’d long known—mainly because of my mother’s pining for it on my behalf. There is another New York that not every New Yorker can access.”
Gonzalez’s novel chronicles a character’s unlikely entrance into the cutthroat world of finance, fraud, and power that undergirds the chaos surrounding La Garza’s efforts to get to the top. Alicia, herself an outsider, is drawn to La Garza’s built-from-scratch empire and utterly mesmerized by this woman’s fortitude and talent. But La Garza’s fierce determination to dress New York’s most powerful signals the real divide that she can never quite conquer. While she builds her lavish business and hobnobs with the rich and powerful, she is excluded from the very social circles represented by one half of Alicia’s inheritance, the Fortens.
“La Garza was, to me then, less a person than the idea of a kind of woman I wished I could be.”
La Garza’s cryptic life eventually unravels, and “the details of her closely guarded private life cracked open and the mess of her life began running, like yolks, into the streets.” The yolks of Gonzalez’s line recall the oddly but perhaps appropriately named West Egg and East Egg of Fitzgerald’s New York and the underlying fragility of these worlds. If one’s life is wrapped up in a place called an egg, is it ever stable? Will the “foul dust” that consumed Gatsby similarly prey on the likes of Garza and others? This is what makes Gonzalez’s novel so heartbreaking. Like Alicia, or even Nick Carraway, readers are drawn into La Garza’s allure, captivated by this woman who seems to have sprouted out of nowhere.
But here’s the real point, Gonzalez reminds us. While the mystery behind this woman’s origins remains just that, a mystery for most of the text, what is not so secret is that she didn’t simply emerge from nowhere. She is from somewhere, just like Alicia. She’s from Brooklyn, the Brooklyn of “before,” not the Brooklyn landscape that transforms before Alicia’s very eyes, turning whiter, trendier, and more out of reach for longtime residents who once called it home. This is the source of the women’s kinship, which owes as much to their shared Puerto Rican heritage as to their Brooklyn crianza. “La Garza was charming, but untamed. A girl like me, but without a Yale degree and two weeks a year of proper New England upbringing to sand the rough edges,” Alicia tells us of her friend, a woman who is a victim of a world that chews up and spits out so many like her.
“It is not La Garza’s tragedy alone that Gonzalez wants us to mourn but the collective tragedy of the numerous casualties of the financial collapse.”
But the tragedy of the novel is tempered, too, by its brimming sense of optimism: the collective shout, the memories of 2008, the election of Barack Obama, how so many of us hoped, even just a little, that things could be different, how we wondered whether maybe now was our time. And though we know better, we want to believe that one man, or one woman, like La Garza, can make our dreams come true.
As the novel uncovers, it is not La Garza’s tragedy alone that Gonzalez wants us to mourn but the collective tragedy of the numerous casualties of the financial collapse: communities bulldozed, the aspiring artists and creators of color whose brilliance was dimmed by a capitalist system that preys on them. The novel ends with Alicia’s frenetic dancing at a soon-to-be-shuttered bar, a night marked by celebratory drinking as much as by mourning. We can cry over our last night at home, sure, but let there always be music. Let there always be dancing.
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