All posts tagged: lost time

The Crown’s Finale Shows Why the Monarchy Is Eternal

The Crown’s Finale Shows Why the Monarchy Is Eternal

I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous. Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst. These six episodes, released yesterday on Netflix, are an unfocused canter around the paddock of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Prince William turns 18, Prince Charles finally makes an honest woman of Camilla Parker Bowles, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother die, and Elizabeth II ends the series by being talked out of abdication by the ghosts of her former selves. The final scene has her walking out of an abbey door into bright-white sunlight, which feels like an admission of defeat. How do you sum up a life this long and varied, and end a show with such vaulting ambitions? Guys, what if we make it look vaguely celestial—like she’s passing into history? All we need is a really big lamp. Having watched Elizabeth and …

The ‘Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist’ Grows Up

The ‘Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist’ Grows Up

Jonathan Lethem had come back to Brooklyn, and I wanted to know why. One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel. I was raised in Brooklyn too, some 15 years after Lethem, and he remains, among my childhood friends and I, somewhat of a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction. He was given a hero’s welcome by the literary establishment after publishing Motherless Brooklyn, in 1999, and again after Fortress. But I say “somewhat” because after that, he left town. Both literally—he relocated to Maine and eventually to the West Coast—and in his literature. We old Brooklynites have a high tolerance for crimes, but we consider desertion one of the most egregious. Though he’s written six novels since Fortress, he has …