An interview with Boombox author Gabriel Cohen
What is your novel Boombox about?
It’s the story of four neighbors on one Brooklyn block. Their relatively calm co-existence is shaken up when one of them, a teenager, buys a big sound system and starts blasting gangster rap into their shared back courtyard. The book is also about their individual ambitions, and four very different love stories.
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
One day, while I was actually working on a completely different novel, I was confronted with a writer’s nightmare. My home office/kitchen, which faced out on a tranquil courtyard very much like the one described in the book, was suddenly under siege. A teenage neighbor had bought a nightclub-sized sound system and started playing gangster rap at a deafening volume. As I say in the book, the bass was loud as a jackhammer, a mining operation, and a thunderstorm. It pounded through the walls and into my very bones. Closing the windows didn’t help. Earplugs didn’t help. Even calling the police didn’t help; they would sometimes stop by, but as soon as they left the kid just cranked the volume back up. For months I tried to just concentrate on my writing, but even when the music wasn’t playing I was always tense, waiting for the barrage to start again. I despaired of getting any work done, until one day it occurred to me that maybe the noise could be more than just a problem—it could be the germ of a whole new novel.
Are the four main characters in Boombox based on your real neighbors?
The only character who started with a real neighbor was Jamel Wilson, the kid with the sound system. I began with the obvious external facts of his situation, but then of course I had to invent a whole internal world for him. The other characters came from very different starting points. The germ of Mitchell Brett’s character was a kid I vaguely remember from around fifth or sixth grade, whose father used to pressure him so much that he couldn’t help crying if he lost at sports. Grace Howard was inspired by a friend of my mother’s who, sadly, died of cancer years ago—I was moved by memories of her quiet dignity and integrity. Last but not least, Carol Fasone’s story was inspired by the true tale of a secretary I worked with in a brief temp job when I first arrived in New York.
Why did you choose to tell the story from four points of view?
I think the story almost physically dictated that choice. I would look out my window while this music was blasting and wonder how the different people who shared this same view felt about what was going on.
How did you come up with the title?
Again, it felt inevitable. It refers to the little boombox we see in the first chapter, then to the huge club-sized sound system that shows up later on, but it also refers to the courtyard itself, which becomes the crucible of heated emotion and conflict.
Race and racism feature prominently in the book. Why is that?
These issues are inherent in the situation. Just like the characters in the book, I lived around the corner from a big public housing project in which almost all of the tenants were African-American or Latino. When I moved in, the neighborhood had a really interesting balance of races and ethnicities; my landlords were an elderly Italian family, there had historically been a Mohawk Indian segment of the population, and all sorts of people co-existed in that low-rent Brooklyn melting pot. I lived in the same apartment for 16 years and watched as white gentrifiers moved in and totally changed the dynamics (and economics) of the neighborhood. I was eventually forced out when the crumbling, sagging brick row house I rented my apartment in got sold for a million dollars. The book is not just about race, but also about class and real estate. Above all, perhaps, it’s about the frustratingotherness of other people. Though we would often like to, we just can’t control what they will think or say or do. I wanted to give an unflinching answer to Rodney King’s plaintive, universal question: “Can we all get along?” I made a lot of effort not to be too didactic about the issues in the book, but I felt that it was important to try and tackle them. The biggest challenge, though, was not to write about issues, but to create four breathing individuals who each desperately want certain things for themselves.
What do you think about racism in America today?
After 9/11, our national attention has shifted so heavily toward issues of terrorism and national security that we’ve tended to stop talking about social issues that are still very much with us. Every once in a rare while, I’ll still come across a newspaper article or editorial that acknowledges that the problem of racial discrimination never went away. Even black corporate executives still face a glass ceiling. For every Oprah or Magic Johnson or Condoleeza Rice who manages to break through, there are still thousands who don’t.
Your previous book, Red Hook, was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel, an award in the mystery field. There’s a killing in Boombox, but no mystery about who did it. Have you turned away from a mystery audience?
Actually, I have a sequel to Red Hook that just came out (it’s called The Graving Dock), so the short answer is No. A better answer, though, is that I’m always writing about what I see as one of the great mysteries of life, which is,Why do people behave the way they do?
December 18th, 2007
