Done Good

IN THIS CITY, what you call yourself is very important. The NYPD are New York's Finest, the FDNY New York's Bravest. Other civil servants have their own monikers, from sanitation workers (Strongest) to corrections officers (Toughest). Court officers are unofficially known as New York's Smartest. An uncle of mine, a court officer, sneered in both contempt and embarrassment when he told me that.

It was through this uncle that I first heard of Tim McLoughlin, a fellow officer with whom he'd worked in the Brooklyn Court House. One of New York's Smartest was apparently smart enough to write a novel, which both surprised and impressed him. Heart of the Old Country, published by Brooklyn's Akashic Press, is loosely based on McLoughlin's own experiences growing up in Bay Ridge, surrounded by small-time gangsters and low horizons. The book garnered well-deserved plaudits upon its 2001 release, inspiring comparisons to James T. Farrell and Hubert Selby, and was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. It was released in Italy (under title via da Brooklyn), where it won the Premio Penne, a prestigious first-novel award.

McLoughlin's novel captures a working-class Brooklyn in the wake of white flight without looking down on its characters and resists the temptation to paint them as innocents. Its outlook on life resembles that of gritty Chicago writer Nelson Algren. In Algren's universe, as in McLoughlin's, everyone is trying to make an honest buck in a crooked sort of way, doing their best to keep out of the hands of the law and making sure enough bodies remain beneath them to keep The Bottom at bay.

Three years later, McLoughlin's star continues to rise. Akashic Press has just released his anthology of Kings County-centric crime fiction, Brooklyn Noir, which features brand new fiction from Pete Hamill, Maggie Estep, Arthur Nersesian and C.J. Sullivan. As editor, his goal was to feature stories from as many Brooklyn neighborhoods as possible. ("I was dying to get a Flatbush story," he told me, "but no dice.") Like his novel, the anthology has received good notices and is selling briskly in his home borough and elsewhere. A second printing is just about to hit the shelves; a sequel is in the works.

Many critics seemed surprised to learn that Brooklyn existed before gentrification. One reviewer asked why so many stories were set in "Old Brooklyn."

"It's not Old Brooklyn to me; it's just Brooklyn," says McLoughlin. "When I think of Williamsburg, I think of Hasids, not hipsters."

McLoughlin's critical reception, while generally favorable, does carry with it hints of condescension. Entertainment Weekly back-handedly applauded his capture of "the depths of working-class Brooklyn"-a typical assessment that betrays a complete ignorance of McLoughlin's subject matter. Novelist Jonathan Ames wrote of Brooklyn Noir, "for fans of just plain old great writing, this is the book for you, or, rather, I should say, you'se."

The critical perception of McLoughlin's work underscores the difficulty the literary world still has with people with working-class roots. It goes beyond the fact that publishing is, by and large, a rich man's game. While a plethora of Men's Men has written potboilers and whodunits (usually pulled from the ranks of ex-G.I.s and ex-detectives), the ranks of literary fiction, which McLoughlin's work straddles, remains populated largely by graduates of prestigious MFA programs and promoted by the well-connected products of literary-agent apprenticeships. In sociological terms, someone like McLoughlin shouldn't have the cultural capital to gain entrance.

This uneasiness works both ways, as I found out when I met McLoughlin for the first time at Montero's, a former longshoreman's bar at the far western end of Atlantic Avenue. "This was a real bucket of blood, back in the day," he says. "Back when you had all the shipping on the Brooklyn piers, one night you'd hear guys speaking Norwegian, the next night Italian." Montero's survived the collapse of New York's marine shipping industry, hung on throughout the Scum Years of the 1970s and 80s and now attracts a hip clientele in search of cheap drinks (though old regulars still abound). Its decor-rusting anchors, smudged manifests, orange lifesavers from several dozen vessels-might appear ironic to someone unfamiliar with its old patrons. The bar's transformations followed the same route as much of this city: former workingmen's haunts turned into playgrounds for affluent youth.

"In my mind, being a writer was a lot like what being a judge or teacher once was," says McLoughlin. "High prestige, low pay-you could do a lot better if you tried harder. It's the kind of avenue you could only pursue if you didn't have to worry about money." He described himself as coming from "the Irish-American civil service tradition," with many relatives working as cops, in the MTA or in some other city agency. After spending a few semesters at NYU, he started driving cabs for an unsanctioned fleet in Bay Ridge, and his experiences there formed the basis for Heart of the Old Country. Many years separated the stories and the novel they inspired, with work being the biggest culprit for the delay.

He plunged back into writing after earning admittance to a Writer's Voice workshop at the YMCA. ("I later found out I only got into the program because they already had too many women, and they needed one more guy," he says.) Heart of the Old Country came together mostly on weekends, while McLoughlin paid the bills working in the court system.

"At work, I was completely in the closet with the novel," he says. "Most of the people I worked with had no idea I wrote at all until they passed by the Barnes & Noble on Court Street and saw I was doing a reading there. It didn't make any sense to tell them. It's better now, but years ago, if you came to work reading anything but the Daily News, people would ask you if you were going to school. And if the answer was no, then you'd probably get a funny look."

McLoughlin still works in the court system as a clerk, and though he laments "the curse of the safety net," he doesn't see any other way to pursue his writing, economically or psychologically. "People who ask me, 'I don't know how you work and write at the same time,' I say to them, 'I don't know how you don't work.'" Friends from the neighborhood who have read his work have received it well, though the two comments he hears the most are, "How come I'm not in there?" and "That's not really the way it happened!"

McLoughlin is quick to adopt typical blue-collar self-deprecation. "A lot of what has happened to me as a writer has been luck," he says. But I'm more inclined to believe that at least one of New York's Smartest has earned his title the old-fashioned way.