More even than for their extraordinary dialogue and level of detail, Daniel Fuchs’ three novels of life under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn remain valuable for their rich admixture of despair and nostalgia. The Jewish past in Fuchs’ hands is less sentimental than the air-brushed Lower East Side we’ve become accustomed to, and less crassly sensational than revisionist tales of Jewish pimps and murderers. Fuchs’ intent was to do justice to the world of his youth, though he understood that this was an impossible task: as his alter ego, the writer-to-be Philip Hayman, muses at the end of Summer in Williamsburg, “no book was large enough to include the entire picture, to give the completely truthful impression, the exact feeling.” True, but Fuchs’ novels come close.

The first, Summer in Williamsburg, is the broadest, most ambitious, and consequently most uneven; here the young writer attempts to shrug off storytelling conventions in favor of an ensemble cast and intricate, parallel plotting. He goes so far—too far, maybe—as to write a few scenes from the perspective of God Himself. There’s no shortage of plot: little Davey leads his Ripple Street gang in clashes with the kids from neighboring blocks; a fire claims a couple of lives; and perhaps most interestingly, Philip’s older brother, Harry, gets involved with gangsters who have been hired by the owner of a bus line to terrorize the competition out of business. But Fuchs’ aim isn’t narrative arc, but to show “people as God made them and as they were,” as well as the depressing lack of alternatives open to a smart kid like Philip. Homage to Blenholt and Low Company are tighter, sharper, and sadder books, confining their narratives to a couple of days each and focusing on fewer characters. In the former, Max Balkan, an aspiring inventor, hopes to rise to power by emulating a local politician known far and wide as a crook, but at least a somewhat successful one. In the latter, a soda shop owner, Spitzbergen, who also rents space to brothels, attempts to fend off ruin as organized crime and sheer numbing tragedy drown each of his regulars and associates one by one; the novel’s epigraph, the Yom Kippur viduy or confession, suggests that Fuchs’ interest lies in the various ways, holy or not, that our sins are punished. Throughout these books, Fuchs demonstrates a surfeit of talent—he constructs sentences and scenes with incredible precision and grace—that surely would have led to an extraordinary American literary career had the indifference of readers not chased the author to Hollywood, and away from literary fiction.

By a somewhat strange but consistent publishing convention, these classic novels have repeatedly been bound together, under one cover, as a trilogy. The resulting volumes—most recently a handsome paperback from Black Sparrow Books (2006)—tend to resemble cinderblocks. It’s not ridiculous to call the books Fuchs’ “Brooklyn trilogy,” of course, as all three are about Brooklyn, but each is substantial enough to warrant reading (and purchasing) on its own; the only reason to group them this way is to make them a great bargain—which they are, at any price—in the hopes of alerting a few more readers to Fuchs’ deserving, enduring achievement.