Conley is a trained sociologist and a career academic teaching at New York University. His book raises his own anecdotal experiences into a sociological light, making it a kind of memoir-plus. Yet it seemed to me the book ultimately comes down on the side of the personal, and on those terms it's a triumph. Like any novelist arraying himself with inspiration for a long voyage into unknown territory, I took it as a hopeful sign.

A month or so later, I was lucky again, in coming across Phillip Lopate's essay "The Countess's Tutor" in the fifth anniversary issue of Doubletake magazine. Lopate's description of his family's move from Williamsburg, a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., into largely black Fort Greene echoed Conley's experiences, and my own, uncannily. It was all the more striking for the way certain rituals that had seemed so particular to my 1970s experience were already evident in the mid-'50s. Just like Conley and me, Lopate had been repeatedly posed an inexplicable and unanswerable question by the black and Hispanic kids on the streets where we lived: "What you lookin' at?"

The three of us met in Brooklyn over coffee, cookies and a tape recorder in November to talk about it.

-- Jonathan Lethem

Phillip Lopate: I really liked [Dalton's] book. It's not easy to do the adult voice but keep the child psychology. And you got a plotline going in spite of this choppy episodic stuff that can happen when you're talking about your childhood: "Then we did this, then we went around doing that." There's humor and perspective. Fortunately, Dalton did so many bad things when he was a kid that you didn't have the problem of a goody-goody character. You had an embarrassment of riches.

One of the hardest things in writing about the kind of background we've had -- being a white kid in a minority neighborhood -- is that there's a tendency to hero-worship the blacks or Hispanics and, underneath that, to patronize them and not, on some level, to be honest. You showed how attractive, for all kinds of reasons, black culture and Hispanic culture were for you, but you also showed that character putting a knife to your head.

I remember when I was much younger, and read an essay by Gregory Corso in Esquire where he talked about being white and being beaten up by black kids. It was the first time I'd ever read anything like that. You don't know where to go with those feelings. What are you going to say? "I was oppressed too." "Um ... my oppression to me is the same as your oppression." That's why I think your tone of irony is so important.

Dalton Conley: Who actually knows why you got the crap beat out of you? I mean, all kids beat each other up. I'm sure I would be a very different person if I'd been 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds of muscle. The whole dynamic would have changed then, because toughness would have been on my side, regardless of race. It's hard to know what went on, because I was a skinny white kid. In some ways I regret the way I titled the book. I wanted a punchy, quick title. But it makes people who haven't read it think it's "Oh, poor white boy complaining about reverse racism and being singled out and called 'honky' all the time," and that's not what I wanted to get across at all.

Lopate: No. But it's not a bad title for a book.

Jonathan Lethem: This is exactly what I'm wrestling with: the difference between ordinary bullying and bullying with racial overtones. And then this -- call it reverse racist bullying, for lack of a better term.

In those moments the wider context -- that my tormentors were powerless in society and that I was a representative of the powerful majority -- was right there with us, even at age 10, 12, 13. The impossibility of ever claiming racism as an issue was something I felt. If I pointed out what was going on I was automatically a racist. That silenced me.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"