THE JUNK-DRAWER CORNER-STORE FRONT-PORCH BLUES

Powers's fourth novel (Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, 1975, is his best known) is a 1950's coming-of-age saga about a boy who loses his brother in an accident. Its bittersweet nostalgia is amiably comic most of the way through. Donald Cooper returns to the neighborhood where he grew up—on the South Side of Chicago—when his mother, a widow, breaks her hip. The narrative then seesaws between the present and the past that comes to haunt Donald. His mother was a housewife and his father drove a delivery truck at a time when the nuclear family was celebrated not for its dysfunctions but for its wholesome American flavor. And Donald, who in the present is recovering from lung- cancer surgery, remembers it mostly that way: brother Danny playing the trumpet, lemonade on the front porch, trips to the corner store, the crosstown rivalry between the White Sox and the Cubs. The story jump-cuts between years and instances, between Donald and Danny, between the usual crises and illnesses of childhood, providing nostalgia by way of 16-inch softball (``Many a Chicagoan has spent virtually every warm evening hour of his life playing sixteen-inch softball'') and high jinks by way of puberty (``About every ten minutes I'd have this urge to gangbang Europe'') and a mother who ``goes through the motions of tucking us in,'' no matter how old the boys became. Finally, however, after a series of instances involving the family car, Danny borrows it one night and is killed in a car wreck, whereupon the story turns suitably melancholy before finishing with an aching description of autumn and a relatively upbeat ending. Portions of the novel were originally presented in a one-man show. While the prose style is not particularly distinguished, the material has enough psychic weight and nuclear-family ambiance to deserve attention.