Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.
A zany, erratic, painfully poignant memoir of growing up working class and gay in the Bronx during the ’60s and ’70s.
Actor/playwright Capotorto’s debut is based on his one-man show of the same title, a loose translation of his surname (torto = twisted; capo = boss or head). The gallery of nutty grotesques who inhabited his Italian-American family and neighborhood ran the gamut from his tyrannical, slave-driving father to his long-suffering mother and three sisters; an array of grandmas, aunts, cousins and teachers also peopled his lonely, awkward childhood. Capotorto’s father struggled to wrest a living from the off-the-beaten-path Cappi’s Pizza and Sangweech Shoppe near Pelham Parkway, but his strict house rules drove customers away. Cappi exercised a despotic rule over his family as well. He verbally abused everyone, censored all cultural activities and tracked down eldest daughter Rosette when she ran away to become a flower child. Once the Capotortos moved from their tiny apartment into a big house a block away, teenaged Carl spent his weekends toiling thanklessly for his father in the ramshackle building’s renovation. His cameo portraits of various sadistic public-school teachers are wickedly funny, as is his send-up of the “high theatrics” of the local Catholic church, St. Lucy’s. As the author became aware of his homosexuality, he sought out likeminded “misfits,” discovered disco, got involved in drama and experimented with sexual partners. Unsurprisingly, hiding his true nature from his father made him fearful and anxious. Cappi, who never really accepted his son, died of a heart attack in 1998.
Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2861-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
In a dramatic memoir, Sexton (Private Acts, 1991, etc.) offers her account of life with suicidal poet Anne Sexton. This highly personal account complements Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of Anne Sexton, and even textual overlaps can be intriguing. For example, Middlebrook places one of Anne's suicide attempts near Linda's Harvard dormitory room but across from the office of Barbara Schwartz, then Anne's therapist. Here Linda simply omits Schwartz from the scene, thus highlighting her own importance to the story. One of Linda's primary themes is in fact her attempt to extricate herself from her mother's dependence on her. The childhood scenes Linda paints (including seeing her mother masturbate) most often terrify her and her younger sister, Joy. Anne's depression and instability make a poor match for her husband's volatility: She taunts him, and he beats her as the children look on. Writing with the immediacy of the present tense, Linda notes than when Anne spanks her, ``she never counts. She just does it till she isn't angry anymore.... I hate her. I hate me.'' Linda responds to such chaos by imposing order in her own small ways, eating precisely one piece of Halloween candy each day or tidying the house her mother ignores while she writes. Linda even tries to take care of her mother, but it is not until she reaches high school that they become friends: ``At last she seemed to like me.'' As Linda matures, she learns about writing, particularly from Anne and her friend Maxine Kumin, but she also struggles to free herself of her mother. Even after Anne's suicide, Linda finds her life linked to her mother's, most directly in her work as literary executor, but most disturbingly in her own struggle against depression and her battles to maintain her equilibrium when dealing with her own children. In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family. (Photo insert, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-78207-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Great idea: Take one of America's top jazz singers, who also happens to be a good writer (Traps, the Drum Wonder, 1991), and have him write about the singers and musicians who influenced him. Unfortunately, the end result is disappointing and frustrating. TormÇ had the good fortune to grow up in an era of great singers, songwriters, arrangers, and instrumentalists. More important, it was also an era of live radio broadcasts and increased fidelity in recording techniques. As he makes abundantly clear in this text, the phonograph was his conservatory, with radio serving as a practicum and the movies and Broadway as sources of extra-credit assignments. As a result, the influences on his musical style range far and wide, from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald to Mabel Mercer and sax players Georgie Auld and Gerry Mulligan. In the book's best moments, he deftly describes a singer's style in a few quick brushstrokes; his descriptions of Louis Armstrong on a bandstand or Crosby at a mike are little gems that capture a moment and a style. However, too much space in this slender volume is wasted on biographical data or irrelevancies like a long list of people who dubbed vocals for Hollywood's non- singers. TormÇ is capable of better, more extended analysis, as the excellent section on the underappreciated Lee Wiley shows. He is also a pretty fair prose stylist, despite a glaring mixed metaphor in his discussion of Richard Rodgers, whose ``iron-clad melodies...stuck to your ribs.'' That sounds like a painful experience indeed. This book would have been much better if TormÇ had concentrated more on the music.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509095-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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