Portrait of a suburban Italian-American as a young man.
In a heartfelt first collection, Prete follows a good-looking Italian-American kid from Yonkers as he struggles to understand himself and his surroundings.
It’s 1975, and in the opening story, “No King, No Puppy,” Joey Frascone is a four-year-old living with his grandparents, his adored older sister, and his young divorced mother, who works in a department store. He’s just a kid, but he’s also precocious and confused at his changing world and his mother's relationship with a shady character who beguiles her children with promises of a house with a swimming pool. With each story, Joey grows older and more aware of the people and world around him, realizing during the turmoil of the Summer of Sam that the Gallagher girl from down the street has a crush on him, and that his father is behaving inappropriately when he lectures him, at eight, on the sexual differences between men and women. But Joey Frascone as a small boy is only mildly convincing. It’s when he reaches adolescence, in “Self Respecting Neapolitan,” that the collection gathers power. Here, he’s struggling to become a man, establish his independence, and to understand love when his first girl flees her abusive family and leaves for Phoenix. Joey is rebellious and yes, charming, when, lured by the New York City skyline, an Oz that glitters in its unattainable splendor, he ditches high school for a road trip with two buddies in “After We Left Yonkers.” His quest for success and experience continues with a trip to Jamaica to smuggle drugs and a bittersweet meeting in a bar with an older woman from the neighborhood. Prete aptly draws Joey in all his posturing and hesitant glory. “We were easy on the eyes and that carried a lot of weight in our neighborhood, but we had sense enough to know that if we were to be put in a room full of truly beautiful people, we would be asked to leave.”
Portrait of a suburban Italian-American as a young man.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05798-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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