A romanticized but beguiling saga of one man’s life on the streets.
A winsome character sketch that celebrates a homeless man’s quirky personality and picaresque life story.
Richard Musto, an 87-year-old homeless man living on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, is a Runyonesque figure who has a jumble of colorful memories and habits. He’s a fastidious housekeeper, carefully keeping his milk-crate–and-cardboard campsite ship-shape and his patch of sidewalk clean and mopped; a dapper dresser in black beret and American-flag cravat; an amateur expert on military history and cinema, always happy to act out a scene; a cigar-smoking bon vivant and incorrigible ladies’ man, always ready with witticisms for the Hooters gals; and a clear thinker with an acerbic take on the world (sample pensée: “A lot of guys / stop to ask me / what’s the secret of life / and I’ll say to them / how the hell should I know”). Lamport, bemused by Musto, spent many an evening hanging out and recording the man’s back story, which included combat in World War II, many knockabout jobs, an enduring passion for the ponies, a sexless marriage and countless adventures in cross-dressing and BDSM, which, he claims, began with the nuns at his grammar school. (One of Musto’s more improbable sideline career jags was as a ladies’ maid and lingerie model.) The author tells Musto’s tale in limpid, engaging free verse, which suits the narrative’s offbeat content and poetic mood; along the way, he sprinkles in atmospheric odes to the bustling New York streetscape, along with somewhat overdone stanzas invoking the muse. The portrait also has some dark edges, including an ugly family feud that makes Musto “all the more human in his monstrosity.” Musto appears in Michel Delsol’s arresting black-and-white photographs looking like an elfin version of an Easter Island statue. Overall, Musto emerges as a resilient survivor, weathering the obliteration of his camp by city workers with a soft curse and plucky aplomb. The result is a heartening lesson on “How to live life in extremis / Yet to the fullest.”
A romanticized but beguiling saga of one man’s life on the streets.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Roll Your Own Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A cool diagnostic tone helps capture the teenage experience but occasionally obstructs the emotional trip.
Dickerson’s debut tells a sympathetic coming-of-age story deeply embedded in ’90s music.
When a book about musically inclined teens begins with a five-page meditation on suicide, readers may assume not all will end well. That introduction sets the tone for the novel: reflective, unafraid of big-picture pronouncements—“Absolutely nothing is more do-it-yourself than suicide”—but also digressive. The main characters, Thomas, 17, and Bridget, 15, exemplify teenagers of the ’90s: Thomas dreams of grunge superstardom with his band of misfits, while Bridget barely survives her regimen of mood-stabilizers and antidepressants, her feelings of alienation erupting in a gangsta rapper alter ego. Yet the omniscient narrator freely swoops into the minds, memories and POVs of minor characters, giving sympathetic but brief glimpses into other lives. Mom and dad, for instance, may simply be parental obstacles to the kids, but we know them better as we glimpse into dad’s tour in Vietnam and his work as a judge, and mom’s free-love past. Other digressions add to our understanding (or memory) of the ’90s, placing in context, for example, the first Starbucks in the neighborhood or the church’s acoustic music night. These digressions turn out to be narratively motivated: The omniscient narrator turns out to be someone reflecting on the past. And yet some of the asides are less momentous or simply too long: At two pages, a digression on black-and-white motifs in pop culture and race relations begins to feel essayistic and detached from the novel. The digressions and broad declarations sometimes mute the main characters’ emotional journeys, while treating the teens more like specimens. Still, the cool, casual tone results in some knockout diagnoses of the ’90s teenage condition: “[Y]ou feel older as a teenager than you will ever feel in your entire life.”
A cool diagnostic tone helps capture the teenage experience but occasionally obstructs the emotional trip.Pub Date: April 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985188610
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Kettle of Letters Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not quite Ripley, but an enjoyable tour of a deranged mind nonetheless.
In Hunt’s debut thriller, what begins as a humdrum play-by-play of a community’s recovery from a disastrous hurricane blooms into a twisted tale involving two murders—both by the same hand.
On a whirlwind trip to Machu Picchu, 40-year-old Judy meets dashing and single Sam Haite on a train. They flirt; they fall in love; they marry and languish in pursuit of connubial bliss. Sam makes millions selling miniscule pets to wealthy yuppies and Judy dabbles in doling out physical therapy to patients at the local hospital. But following a party at the Haites’, an elderly couple from down the street is injured by a fallen tree. Eileen—the wife—survives, but her husband, Joe, is left brain-dead in critical condition. When a hurricane hits, so does the ensuing drama. After weeks of housing Eileen and Joe’s meddling relatives (who are waiting for Joe to die), Judy takes matters into her own hands by secretly suffocating Joe in a brutal act she calls a mercy killing. At this point, the tone and pacing of Hunt’s novel shifts and picks up speed. In quick succession—and in stark contrast to the languid tempo of the book’s first half—Judy is fired from her job, walks in on Sam having sex with an old college friend and leaves Florida for her parents’ cabin in Maine. When Sam visits Judy unannounced and fatally chokes on a fish bone during a heated conversation about their crumbling marriage, Judy does nothing to save him. In a Tom Ripley–esque manner, Judy chucks all vestiges of her old life into the sea—along with Sam’s ashes—and begins anew, with nary a backward glance of regret. While she doesn’t succeed in matching the psychological complexity of Highsmith’s writing, Hunt’s portrayal of Judy bares merit, even though Sam’s death feels sudden and Judy’s reaction seems too blasé to be fully believable. Perhaps if more red flags were raised and more clever hints about Judy’s warped mental state were artfully interspersed in the text, then readers wouldn’t feel so jilted at the book’s conclusion. Still, Hunt’s Judy is a deliciously intriguing portrait of what a trapped mind is capable of—and how far it will go to break free.
Not quite Ripley, but an enjoyable tour of a deranged mind nonetheless.Pub Date: April 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466360044
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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