Nifty comic novel about a bumbling, low-level Mafia gofer who leaves the mob behind and goes to Key West to make a new life for himself. Readers will have a hard time not seeing Joey Pesci as the hero of this ``business novel'' by the author of The Big Time and the uncredited coauthor of the bestselling Boss of Bosses. The plot is The Worm Turns. Joey Goldman, half-Jewish illegitimate son of mob boss Vincente Delgatto, is not a full-blooded Sicilian and so can never take over the mob. What's more, he's forever being squashed by his half-brother, Gino, a full Sicilian. Joey decides to give it all up, move permanently to Key West with his girlfriend Sandra, and then take over a few scams—maybe numbers, prostitution, garbage trucking, something that will not give him the creepy feeling of going legit. But Key West's numbers racket is all sewed up by the Cubans; sex is weirdly ridden with transvestites; garbage trucking is under a city contract; and at each attempt to break in, Joey is humiliated. While Sandra gets another bank-teller's job, at half what she earned in Queens, Joey's money runs low. He meets retired Mafioso Bert the Shirt, who tells him he should look into the local traditions, perhaps get his money from the sea—and Joey starts thinking about the Florida Straits as a moneymaker. Then his greasy brother Gino shows, pursued by a rival mob and looking for $3 mil in rough-cut emeralds that have been hidden in a rotting boat. Soon Joey and Sandra are prisoners of mob goons, and Joe must recover the emeralds.... A comic novel with no laughs: all the humor blooms from character, not from farcical difficulties—a wise business move by Shames.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74933-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...
Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.
At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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