GOWANUS CROSSING

The terrors and occasional wonders of a midcentury Italian American boyhood in “the roughest neighborhood in the city.”

“When I was growing up, no one would have mistaken the Gowanus for the Nile or any other living body of water. It was an open sewer, stagnant, reeking, sluggish, meandering from Butler Street—today’s Boerum Hill—through a graveyard of decayed nineteenth-century industrial plants, abandoned warehouses, dying marine repair facilities, rotting docks, its future already past. I played pirates on half-sunken barges, sought treasure among barrels of glittering industrial chemicals, climbed ladders and through hatches of gigantic rusted marine diesel engines.” This description of the body of water that gave Coppola’s Brooklyn neighborhood its name sets a tone he sustains through the vignettes that follow: lyrical, entrancing, and brilliantly specific descriptions of the mostly horrifying and painful experiences that comprised his childhood, including the violence of the local wiseguys and equally vicious police; the emotional terrorism of cruel nuns and pedophilic priests; and the dangers posed by reckless drivers, street gangs, unexploded firecrackers—you name it. Though his mother was loving and gentle, the unpredictability of his father kept his home from being a refuge; the one reliably good thing in Coppola’s life, however, was the food. No matter what, the braciole, the spaghetti, the calamari, and the “gabagool” (capicola) just kept on coming. The vignettes skip forward and backward through time; though most are set well before Coppola leaves the neighborhood, we see glimpses of his later life as a father, a Newsweek reporter, and an abruptly abandoned husband. Returned to time and again is the death of his beloved gay brother, Thomas, blond and gorgeous, who had AIDS. A visit to the family’s ancestral hometown in Italy provides a rare moment of redemption; he learns that his namesake grandfather was not the irresponsible squanderer they thought when he returned from his own visit penniless—he had spent all the money helping the family. This one monster turns out to be an angel.

With powerful sentiment but no sentimentality, this memoir is beautifully written elegy to a vanished world.