Say That To My Face: Fiction - Hardcover

Prete, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393057984 ISBN 13: 9780393057980

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

Yonkers, New York, finds its place on the literary map of America.

Transcending all the limitations of "ethnic literature" and mobster stereotyping, David Prete flawlessly (and seemingly effortlessly) nails Italian-American life to the page and elevates it to a new place in American writing.

Say That to My Face introduces us to Joey Frascone and his family and friends in the tense, violent, racially divided Yonkers of the Seventies and Eighties. His childhood segmented between four homes and his teenage dreams pulling him towards the challenge and excitement of New York City, Joey is a handsome kid whose intense and conflicting loyalties threaten to tear him apart. Whether responding to the crush of a motherless girl whose sister he adores; flirting with danger during the terrifying summer of mass-murderer "Son of Sam"; cheating his teammates of a victory to save a friend on the ballfield; watching his mother play softball against his father ("in her lovely red dress, she pretended to fix her crotch and spit out a wad of chewing tobacco... With one shake of her ass in the batter's box of a church parking lot, my mother dropped thirty years"); or struggling with the mind-blowing high of a lifetime while running drugs from Jamaica, Frascone wins the reader's steadfast allegiance as he tries to figure out where his own truest loyalties lie.

Capturing people in flux between their better and worse selves, David Prete is one outstanding storyteller. With hilarious, thrilling, and painful accuracy, he evokes the color and poignancy and humor of Italian-American speech and the characters who use it. Like barman Frank Gianguzzi, whose favorite term of affection is "coog," from the Italian "cugino," or cousin, or any of its variations: "coog-o, coogini, coogette, coogie coog, coog a'bell, coog a'brut." Or Benny Colangelo, the quintessential neighborhood guy, "emanating his future. A future of work, neighborhood, family, and the beautiful poetry of routine." Or Joey's butcher grandfather, scratching his grandson's back with his thick, heavy butcher's nails, as he yells, "Look at the prince here." Or his Uncle Gingy, whose motto ― "the one thing you don't mess with is family"-doesn't seem to apply to how he treats his wife.

Having come of age among characters as memorable as any in Faulkner's Mississippi, Joey finds that even when he escapes Yonkers for the sophisticated city sparkling at the other side of the bridge, his past isn't forgotten: the past isn't even past.

About this title

About the Author

David Prete is the author of Say That to My Face. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Reviews

Adult/High School--Coming of age in Yonkers, NY, in a working-class neighborhood during the '70s is difficult for Joseph Frascone. His early childhood is spent shuffling back and forth from the households of his divorced parents and the family friends whose intact home gives the preschooler and his sister their only sense of a nuclear family. There is much trauma for the sensitive protagonist--the death of a classmate's mother, the scary headlines about a serial killer in his neighborhood, callous teachers, and his volatile family. Paradoxically, the warring extended family and caring if eccentric neighbors provide a kind of stability. Cast reluctantly in the role of man of the house even after his mother's remarriage, Joe refuses the role of student, already filled by his sister. He dreams of leaving home and playing professional ball. The baseball dream is brutally deflated when he witnesses a vicious fight between players in a neighborhood game, his carefully planned trip cross-country with like-minded friends gets them only as far as South Carolina, and his restlessness eventually brings him into the frightening underworld of drugs. Told in short, picaresque episodes of compelling and graphic dialogue and suspenseful drama, this fast-paced novel will especially appeal to reluctant readers, who will sympathize with the hero's troubled preadolescence, be touched by his poignant love affairs and the bonding among his buddies, smile at his pranks, and ultimately cringe at his reckless confusion.--Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this classic New York tale of lost innocence, Joe Frascone grows up running the streets of Yonkers, then embarks on a revelatory cross-country trip and finally winds up back in the city working as a drug mule. Prete's debut novel gets off to a slow start with a series of mundane coming-of-age scenes that establish Frascone's gritty Italian heritage and his difficulty adjusting to his parents' divorce. The action heats up when Joe and two buddies, Mark and Benny, drop out of high school half way through senior year and take off on a cross-country drive. Their trip takes an unexpected turn, and they end up settling for a while in the unlikely locale of coastal South Carolina. The best passages in the book find Frascone back in New York, where he connects with a drug dealer and takes a terrifying trip to Jamaica on which he must swallow dozens of latex-covered marijuana pellets and make it back through customs in a semi-hallucinatory state. Prete combines a tough-guy sensibility with fragmented, episodic storytelling. The effect can be gruffly lyrical, but the pacing is rocky. Still, Prete's complicated affection for neighborhood life-and his ability to produce vivid thumbnail sketches of the kind of men who feel at home in dingy pool halls-gives his debut authority and individuality.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Prete presents the life and times of Joe Frascone, Yonkers (N.Y.) born and bred, in 10 episodes that start with a scared four-and-a-half-year-old and close with the brash, slightly battered twentysomething bartender he becomes. Together the 10 vignettes sketch the life of a restless guy, low on ambition but driven to leave home for the bright lights just south. The early chapters convincingly re-create New York working-class neighborhoods in the 1970s: incidents that shaped the era, the centrality of family, the insularity of the various ethnic groups, and the profanely funny conversations. The first-person, in-your-face narrative filters glimpses of Joe's family and friends, how they live and what motivates them, through his self-centered perceptions. As Joe gets older, his bar-centered life and his desperate attempts to escape boredom lead him to dangerous and unconventional choices and considerably darken the novel's tone. The creative use of language, honest depiction of character and setting, and occasional laugh-out-loud scenes will satisfy all readers of good fiction--but definitely men. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393057984
• ISBN 13: 9780393057980
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 188