My Ride with Gus

On New Year's Eve, Jimmy Gambar (nee Gambuzza) storms out of Windows on the World restaurant, leaving his uptight girlfriend, her ridiculous gift of a hot pink silk tie, and the diamond blaze of the Brooklyn Bridge behind. At thirty-eight, Jimmy's precise, architect's life plan has just fallen apart, undermined by his would-be fiancee's manic drive to reinvent him. Later that night, trouble hits big...a sleazy downtown bar, a shady lady with a switchblade in his Soho loft, an accidental fall against a metal lamp. Now Jimmy has a dead woman's body to deal with, and only one person to turn to: his brother Gus.
Driving across the bridge to Brooklyn with a body rolled up in an oriental carpet locked in the trunk, Jimmy has the feeling that Gus is taking him back to sixteenth-century Sicily. "Don't tell me what I don't want to know," says Gus "The Ghost" Gambuzza, whose name is known to every street punk and whose car stays unlocked in his Bay Ridge neighborhood - and untouched, except when kids reverently polish it. But Jimmy has a lot to say, and a painful secret burned deep in his heart that changed his life, and Gus's, forever. Long estranged from his family, Jimmy's on an all-night ride into his past with a brother who, for all he knows, might save or kill him. Jimmy's about to find out once and for all who loves him best.

Nothing is what it seems in this tight, funny and refreshing 1990s take on A Christmas Carol. The Scrooge here is architect Jimmy Gambar, favored by both a successful career and the love of a beautiful woman. But after Jimmy's egomania sparks a lovers' quarrel on New Year's Eve, and a potential one-night stand drops dead in his apartment, he encounters his very own ghost of days gone by: his big brother Gus "The Ghost" Gambuzza, a reputed gangster. In an odyssey that takes him from Soho through Brooklyn, Jimmy confronts the past he's been avoiding for most of his adult life. Carillo neatly balances the quirky and sometimes hilarious events of the long night with artfully arranged flashbacks. Through conversations, memories and Jimmy's subtly portrayed point of view, the members of the Gambuzza family grow and become more complex, as does Jimmy himself. What started out as a wild ride to get rid of a corpse ends up as a touching and believable story of family love and survival, a testament to Carillo's storytelling abilities.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A second helping from TV-producer Carillo (Shepherd Avenue, 1986) in which fate, confusions, and simple mishap drag us--along with his yuppie wannabee hero--across the bridge into Brooklyn, where the secrets of one man's life are laid bare. ``Jimmy Gambar was not a man who often ignored his instincts, but when he did, he pulled the plug on the phone and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door to his better judgment.'' Jimmy, in fact, is a bit of a dweeb: A Manhattan architect ashamed of his working- class Italian origins, he changed his name (from ``Gambuzza'') and cut all ties with his family once he left Brooklyn for college. Since then, however, he's gone from strength to strength and now, somewhere in his 30s, is about to be made a junior partner. This is precisely when his troubles begin. First, he argues with his girlfriend and ends things by breaking up on the very night, New Year's Eve, on which he'd meant to propose. Then he picks up some random nasty girl at a bar and accidentally kills her at his place. Now what to do? Somehow Jimmy has the presence of mind to call his wiseguy brother Gus, and the two of them set about the unpleasant task of finding a place to dump the stiff. This means Brooklyn, of course, where the two are helped along the way by a rogues' gallery of hoodlums, priests, old girlfriends, and Mom herself--who's still living in the old place in Bay Ridge, waiting to welcome Jimmy back to the fold. In the end, the dawn brings more than the first day of a new year--it brings a new life for Jimmy, who sees that he can start over only by starting again. Predictable and strangely flat: All the ``characters'' can be recognized a block away, and the there's-no-place-like-home theme creaks beneath the heavy burden of stereotype. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When Jimmy Gambar, Brooklyn punk turned yuppie architect, breaks up with his girlfriend on New Year's Eve, abandoning a choice table at Windows on the World, he winds up in a downtown bar with a switchblade-packing whore who, in turn, winds up dead on the floor of Jimmy's Soho loft--an accident, yes, but dead all the same. Jimmy has no choice but to call his brother, Gus "The Ghost" Gambuzzo. So begins a long night's journey into day for the Gambuzzo brothers, who relive their misspent youths and sort through a closetful of unresolved emotions, all the while trying to figure out what to do with the stiff in the trunk. Reminiscent of the movie After Hours, this nightmarish picaresque novel mixes elements of slapstick, the surreal, and the absurd, all delivered in rambunctious, wildly profane Brooklynese. If the result leans a bit heavily on blue-collar sentimentality, Carillo generates more than enough wacky energy to keep most readers from caring. Bill Ott