Synopsis
Alice Smail, a guitar player and short order cook, Dennis Francis, a painter and plumber, Max Crick, a drug dealer, and their friends in Haledon, New Jersey, have to deal with real life and responsibility and the consequences of refusing to face them
Reviews
Anomie is raised to the level of a deadly virus in this first novel (winner of Pushcart's Tenth Annual Editors' Book Award) about wasted youth in suburban New Jersey. ``All over Haledon, kids were coming apart.'' Kids like punk- rocker Alice, 23 years old, unemployed, and less motivated than ever now that her band has broken up; kids like Lane, who has tried every drug on the menu and is debating when to kill himself, now or later. They all remember their contemporary Mike Maas, who set himself on fire ``next to I-81, in a marsh'': though Mike is ``just a memory,'' he's a memory that won't go away. And most of them still live at home, though resisting their moms' influence; as for fathers, ``well, there were fathers, but there were no dads.'' The city (meaning New York) is within reach, but so what? For bass guitarist Scarlett, it was just ``so much disappointment,'' and it freaked Lane out so badly he had to call his mom to come get him. So it goes in this slice-of-life, which has no plot but, rather, a central episode in which Lane slips off the roof at an April Fools' Day party. (He survives, and even rediscovers, tentatively, his appetite for life.) Desolate lives, desolate landscape; but Moody paints with too broad a brush (and adopts too smart-alecky a tone) for his vision to have power. Also, he shortchanges his kids, presenting them as inarticulate zombies without going below the surface to plumb Alice's malevolence (she was deeply implicated in Lane's rooftop tumble and Mike Maas's self-immolation) or Lane's terror (what did happen to him in the city?); and this glib inattentiveness proves fatal. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
These New Jersey kids have it all: rage, poverty, depression, paranoia, violent sex, cheap booze, mental hospitals, nihilism, street drugs, suicide. It's an American nightmare set to a blaring punk-and-thrash soundtrack. What are their prospects: "Nothing had come since high school and . . . nothing would come of the years ahead." What about their parents: "Lower down, Ruthie loved disaster." Not deeper down, just lower. Work is a trap, family a sick joke, and not even fantasy brings relief: "Fantasies are like ideals. . . . Close in on them and they move. Further out, mostly." Unlike Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho ( LJ 1/91) and similar rolls in the sleaze, this book is well and subtly written. You may not initially identify with these folks, but you learn just how they feel, why they try to escape, and why running solves nothing. In the end, can there be any hope that a cynical heavy metal bimbo and a fragile former mental patient will help each other turn their lives around? Well, maybe. This winner of Pushcart's Tenth Annual Editors' Book Award is very powerful. Highly recommended.
- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. at Chico
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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