"If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

This superb short novel is a searing indictment of white America in the 1970s (and it may not be a whole lot better now) seen from the perspective of a black family living in New York. The narrator, Tish, is pregnant with her first child; her lover and long-time friend Fonny, a sculptor, is in jail, on remand, not yet convicted. They are trying to raise the money for a lawyer. In one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever read, Tish tells Fonny's church-going mother and sisters, and his drunkard of a father, about the baby. The narrative, told in first-person with an intriguing mixture of past and present tense, jumps backwards and forwards in time as Trish recounts the events that led up to Fonny's arrest and the family's efforts to get him acquitted. The tension builds to an almost excruciating climax as the baby develops in her womb towards its birthday.

The power of this novel lies in its characters. Although the city as a whole is cast as the villain, most of the individuals are shown as good guys struggling to survive, often in ways that bring them into conflict with others (Fonny's mother, Senor Alvarez, Mrs Rogers), but often in ways that mean they give help generously and selflessly (Jaime, Levy). 

Told in uncompromising language, and this is an outstanding story written by a novelist at the very pinnacle of the writer's art.

Selected quotes:

• "New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It's got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it's got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that's exactly the smell of New York in the summertime." (p 8)
• "Some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins." (p 18)
• "I don't think America is God's gift to anybody - if it is God's days have got to be numbered." (p 24)
• "That God these people say they serve ... has got a very nasty sense of humour." (p 24)
• "It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin." (p 30)
• "The death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age ... took many forms, though ... the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heap of their lives, like flies." (p 32)
• "Between the mother's prayers, which were like curses, and the sisters' tears, which were like orgasms, Fonny didn't stand a chance." (p 33) The power of this line is the choice of oxymoronic similes, to disrupt your thoughts, and to make you think.
• "He had found his centre, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country." (p 33)
• "Although I cannot say that your beauty rest did you a hell of a lot of good, I do admire the way you persevere." (p 36)
• "These days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people, especially most white people, are lost." (p 40)
• "Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer." (p 64)
• "He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down, he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms." (p 76) Another powerful oxymoron expressing the complexity of human emotion.
• "A fool never says he's a fool." (p 104)
• "Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart." (p 106)
• "The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me." (p 106)
• "People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision." (p 108)
• "The rind of regret" (p 131) What a stunning description.
• "The blue sky above, and the bright sun, the blue sea, here, the garbage dump, there. It takes a moment to realize that the garbage dump is the favella. Houses are built on it - dwellings; some on stilts, as though attempting to rise above the dung-heap. Some have corrugated metal roofs. Some have windows. All have children." (p 142)
• "The righteous must be able to locate the damned." (p 168): The excuse for prison!

Not only does this little story pack an incredible emotional punch (and the ending of the book is different from that of the film; otherwise the film adaptation is very loyal) but the characters are beautifully drawn and their struggles to thrive given their circumstances are epic.

March 2022; 173 pages

Also by this author:

• Giovanni's Room: another classic, this time about a love between two men
• Go Tell It On the Mountain
• Another Country

This book reminded me of the poems collected in Poor by Caleb Femi, about the plight of young black boys living in London 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"House of Thieves" by Charles Belfoure

 New York, 1886. A society architect is blackmailed into helping a gangster plan daring raids on banks and society mansions. The architect's entire family, one by one, discover the thrills of illicit activity.

The author has clearly done a lot of research about New York of that period. Some paragraphs, for example when describing the menus of a society dinner, sound as if he has transcribed his research notes. 

From this situation, the plot development is entirely cliched and predictable. The characters are predictably two-dimensional. Complex human emotions are described in a few definitive sentences (we are told, repeatedly, that George's gambling problem is a sickness). The amorality of the story is immense: bit parts are killed off in a few sentences and, although the architect is said to suffer remorse and horror about the murders he witnesses, the reader doesn't feel that. The entire story is plot driven.

And the plot is predictable, repetitive and boring. There's a heist. There's another heist. And then another. There's an informer. The architect's brother is a policeman.  There is gambling, drinking, prostitution, pick-pocketing ... There are society balls (and, of course, rigid moral codes: these are regarded as straight-jackets against which the crime spree seems like entrepreneurial free enterprise). This is a story that has been written many times before. 

Not my sort of tale.

July 2021; 413 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Deacon King Kong" by James McBride

This book was chosen by Barack Obama as a favorite read of 2020. Man must have good taste.

Why does 'Sportcoat', the drunk deacon of a church in Brooklyn, shoot Deems, his one-time teenage protege and now the neighbourhood's drug dealer. Set in a housing project in New York in 1969, when the area is changing from predominantly Irish and Italian to  African American from the southern states, and when the old-time dock-side smugglers of cigarettes and white goods are under threat from the new wave of organized crime based around heroin?

This brilliant novel has fantastic characters, many of whom seem to have walked out of the pages of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, like Sportcoat, always talking to his dead wife Hettie, and his pal Hot Sausage, who has intermittent but incredible sex with Sister Bibb the voluptuous church organist, Potts the honest cop, 'the Elephant' bachelor crime lord and his gardening mother, Earl the incompetent enforcer of the drug's gang boss, centenarian Sister Paul, and the Haitian Sensation:

• "Reverend Gee was a handsome, good-natured man who liked a joke, though at the time he was fresh off scandal himself, having recently been spotted over at Silky's Bar on Van Marl Street trying to convert a female subway conductor with boobs the size of Milwaukee." (Ch 1)
• "The funeral director, old white-haired Morris Hurly, whomn everybody called Hurly Girly behind his back because, well ... everybody knew Morris was ... well, he was cheap and talented and always two hours late with the body" (Ch 1)
• "Sister Bibb, the volutptuous church organist ... was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance." (Ch 1)

The prose is brilliant. My favourite moments came when the author put out an idea and kept elaborating it, often in a single breathless sentence, such as:

• "If your visiting preacher had diabetes and weighed 450 pounds and gorged himself with too much fatback and chicken thighs at the church repast and your congregation needed a man strong enough to help the tractor-trailer-sized wide-body off the toilet seat and out onto the bus back to the Bronx so that somebody could lock up the dang church and go home - why, Sportcoat was your man." (Ch 2) 
• "The young white social worker with bog boobs who couldn't clap on beat and wouldn't have known a salsa rhythm if it were dressed up like an elephant in a bath tub, but whose wide hips moved with the kind of rhythm every man in the Cause could hear a thousand miles away." (Ch 10)

There are also some wonderful similes:

• "To get within sight of the cheese and then to witness the supply run out was akin to experiencing sudden coitus interruptus." (Ch 1)
• "They sounded like a diesel engine trying to crank on a cold October morning." (Ch 10)
• "You looks like a character witness for a nightmare." (Ch 24)

And some brilliant, if sometimes obscure, proverbs:

• "Better to be a fat man in a graveyard than a thin man in a stew." (Ch 10)

And it keeps giving with more magical moments:

• "Why would you do that? That would be the smart thing to do, which you is allergic to." (Ch 17)
• "You get to know a man after you seen his straight and narrow." (Ch 17)
• "Young girls who had once waved at him had matured into unwed drug-addict mothers." (Ch 21)
• "Through the blisters of thought, he saw Elefante watching him." (Ch 21)
• "One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty." (Ch 21)
• "At least I ain't got enough wrinkles in my face to hold ten days of rain." (Ch 24)

Brilliant, vibrant, alive. March 2021; 370 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"Satan's Circus" by Mike Dash

Satan's Circus was the nickname for an area of Manhattan just west of Broadway where gambling dens and brothels flourished in the years leading up to the First World War. Local politicians and the policemen they appointed ran protection rackets which grew fat on the ill-gotten gains of these businesses. Corruption was rife and to be a 'grafter' didn't mean you worked hard, it meant you took bribes.

Herman Rosenthal was a small time crook who ran remarkably unsuccessful illegal gambling dens. Convinced that his long run of bad luck came from his rivals tipping off the police, he decided to blow the whistle and contacted a journalist. His associates attempted to bribe him to leave town but when he refused they became convinced they would have to silence him more permanently. Despite realising he was being followed and being considerably frightened, he persisted and spilled the beans in two long newspaper articles. Shortly afterwards he was gunned down outside a hotel by four gunmen who escaped on the running board of their getaway taxi. The taxi was soon discovered and the men captured. It was then a matter of finding out who was Mr Big behind the plan by the time-honoured American way of offering immunity to some in order to persuade them to testify against their confederates. In this way the District Attorney constructed a case against a corrupt cop called Charley Becker. With the help of a remarkably biassed trial judge and despite a strong of unconvincing witnesses (including the memorable Bald Jack Rose who was completely hairless and had a face that was exactly like that of a vampire), and despite a successful appeal leading to a retrial, another conviction and a second, unsuccessful appeal, Becker died in the electric chair.

This is an exciting, if squalid story. The author does his best with a large cast of characters but it is not always easy to follow who did what (the murder was carried out by four gunmen, at least four other criminals were involved in organising it, there was also the taxi driver and the taxi owner, there were a strong of other related criminals and then there are the police and the lawyers and all the families of all the men). There are some wonderful nicknames (eg Gyp the Blood) and it certainly served as the inspiration for at least some of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls although this was the era just before prohibition and the rise of the famous New York gangsters such as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schulz.

The epilogue traces the subsequent careers of the low lifes mentioned on these pages. Arnold Rothstein (who was celebrated in fiction as The Brain in Guys and Dolls and Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby) was the man who fixed the 1919 World Baseball Series; he was shot dead in 1928. Winfield Sheehan who may have been involved with a corrupt Gambling Commission for Tammany Hall became a movie producer and discovered Rita Hayworth and John Wayne. And Charlie Becker's son became a professor of Sociology.

This was a fascinating book, lifting the lid on an underworld whilst managing to remind us always of the precarious and seedy existences the criminals led. The conviction of the policeman was clearly a travesty of justice but on the other hand he had accumulated a remarkable amount of graft in a very short time so he wasn't a nice man. Nevertheless, the description of his electrocution is horrendous.

Great reading. October 2015; 354 pages

"Sexus" by Henry Miller

This is a heavily autobiographical account of Miller's life in 1920s New York. He works for the Cosmococcic (sometimes Cosmodemonic) Telegraph Company as Employment Manager but he is always broke and always borrowing money off his friends to fund his low-life adventures. The book starts with him meeting Mara (later Mona); before ten pages are out they are fucking in the back of a taxicab. From then on, Miller rambles on about his hatred of the Company who employ him (goodness knows why they keep him on), his longing to be a writer, and the meaning of life whilst visiting his friends (artists, doctors, musicians etc) and having sex with his wife, his wife's friend, his new girlfriend, the girlfriends of his friends and almost anyone else he seems to meet. These encounters are described in frank detail and are as casual as could be. He is a stunning lover: he is clearly able to make a woman orgasm as soon as he penetrates her, she orgasms time and time again, he has multiple orgasms, he never gets anyone pregnant (except that the wife has "the child"), and he never contracts an STI (although his penis does get some spore spots but the doctor gives him a clean bill of health and he puts it down to having had sex with a menstruating woman).

Maybe he was a great lover. Apparently he had an affair with Anais Nin (who wrote Delta of Venus); later his wife did too. But most of the descriptions seem a little unlikely, superhuman.

In short, I found it a difficult book to read. It is little more than rambling self-indulgence interrupted by pornography. It reminded me of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (which was written before Sexus although after Miller's earlier works) but I found the energy of Kerouac carried his interior monologues along a lot better than Miller's; Kerouac also seems to use fewer characters and to have more structure. Sexus needs editing, trimming, structuring.

There are some delightful moments. I loved the description of the elevated train as a "ride across the rooftops" giving a romantic feel to what must have been rather urban and decaying. There is a brilliant description of a woman as "Her passport was in order but her luggage excited suspicion". But much of it was boring.

September 2015; 463 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Victim" by Saul Bellow

Asa Leventhal works as a journalist on a trade paper in just post-war New York. It is very hot. His wife is away, helping her mother to move house. He get a call from his brother's wife (his brother is working away) about her very sick son and he has to trek across the city to help. Then, in the park, he meets a man he knew years ago who explains that Asa ruined his life.

The dialogue reminds me of Beckett, it is stilted and sometimes you get the feeling that neither character is actually talking to the other but rather that they are both rehearsing their own anxieties. But the matter-of-fact way in which the stranger, Albee, insinuates himself into Leventhal's life, trading on Leventhal's guilt and good will, and the way in which this relationship changes the way that Leventhal acts to others, making him paranoid and angry, is like a Pinter play. Add in the nightmarish quality of the setting, New York in a heat wave, full of dark and shadows, but at the same time rooted in mundane reality, everyday and banal, is pure Kafka.

An Anerican classic. December 2014; 264 pages

"Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Hubert Selby Jr

Banned as obscene in British courts in 1967, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a collection of interlinked stories about poor people in Brooklyn. Each story is introduced with a Biblical quotation. Then the action gets going. In long paragraphs in which people think or talk or argue and using many phonetically spelt words such as krist and fukim, Selby captures the rhythms, the styles and the interior monologues of his characters.

And what characters they are. We start with a scene at the Greeks which ends when the boys go out and beat up a sailor from the naval base. Then we discover Georgette. 'She' is a fairy addicted to benzedrine. After getting cut in the cross fire of a Harry and Vinnie knife throwing competition she is sent to the place she dreads most, her home, where her brother tells her off for being a fairy, and then she sneaks out and goes to a gin and benzedrine fuelled party with other fairies and ends up sucking Vinnie's cock, Vinnie being her ex-prison rough trade boyfriend.

Tralala is a young girl who discovers that she can get money by being laid by drunken sailors and then stealing their money when they pass out. She enjoys this and enjoys the sex but she becomes addicted to this way of life and ends up a pathetic tart being gang-banged by by the boys from the Greeks.

Harry is shop steward at an engineering works and causes a great deal of trouble. The management engineer a strike hoping to get rid of him. He finds purpose in the strike although at the same time he discovers a strange attraction for cross-dressing gay men. His role in the strike enables him to spend big, charging it to expenses at the corrupt union. But when the strike ends his life outside drag bars has lost its meaning and his boyfriend throws him over because he can't lavish money on her so he ends up pathetic and beaten up.

Finally there is a 'coda' which explores a number of interlinked lives at the Housing Project. The men are useless, mostly out of work but unwilling to help their wives at home and with the kids, the women are long-suffering, taking a great deal of abuse for the sake of their husband's hard cock at the end of the day. The children just suffer. No life is happy, even the slightly more couth ones.

This is a depressing nightmare vision of life in America's underclass. But it is brilliantly written.

Difficult to read but fantastic. September 2014; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God