This book appealed to me initially because it reminded me of my all time top 10 faves of life--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This book takes place in the 30's and 40's in a tenement slum in Albany, NY. The narrator is Jean-Luc, a boy who is 8 at the beginning and 16 at the end. He lives with his mother and younger sister in this slum. His father is a con artist who ditched the family there and the mother has some kind of lung illness so that whenever she works she gets really sick if she overdoes it. So Jean-Luc takes care of the family by supplementing the welfare checks with whatever money he can earn doing odd jobs.
The first 1/3 of this book, I really loved it, the 2nd 1/3 I thought was OK, by the end I was really annoyed and just wanted it to be over.
I am not a fan of what I term "depressing" books--I do not enjoy stories of hardship and poverty and personal disaster. I get nervous feelings in my stomach reading about people who are broke or lose jobs or drink away paychecks. I don't find them inspiring if they turn out semi-OK in the end, because getting there is just too painful. The major exception to this rule is my adoration of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because there is a spark in Francie Nolan that made me always think that she was going to get out just fine. And that book has a more happy ending than most, too. But this Pearl Street book was just too much sadness and woe at the end. The first half showed a lot of the pluck and making do stories of poverty that were kind of funny or upbeat. But then as Jean-Luc got older and his mother got more desperate, things got more depressing. Plus the mother is kind of a jerk, and he put up with WAY more than I wanted to read about in terms of her being really unkind and ungrateful toward him and others who tried to help her or her kids.
As for this one-named author, Trevanian...I'm not sure who the heck he is. I looked him up online and Trevanian is a pen name for some other guy and the jacket bio thing says Trevanian lives in the Basque country of Spain. But the bio online about the real man who wrote this book (he recently passed away) made no mention of his living abroad. But in this Pearl Street book, the Jean-Luc character reflects this entire story from the adult memory point of view and that adult lives in Europe at the end of the book--so is this a fiction within fiction kind of thing? Like, the author made up a writer named Trevanian, then he made up a life story for Trevanian to use in writing an autobiographical novel? In some ways, that's really cool but in other ways it makes my head spin just a tad. Probably because of my propensity to think too hard??
At any rate, this book had its moments, the literacy of it was fantastic--the vocabulary was really amazing and intelligent and that was a pleasure to read. But the overall feeling I had when I closed it was negative and depressing, so it didn't leave me feeling like I liked the book, even though if you had asked me the day I started it, I'd have said it was good.
C'est la vie, on to the next novel!!
No comments:
Post a Comment