1,001 Novels Collected: The Bronx

 The Bronx - 1,001 Novels:

A Library of America

1. Charming Billy (1998) by Alice McDermott

2. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991) - Julia Alvarez

3.  Don't Erase Me (1997) by Carolyn Ferrell

4. The Bait (1968) - Dorothy Uhnak

5.  Spidertown (1996) - Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

6.  Object Lessons (1991) - Anna Quindlen

7. The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life (1980) by Jerome Charyn

8.  The Blackboard Jungle (1954) by Evan Hunter

  The most interesting fact about the titles from the Bronx in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project is that two of the books are mis-mapped- Object Lessons and Charming Billy, which seems significant for a sub-chapter with only eight titles.  25% are mis-located!   The Bronx sub-chapter also illustrates another point that runs throughout the 1,001 Novels Project:  Poor people don't lead very interesting lives.  It doesn't really have much to do with race or gender, a person who grows up poor, never travels outside a ten block radius of their neighborhood, never goes to school beyond high school (if that), never meets anyone outside of their own milieu- it's a limited life experience.

  An author can still construct an interesting novel from those pieces, but it helps if the narrator has actually escaped that universe- which is the case for the two top books- Charming Billy  and Garcia Girls- both narrated by educated women who have escaped their back-story and are writing from the perspective of an escapee.  I'm not trying to say books written about poor people and their circumstances are boring, but I am saying that they tend to feature similar elements.   Also, I've said the same thing about the literature of the well-educated, upper middle/upper class, wealthy city dwellers for years, so this isn't an attack on the poor.

Published 1/16/24

The Bait (1968)

by Dorothy Unhak

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 5/105

The Bronx, New York City: 1/8

  As you'd expect from a state with 108 titles, there are states within states for New York.  Upstate, with its 22 titles qualifies as the third biggest state thus far (Massachussets, Maine) and The Bronx equals a smaller state like Vermont or Rhode Island. Pioneering female writer of police/detective fiction Dorothy Unhak is not a stranger to this blog- I read Policewoman memoir on the recommendation of a genre afficionado.  The Bait was her hit debut writing fiction- it won the Edgar Award the year it was released.  

  It certainly qualifies as a good novel about The Bronx- I believe all the action takes place there.  The story hasn't aged well- I'm not sure how many mentally defective serial murderers the 1001 Novels project is going to encompass but I think we are already at a half dozen 10 percent of the way through.  Are serially killers ever not mentally ill?  There are parts of The Bait that don't age particularly well- an incipient romance between the plucky girl detective and her District Attorney boss is cringe inducing, but the inter-cop banter is less racist than what you would expect from a more period accurate book.  Unhak, of course, was a cop, so she is clearly writing from that perspective.  A book like this, you half expect the N word to pop out at many minute, but thankfully there was no racial angle to the plot.

Published 3/13/24

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991)

by Julia Alvarez

The Bronx, NYC

New York: 31/105

The Bronx: 2/8

   How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent is an example of a book from 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that was both something I didn't like AND easily recognizable as a good book despite my personal preference.  Alvarez is widely recognized as a path-breaking Latina/Dominicana author, with novels(adult and YA) and poetry to he credit, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent inspired a generation of Latina authors- see, for example, In Praise of Julia Alvarez- published in the New York Times in 2018. 

    Unlike much of the Latno representation on the 1,001 Novels list, the characters of Garcia Girls are not members of the underclass, the patriarch is a Dominican doctor who is forced to flee political unrest in the Caribbean for New York City, the Bronx, specifically.  Alvarez takes a non-linear approach, telling the story in four parts in reverse chronological order. I actually the parts that took place back in the Dominican Republic more compelling and the material set in the US less so.   Like many immigrant narratives, I found myself more sympathetic to the parents, sacrificing for their children than the children themselves, who, as is the case in many immigrant centered bildungsroman's come off as selfish dicks.   It is amazing to me how many characters in immigrant centered fiction decide they want to study to be writers, rather than going to school for some practical reason and then writing on the side. 

  Immigrant children in bildungsroman fiction seem to never grasp that one does not have to study art to become an artist, and that studying art is no guarantee of a career in said art. 

Published 3/14/24

Spidertown (1996)

by Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

New York: 32/105

The Bronx: 3/8

   Spidertown is an extremely tedious bildungsroman about a teenage crack runner (don't call him a dealer!) living in the South Bronx in the 1990's.  As a criminal defense attorney working in federal court, I've spent many working days reviewing the text messages and phone calls of drug dealers so a three hundred page book on the subject wasn't going to add much to my understanding.  Nor, for that matter, is the love life of a 16 year old drug runner of particular interest.  Also, I didn't enjoy the fact that the whole book is written in South Bronx patois- there isn't an H pronounced properly in the whole book.  I didn't find any of characters convincing, nor did I find the author's depiction of the drug trade particularly accurate or compelling. 

   And, amazingly, Rodriguez makes the South Bronx of the crack era seem pretty boring culturally speaking- no references to the amazing NYC rap that dominated that era- rap that was often about dealing crack.  I've often had the thought- not generated by this book but from my work experience, that being a drug dealer is highly stressful and not particularly lucrative when one factors in the risks involved- whether at the hand of your own organization, a rival organization, the cops or the feds.  Also the lifespan of a professional drug dealer is often quite short and leaves the dealer unable to pursue a different line of work.  Other than manual labor I can't think of a worse way to make a living- personally I'd rather work at a fast food restaurant.

Published 3/15/24

The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life (1980)

by Jerome Charyn

New York: 33/105

The Bronx: 4/8

      I can't remember this ever happening before, but I could not find a single review of this novel on the internet.  I used Google Books and found a reference to a review that appeared in Kirkus Reviews but that review is not online.  The New York Times reviewed plenty of his books, and he wrote reviews for The New York Times, but they did not review this book, which is today what we would call a work of "auto-fiction." 

   Jerome Charyn is one of those authors who will be revisited when he passes away but appears to be done with publishing books.  While he published, he was incredibly prolific, with over 50 titles to his name, including a run of 12 detective novels about a Jewish detective in New York City, several graphic novels, works of non-fiction about Quentin Tarantino and Ping-Pong and a grip of fictionalized biographies of historical figures- his book about Emily Dickinson caused a minor uproar when he put it out in 2010.  

   The Catfish Man is an example of his auto-fiction.  Apparently he wrote more than one auto fictional book but I can't figure out which they are among his oeuvre.   The first fifty pages, describing his childhood in the Bronx and attending an arts magnet high school in Manhattan are interesting- particularly his participation in a nascent weight-lifting culture in the Bronx in the 1950's.  He attends Columbia University and finds work ghosting adventure stories for the uncle of a classmate under a pseudonym.  Up to this point, The Catfish Man is a pretty typical NYC bildungsroman.  After graduation however, the author-protagonist relocates to New Orleans in pursuit of a story about a New Orleans based 19th century chess master who met an early death.

   Here, The Catfish Man goes badly off the rails, as the protagonist loses his mind-quite literally- and is institutionalized outside of New Orleans.  He escapes, goes back to NY, then back to the South, landing outside of Texas, where he takes over a gang of latino child bandits.   Here, The Catfish Man lurches into incoherence.  I can't remember reading a book where mental illness is treated so casually and unsatisfactorily.  I couldn't tell you the nature of the mental illness at play or why it manifests itself. It makes the last two hundred pages of the book remarkably tedious to read. 

Published 3/18/24

The Blackboard Jungle (1954)

by Evan Hunter

New York: 35/105

The Bronx: 6/8

    Quite frequently I check out one of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of American books as an Audiobook for a library and find the experience simply excruciating.  I really learn about my own prejudices based on my positive/negative reactions- as clear an example of the "unconscious bias" phenomenon in my own life.  One of my most disturbing discoveries is that I have issues appreciating narrator voices that mimic the tones of the American underclass- of whatever ethnicity- I just find those voices grating and unpleasant, whether they be male or female, white, black, hispanic etc- a disturbing discovery and something that I am trying to address.  

   This book wasn't in that category, but it was in this category of American fiction from the earlier half of the 20th century that also gives me issues for different reasons.  

Published 3/19/24

Charming Billy (1998) 

by Alice McDermott

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 36/105

The Bronx: 5/8

* mis-mapped- should be in Queens....

   Charming Billy won the National Book Award in 1998.   Unclear why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has placed it in the Bronx instead of Queens.  To quote the first line of the New York Times review, "The Irish Catholic world Alice McDermott writes about in her magical new novel, ''Charming Billy,'' is located in Queens, not Dublin."   McDermott is one of those writers "celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-century American life" who I have studiously avoided for my entire life.  Indeed, the 1,001 Novels project I've undertaken is specifically an attempt to rectify this purposeful omission. That means I'm trying to keep a positive and optimistic attitude about reading hundreds of books about alcoholic ethnic-white Americans and sad teenage girls trying to get out of their bedrooms.

  At least Charming Billy is an award winner, another category I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I go through this list.  Additionally, Charming Billy is neither a work of detective fiction nor a YA title, so that also made the reading experience tolerable.  Finally, there is no denying that Charming Billy is chock filled with literary technique- using a kaleidoscopic approach that takes the reader backwards and forwards in time and space (from Queens to Long Island and back, at least.)    The Billy of the title is a recently deceased alcoholic, and the book explores his lifelong "great disappointment"-  being abandoned by an Irish girl-woman who promises to return from a visit home to marry him and subsequently throws him over for a local lad- and the impact it may or may not have had on his lifetime of alcoholism. 

   McDermott and her characters are not naive dummies- the narrator- who I think is a younger sister of the extended clan- early on questions the premise that a lifetime of alcoholism  could possibly be triggered by a single romantic disappointment.   But here we are, three hundred pages about the impact of said romantic disappointment.   Also, this is another book on the 1,001 Novels list where the dysfunction of a single family member ends up defining the life of all the other family members.   There are a lot of those books on this list.

Published 3/22/24

Don't Erase Me (1997) 

by Carolyn Ferrell

South Bronx, New York

New York: 39/105

The Bronx: 7/8

   Don't Erase Me, a harrowing collection of short-stories about materially disadvantaged young women growing up in the South Bronx in the early 1990's, closes out the Bronx sub-chapter of editor Susan Straight's 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. Ferrell published this collection back in 1997- one of the stories ended up making it into more than one anthology and Ferrell landed a job teaching at Sarah Larwrence.  She didn't publish another book until July of 2021 when Dear Ms. Metropolitan came out- a grim tale about three young women who are kidnapped, tortured and raped for a decade by a neighbor.   Don't Erase Me isn't quite that grim- although several of the included short stories- all about young minority women living in the South Bronx (except for one that takes place in Orange County for some reason), recall multiple tropes that I remember from 90's newspapers.  In one story, eighth graders compete to be "school wives"- i.e. get pregnant and married in the eighth grade.  In another, a single mother of three struggles with her HIV diagnosis, which she apparently contracted from her step-father.  In a third, a gay African American student is murdered by classmates. 

  Also worth mentioning that Don't Erase Me is not a novel, it's a collection of short stories.  I think this is the first short story collection on the list and it's hard to see why this would be the one book to pick in a project putatively dedicated to the novel.

  It is all pretty dark stuff, and frankly, every novel in this sub-chapter was pretty dark.  Not to tip my forthcoming summary post, but How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez, which was recently named to Atlantic Magazine's Top 150 American Novels list, looks like the class of the bunch.  Charming Billy is also up there because it's a prize winner, but the rest, yikes.  Not fun. None of these books were fun and a couple were positively excruciating. 

Published 5/16/24

Object Lessons (1991)

by Anna Quindlen

Kenwood, The Bronx, New York

The Bronx: 8/8 *

New York: 66/105

* This book is mis-mapped on the home page of the 1,001 Novels project.

   Object Lessons is mis-mapped on the home page of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  They mapmakers have placed it on the edge of Washington Square Park, but the book takes place in the Bronx.  No one goes to Manhattan in this book- the furthest they travel from the Bronx is Queens.  Quindlen is an authorial jack-of-all-trades with a career in journalism, both fact based and opinion, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.  She wrote a memoir that was made into a movie and she's written 10 novels, the most recent of which was published this year. 

   Object Lessons was her first work of fiction- which Wikipedia calls a coming-of-age book about a 13 year old girl growing up in a toxic extended family headed by a stereotypical Irish American patriarch, John Scanlan.  I actually thought the central plot was that of the 13 year old's mother, an Italian-American who marries into this family and spends literally the rest of her life complaining about it (with merit, to be sure).   I found this entire book almost indescribably sad- another American  novel filled with characters who don't go anywhere, do anything, achieve anything or change anything about their circumstances, except for the villain/patriarch, who is hated by everyone for actually accomplishing something in his life and then trying to hold the rest of his clan to his standards.