Floyd Harbor (2019) by Joel Mowdy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Floyd Harbor (2019)

by Joel Mowdy 

321 Neighborhood Road, Mastic Beach, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 16/26

New York: 93/103

   This book of inter-connected short stories is set largely over the course of a couple of days in the community known as Mastic Beach- if you Google "Floyd Harbor" you will learn that it is a kind of alternative place name in the area- the area town of Shirley considered changing their name to Floyd Harbor in the 80's but the decision was voted down by the local community.  It's a book that genuinely sent me to the map, since I was unaware of this colony of economically depressed white people (you could call them "white trash") living a proverbial stones throw from the wealthier communities of northern Long Island.  I guess you could call it south-central Long Island.

   Mostly, it reminded me of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful, set a couple hundred miles north of Long Island, but with a similar case of wayward, damaged young people, doing their best to destroy their own future while avoiding responsibility in the present.   Recently, I've been homing in on the fact that I do not enjoy listening to most of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of America as Audiobooks and simply prefer checking a few out from the library at a time and running through them in a weekend.  I read Floyd Harbor on my Kindle- which is a good format/book fit- reading a series of interconnected short stories on the Kindle.  Short stories, generally speaking, go better with reading on a device, full length novels are better read as a book if possible.  Audiobooks are best for books the reader really enjoys and books that are so long that you will never read them. 

   In terms of understanding Long Island based on the books chosen for 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, the only time in my own life I've been to Long Island was to the northern part for Thanksgiving my freshman year in college because a high school relative had family who owned a home up there.  I remember smoking a joint and being freezing.  I've also been listening to the Power Broker, by Robert Caro about Robert Moses.  The first 15 hours of the 60 plus hour Audiobook is all about Long Island, since that was Moses' first major project- lots of talk about early twentieth century Long Island there.

      Mowdy only got a "new and notable" sentence in the New York Times which describes characters "struggling to overcome poverty and trauma."   At least they are somewhat interesting people and Mowdy does a good job describing the drug use- not always the case in trauma-lit.