Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic episodes, the book details the collapse of a basically decent, homogeneous, and honorable group of people into a greedy, ignorant, and slipshod conglomeration, corrupted by money made available by the war economy. The neighborhood as a whole is the protagonist, although there are many characters who become familiar. Moving the way memory does, the narrative skips from episode to episode in no conventional time sequence, projecting indelible flashes of the past as they strike the mind. Gilbert Sorrentino has beautifully encompassed a section of America in this very human, funny, intelligent novel which re-creates perfectly the mood and the time of its inhabitants and its past.
The spirit is tragic, and the tragedy is America's as capsulized in the slow warp of one of those richly mixed neighborhoods that once gave credence to the myth of the melting pot. And with that myth, the American dream of making it - the shiny property of hopeful new immigrants but corrosive and corroding so quickly that for their children it will amount to little more than desperate self-justification or an equally desperate wish to get away - unlikely, unless as a soldier. So goes the implicit theme, but the explicit is considerably livelier, a kind of kinetic scrapbook of sketches, portraits, ephemera from a section of Brooklyn during the years 1935 to 1951. The glancing, non-chronological arrangement and the fascination (in many cases the brilliance) of individual pieces mute the bitterness but also tend to obscure causal relationships so that what comes through most clearly is a general sense of souring as poverty and expectation fade together. Ethnic, economic and especially period distinctions are impressively subtle, with no romanticism but the original; and the brief, essential characterizations could scarcely have a more appropriate effect - raucous, tender boys whose faces are forgettable but whose growth into suffering and bigotry is not. (Kirkus Reviews)
