Monday, Jun. 14, 1982
An Underdog-Eat-Underdog World
By R.Z. Sheppard
FORSAKING ALL OTHERS by Jimmy Breslin; Simon & Schuster; 431 pp.; $16.95
Jimmy Breslin's colleagues at the old New York Herald Tribune used to wonder how much of his Runyonesque column was fiction. The question was settled with the suggestion that Jimmy did not write fiction because he had enough trouble making up the truth. That, in part, was how the New Journalism was born. From barroom, cloakroom and police station, Breslin cut slices of life in which big guys squeezed little guys; people who read too many books didn't know what they were talking about; and politicians were vain, greedy and corrupt--except Bobby Kennedy, who got shot as Breslin watched. Nobody wrote a better eyewitness piece about the assassination.
The usual Breslin column, which now appears in the New York Daily News, is marked by aggressive resentment and romantic disillusion. His monosyllabic prose rolls down the page with the subtlety of a bowling ball, although the kingpins he aims at and often hits are automatically respotted with no lasting damage. Breslin's ability to entertain is another matter. His Archie Bunker accent and appearance as a working-class wide body put him in beer commercials and a movie. It was not too hard to parlay his writing talents into popular hardbacks. His fiction to date: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a spoof of the Mafia; World Without End, Amen, the travels of a New York Irish policeman to warring Northern Ireland; and .44 (written with Dick Schaap), a novelized exploitation of the Son of Sam murders.
Forsaking All Others is another depiction of an underdog-eat-underdog world, bordered on the south by small-town Puerto Rico and on the north by the slums of the South Bronx. To the west, living in suburban New Jersey, are the absentee Mafia lords of the drug trade. To the east, in the modest neighborhoods of Queens and Long Island, are the homes of the cops. The Puerto Rican hoods hate their poverty and lack of power. The Italian gangsters despise the Puerto Ricans because they say "New Jessey" and are competitors in crime. The cops believe that everybody is guilty for just being alive.
To this unholy trinity, Breslin brings adventure, excitement and a commuter version of West Side Story. His three principal characters are Teenager, a Caribbean-born drug dealer; Maximo, a young Harvard-educated lawyer with a desire to serve his Latin community; and Nicki, daughter of a gang boss, who lives in New Jersey with her parents while her hus band serves time in prison.
Breslin's Teenager is a monster of social determinism: "Rising out of a blank life, he found his identity depended upon his level of violence . . . His search was for domination, his basic urge was to destroy; sexual conquest for the sake of humiliating a woman was the first duty of a man to himself." Stretched between a Hispanic past and American future, Max imo has the makings of a tragic figure, "his feet slipping each time he tried to turn about." Nicki, foulmouthed, man hungry and bound by family code and prejudice, is almost endearing as she figuratively holds her nose to conduct a secret affair with Maximo.
Breslin attaches a long and sultry fuse to the plot's ethnic charge. There are many preliminary explosions as Teenager casually murders his way through the business day. At times, this nonchalance is carried too far: "Teenager shot Gigi in the back of the head with the gun in his left hand and Victor in the back of the head with the gun in his right hand. He fired once more into each head. He stuffed the guns into his belt and dove out of the Lincoln on the street side, so schoolyard kids would not see him.
Benny drove up in his Mercedes. As the car pulled away, Teenager could see Gigi and Victor with their heads against the seat backs. Teenager began to think of a place to get rid of the guns. Then, like a bored cat, he began to lick the blood from his hands."
The author has been accused of many things, though never of wearying his readers. Some, however, may be dissatisfied with the loose connections between Teenager's story and that of Maximo and Nicki. Both story lines meander and end abruptly as if Breslin had run out of anecdotes. But he is a brilliant descriptive journalist and compensates on nearly every page with energetic, often humorous scenes.
Much of Forsaking All Others will be read with a measure of disbelief. On the other hand, the public has been so saturated with the pornography of violence and infernal visions of the underclass that there may be little disbelief left. Breslin plays to this possibility with a stylistic naturalism that renders his characters as bundles of nerve endings and flurries of reflexes. They eventually numb moral response. When, for example, a man is dis membered with a chain saw, it does not seem to be an illustration of bestiality but a demonstration of the state of the art .
-- By R.Z. Sheppard
Excerpt
" Once, migrations caused statues to be erected and poems to be written . . . There is no monument, however, to the new immigrants, the blacks who came to the South Bronx from Jacksonville, Florida, and Americus, Georgia, and the Puerto Ricans from San Pedro and Santurce and Salinas and Ponce. There is not even official recognition that these new immigrants accomplished something that nobody else could do: turn the United States into two actual nations, one country of about one hundred ninety-five million whites and the other . . . of about sixty-five million. "
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