The writer in residence at New York University details an extremely vivid story of the lives of the mixed community of blacks, immigrants, and Jews in the fictitious Chicken Hill suburb of Pottstown, Pa., in the twenties and thirties.
The very complex plot with a host of characters with peculiar nicknames like Monkey Pants, Big Soap, and Fatty is unpredictable, but captures the life of the very diverse denizens of the small town very well.
With my limited ability to visualize described scenes, I had some difficulty visualizing the exact layout when the deaf child Dodo is watching, hidden from view, on the ladder to the cellar, as the dreaded Dr Roberts enters the store aiming to capture him and send him to the institution in Pennhurst, but other than that the narrative is reasonably straightforward and it is not too difficult to keep at least the main character straight.
A good quote among many will give you a sense of the abundant humour and the quirky characters: “ Nobody outside of Pottstown had ever heard of Antes, of course, in part because he wrote trumpet sonatas that nobody played, and in part because the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band, which was composed of forty-five souls -numbskulls, pig farmers, heavy smokers, bums, drunks, cheerleaders, tomboys, bored college students, and any other white American in Montgomery County who could purse their lips tight enough to blast a noise through a trumpet- sounded like a cross between a crank engine trying to start on a cold October morning and a dying African silverback gorilla howling out its last.”
9/10
Thanks, Vera
The Passionate Reader 