Richard Price's The Wanderers

This afternoon I read Richard Price's The Wanderers (1974) and really enjoyed it. It is about a gang in the North Bronx (my old neighborhood) in 1962 and how they slowly drift apart as they grow older. I enjoyed it partly because of its depiction of the Bronx, including businesses I would go to like the White Castle on Allerton Avenue and Alexander's on Fordham Road, partly because of Price's gift for description (there isn't much food in the book, but it made me hungry every time it was mentioned), and partly because Price makes the reader care about the characters even though most of them are hoodlums.


The novel depicts the desperation felt by young Americans at the beginning of the 1960s that led to the societal tumult at the end of the decade in a heartwrenching, mesmerizing way. I couldn't put the book down. I don't feel very articulate about it yet because I am still processing it in quiet awe. It put David Bowie's "Star" in my head, mostly for the understated, needy, defeated mood of the music, but also because of the lyrics: "Tony went to fight in Belfast / Rudi stayed at home to starve / I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star." The characters in The Wanderers all want to do something to break out of their routine, soul-crushing lives. If they could just find that one thing to make it "worthwhile" for themselves and the ones they care about...

The Flying Troutmans

I just finished reading Miriam Toews's novel The Flying Troutmans, and quite enjoyed it. The plot is not especially fascinating (it's a typical "road trip" narrative), but the characters are fantastic. The 11-year-old girl Phebes is especially good. She is a precocious child similar to Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (her talents are artistic rather than scientific, though). Her adult-like persona is almost unrealistic at times, but Toews does a good job of mixing in enough childishness to make her believable. Phebes's brother Logan's single-minded devotion to basketball is also well-done, and is somewhat humorous because he's Canadian (Steve Nash notwithstanding).


The pastiche of pop culture references that Toews mixes in is also entertaining because of its highly eclectic nature. It includes Fight Club (109), the Bible (83), Sylvia Plath (167), Scrabble (63), David Bowie (125), the Beatles (83), and James Bond (116) among others. The novel has a postmodern feel despite its realist chronological narrative, in part because of its pastichiness and in part because of its continued emphasis that hoping for centers in human existence is futile: nothing is universal or infallible. It manages to convey this somber message in an enjoyable, often humorous way, though.