"On Friday afternoon, Alice watched her husband die on television..."
Alice is a former social worker who runs a state agency for delinquent adolescents. But when she tries to help Jimmy, a homeless youth she finds sleeping in her garage, she gets in over her head.
Alice's husband Sebastian is an actor, a soap-opera star suffering from a midlife crisis, who abandons the financial security of the soaps and the off-Broadway company he manages to make a dubious film overseas.
Alice has a younger brother, Mark, a former hippie with a math degree, whose wife Celia has supported him for years. Celia is the lighting designer for Sebastian's theater, longing for wider horizons and a baby before she is thirty-five.
Then there's Claire, Alice and Sebastian's daughter, a back-packing tomboy who wants nothing to do with her parents' social milieu, or with the opposite sex. Until she meets Jimmy.
Jimmy is the catalyst, a young man in search of an identity. It is his interaction with all of these personalities against a background of supporting characters - actors, both has-beens and will-bes, a drunken, redneck playwright, the special twilight people known as the stage crew, social workers, cab drivers, nosy neighbors, and assorted crazies - that brings to life a cross-section of one neighborhood in a small town called New York City.
First published in 1981, this reissue has been tweaked a bit, but not without losing its original sense of time and place.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Alice is a former social worker who runs a state agency for delinquent adolescents. But when she tries to help Jimmy, a homeless youth she finds sleeping in her garage, she gets in over her head.
Alice's husband Sebastian is an actor, a soap-opera star suffering from a midlife crisis, who abandons the financial security of the soaps and the off-Broadway company he manages to make a dubious film overseas.
Alice has a younger brother, Mark, a former hippie with a math degree, whose wife Celia has supported him for years. Celia is the lighting designer for Sebastian's theater, longing for wider horizons and a baby before she is thirty-five.
Then there's Claire, Alice and Sebastian's daughter, a back-packing tomboy who wants nothing to do with her parents' social milieu, or with the opposite sex. Until she meets Jimmy.
Jimmy is the catalyst, a young man in search of an identity. It is his interaction with all of these personalities against a background of supporting characters - actors, both has-beens and will-bes, a drunken, redneck playwright, the special twilight people known as the stage crew, social workers, cab drivers, nosy neighbors, and assorted crazies - that brings to life a cross-section of one neighborhood in a small town called New York City.
First published in 1981, this reissue has been tweaked a bit, but not without losing its original sense of time and place.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Margaret Wander Bonanno's Callbacks