“I’d left a bed and a mother to sleep under storefront awnings right beside men who thought a homeless girl was a warm radiator they could put their hands to. I’d slept in shelters, in abandoned buildings. I’d been beaten. And at the start of every new day, I still believed I could choose my own beginning, one that was scrubbed clean of everything past.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 8, 2009)

Nami Mun’s Miles From Nowhere is a bold and gritty account of a young girl who leaves home at thirteen and experiences life on the streets, rape, addiction, and a series of horrific life events. She writes with no holds barred and her book reminded me in some ways of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. It’s has that succinct, in-your-face style of writing that is both riveting and painful at the same time.

Joon is a Korean girl who leaves home at thirteen. Her father is a philandering drunk who is physically abusive and her mother has been unable to function since her father left. Her mother is virtually catatonic and does not interact with Joon at all. Sometimes Joon finds her mother lying in the dirt in their backyard. Her mother has stopped speaking to her. As Joon says, “One night I found her reading her bible on the sofa. I sat next to her and begged her to say one word, just one. I even gave her some suggestions: Apple. Lotion. Jesus. Rice. She didn’t look up from the pages. This lasted six months. This lasted until the day I left”.

The book is structured in chapters, each one capable of standing alone as a short story. In fact, several of the chapters have been published as short stories in different literary journals. The chapters show Joon’s life past and present, providing the reader with Joon’s story: her feelings, experiences, loves, friendships, disasters, pain, and ultimately, hopes for the future.

The novel begins with Joon in a shelter for run-aways. There she is befriended by a girl named Knowledge who is present in several of the book’s chapters. Knowledge is more worldly than Joon and tries to mentor Joon in the ways of the street. She actually gives Joon lessons in street morality asking her what she learned today. She proudly tells Joon, “Sometimes you gotta do wrong to do right, know what I’m saying?” There’s a complex rule of law for the street, very different from the rule of law that governs regular citizens.

During the course of this book, Joon struggles with heroin addiction, alcohol abuse, and uses most every drug she can get her hands on. She works as a hostess, a street vendor, a hooker, an Avon lady, a geriatric aide, and as a food deliverer. One can’t help but wonder if some of this book is not autobiographical. The author herself is Korean and the blurb about her states that she worked as an Avon lady, a street vendor and in a nursing home. She also attained a GED before college rather than going the usual route of high school.

Joon is a survivor. She struggles and finds herself challenged at many junctions but she plods on. She even finds it in herself to help others who are in worse shape than she is. However, the presentation of her ultimate aloneness in the world is profound. She has no one and is on her own as a child in the dangerous world of the Bronx. She often is homeless, sleeping in abandoned buildings or at bus stops. She is a pragmatist, knowing that life in the streets is not easy or good for her. “ In order to get what I needed – – shelter, food, money, friendship – – parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed.” Joon learns to leave others before she is left, to move on without having to feel intimacy, even if she needs to squelch her feelings with a needle and smack.

This is a powerful book, not for the faint of heart. It is also a rewarding book, one that allows the reader to companion Joon in her life. It keeps our eyes open to another world, one that we may not have lived ourselves but one that is lived every day by so many of the children in the world. By the time I had finished this book, Joon had grabbed my heart and taken a piece of it with her.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE:	Miles from Nowhere
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nami Mun
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More like this: The Blue Notebook by James A. Levine

Bibliography:

• Miles from Nowhere (Dec 2008)

“I live among the dispossessed and disenfranchised. But, unlike others of my tribe, I have not descended as a result of damage done to me. The wounds that drove me to these depths were all self-inflicted.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (NOV 3, 2009)

Andrew Vachss has done it again. He has captured life on the streets – – the homeless, the addicted, the dispossessed, the mentally ill – and has made these disenfranchised people the true heroes of the world. Vachss’s vision is a unique one, with a theme that is pervasive throughout his books. He reframes miscreants into heros and shows real evil where one least expects to find it – – in the ordinary citizen parading as Mr. Good or Mr. Show-off. It is those that we turn away from or that we find invisible or repulsive that Mr. Vachss turns into the super-heroes or saviors of the day. He writes about a cultural underground that many of us have never been privy to, an underground that has its own codes of morality and rule of law, where cities exist in tunnels underneath slums and cultures form based on an unspoken law belonging only to the dispossessed.

Haiku, Vachss’s newest book fits nicely into his thematic repertoire. Here we find Ho (a nickname short for Ho Chi Minh), the “leader” of a group of homeless men. Ho was once a famous and wealthy marshal arts teacher and dispenser of wisdom. He found himself becoming too grandiose, giving vacuous advice to others, and his ego taking over for what should have been a life of humility and learning from others. Because of this, he is responsible for the death of Chica, a young woman he was mentoring. At first, he is consumed by what he thinks is shame and guilt but later realizes is self-pity. “That same night, I walked away. From the dojo, from my living quarters behind it, from my life.” Penniless and alone, Ho makes his way among the tenements and slums of his city, building a secret living area of tunnels below the ground. “The priests had taught us that each man has a personal haiku, a haiku that must emerge from within. A master of haiku might be commissioned to produce thousands in his lifetime. But only one could truly express his own spirit.” Ho walks alone among others searching for his one true haiku which can bring him back to his true self.

Accompanying Ho on his journey is Michael, once a rising star in the world of stocks and trading. Michael became consumed with gambling and lost everything – – his money, family and his job. He is still a gambler at heart as the book opens, not having learned from what his addiction has already wrought. Then there is Lamont, once the leader of a gang. While in jail he taught himself to read, got a GED and finished college by correspondence. Some people in the literati set notice him and help him get a book of poetry published. When he gets out of jail, he enjoys being the center of attention, attending parties and salons. “But then I snapped that I wasn’t a star; I was an exhibit in a traveling circus. A petting zoo. ‘Literary circle,’ my ass. I was never one of them – – I was just the fucking entertainment. They held me that high up just for the fun of stepping away and watching me crash.” Lamont’s character reminded me of a protégé of Mailer’s and Mailer’s later book about him. Target is part of this entourage. Mentally ill, he only speaks in rhyme, called clanging. His “sentences’”are always four rhyming words such as “knife, life, wife, strife.” His clanging may have some covert meaning if one listens closely enough. Brewster, a schizophrenic, and the fourth member of the group has a library of noir mysteries on the top floor of an abandoned building. “Brewster’s every word is some sort of re-enactment of the books to which he is addicted.” Then there is Ranger, a Vietnam Vet with post-traumatic stress disorder who straddles two worlds – the world of being a soldier in Vietnam and the world of living on the streets.

The group is looking for some way to make money. Initially, Michael sees a woman get out of a white Rolls Royce and dump something into the river. He tries to convince the group that blackmailing her might be the way to go because what she threw into the water is likely a body. This is where the plot falls apart a bit because this aspect of the book is dropped midway and is not returned to in a cohesive manner.

We find out that Brewster’s building is scheduled for demolition and the group tries to find a way to save Brewster’s library. They know that without his library, Brewster will not have a reason to exist. Together, they come up with a plan to salvage Brewster’s books and move them to another location.

This novel is about what truly makes a good and honest man. Vachss sees honesty, loyalty, commitment and connection in places that others might not even look. In fact, he sees these aspects of morality in places that others won’t look, taking for granted that it can’t exist among the homeless, the mentally ill and the disenfranchised. For Vachss, that is where these qualities are most likely to be found. Lamont asks, in this book, “Are the only truly honest people on this earth those others regard as insane?”  For Vachss, the answer is probably “yes.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE:	Haiku
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrew Vachss
EXTRAS:	Haiku on Vachss website
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Terminal and Blue Belle Other books might like as well: Lowboy by John Wray Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Moslely The Caveman’s Valentine by George Dawes Green No Good Deeds by Laura Lippman Swansea Terminal by Robert Lewis

Bibliography:

Burke Novels:

• Flood (1985)
• Strega (1996)
• Blue Belle (1988)
• Hard Candy (1990)
• Blossom (1990)
• Sacrifice (1991)
• Down in Zero (1994)
• Footsteps of the Hawk (1995)
• False Allegations (1996)
• Safe House (1998)
• Choice of Evil (1999)
• Dead and Gone (2000)
• Pain Management (2001)
• Only Child (2002)
• Down Here (April 2004)
• Mask Market (August 2006)
• Terminal (September 2007)
• Another Life: The Final Burke (December 2008)

Standalone Novels:

• A Bomb Built in Hell (1973)
• Shella (1993)
• Another Chance to Get it Right: A Children’s Book for Adults (1993; 2003 3rd edition)
• Born Bad: Collected Stories (1994)
• Everybody Pays: Stories (1999)
• The Getaway Man (2003)
• Two Trains Running (June 2005)
• Haiku (November 2009)
• The Weight (November 2010)

“You figure now you got me in your clutches, you going to READ me, like a book, right? — going to look right into my BRAIN and you going to read it page by page, like I was some cheap-jack midnight entertainment to make you forget the mess YOU’RE in — right? Get you chuckling, get your greasy thumbprint all over my thoughts, get you through another miserable lonely night, RIGHT, Stuyvesant?”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (AUG 19, 2009)

Romulus Ledbetter is one of the most usual protagonists that I have met in a long while. And I found myself not only intrigued by his complex character but liking him very much.

Rom used to be a brilliant piano student at the Julliard School of Music. He was a wonder on the keyboard and his compositions were extraordinary, according to his peers, professors and other musicians. When his girlfriend, Sheila, got pregnant, he married her and quit school to get a job that paid enough to support his new family. Then he began to manifest unusual behavior, which grew increasingly worse.

He stopped making music, left his beloved daughter and wife, and moved into a cave. That was years ago. Doctors diagnosed him as a “well compensated” paranoid, with, perhaps, some schizophrenic overtones. He is deemed “well compensated” because, although he lives in a shallow cave in New York City’s Inwood Park, he is able to take care of himself. He grows his own food during the warmer months and scavenges during the winter. Of course, it helps that his daughter Lulu, a NYPD cop, keeps an eye on him. And, when he is not having “fits,” his logic is just fine and his high IQ shines through. He is called “The Caveman” by all who know him or know of him.

Hallucinations, visions of his ex-wife, Sheila, looking as young as she did when they were first married, keep appearing before his eyes. She scolds him and dispenses advice as needed. Lulu visits him, in reality – not another figment of his imagination – and loves her father, who is still as kind and loving to her as he was when she was a little girl.

Rom is convinced that a man by the name of Cornelus Gould Stuyvesant controls the world with Y-rays from the top of the Chrysler Building. He believes that he was brought to Stuyvesant’s attention because he is a “free” man! And this curdles Stuyvesant’s blood! A “free man busting through to his own divinity, right?” “Ghetto kid making it at Julliard. Making a name for himself? Young composer? Hot, jumping? Getting his notes straight from God.” He also believes that his mind is inhabited by moth-like angels.

On an especially cold night on February 14, Rom hears the sound of footsteps outside his cave. Swaddled in various coats and blankets, he leaves his shelter and finds a frozen body. He knows that this is not just another homeless man who froze to death. The person who made the sound of footsteps probably left the body at his front door, he deduces. The frozen corpse couldn’t have walked there.

The dead man is handsome, and well-dressed, without a mark on his body, according to the medical examiner. His wallet ID reveals his name, Andrew Scott Gates, an unemployed model. Rom insists that he saw a man in a fancy white coat driving a fancy white car leaving the “crime scene.” Rom is determined to find the murderer, even though the police, who ignore his ramblings, determine that the death was caused by accidental hypothermia. But, Romulus found Gates and his sense of justice and responsibility kicks in. Of course, he is convinced that Stuyvesant, or one of his minions, is the killer.

Rom is forced to reconnect with society because of his investigation. He leaves the narrow confines of his cave and journeys into the wider world, trying to keep his fits at bay. A homeless ex-lover of Scott’s tells him that the murder was perpetrated by the famous avant-garde photographer, David Leppenraub. Leppenraub, according to rumor, is into drugs and sadomasochistic behavior. Apparently, Scott was the model Leppenraub used in most of his bizarre photographs. Rom hooks up with a former fellow student and musician who knows Leppenraub, and manages to wangle an invitation to one of the photographer’s parties with the understanding that he will play for his supper, so to speak. Of course, he hasn’t touched a piano in years.

As the story unfolds, the reader is caught up in a tale of deception, violence, mystery and a man’s struggle against his madness.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is viewing the world through Romulus’ sometimes deranged, sometimes almost normal mind. The extremely well written narrative is quirky and occasionally humorous. And the characters, especially the protagonist’s, are very well developed. I really liked this most original novel and highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing (February 1, 1995)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AMAZON PAGE:	The Caveman’s Valentine
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	George Dawes Green
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Ravens Also of interest: Lowboy by John Wray Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff

Bibliography:

• The Caveman’s Valentine (1994)
• The Juror (1995)
• Ravens (July 2009)

Movies from books:

• The Juror (1998)
• The  Caveman’s Valentine (2001)

“I don’t want to hear anything. I want not to be hearing. I want everyone to shut their mouth already. Uhhh—
Who’s there, Will? Who’s everyone? Can you tell me that?
Uhhh. You know who.
I don’t know, Will. I want you to tell me.
You know who. You know who. I stopped taking my meds.
Your meds are the only way to shut them up though, aren’t they? I talked to you about that. You made me a promise. Remember the promise you made to me, Will? Remember what Dr. Flesig—
They shut up too much with the meds. It gets quiet. It all gets so flat. ”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Poornima Apte (JUL 26, 2009)

The action in John Wray’s absolutely breathtaking novel, Lowboy, all unfolds over the course of one single November day. Seventeen-year-old William Heller, a schizophrenic, escapes from his institution, goes off his meds and embarks on a mission to prevent global warming from totally annihilating the world.

Will—who likes to go by the moniker Lowboy because of his fascination with the underground—believes the end of the world is merely hours away. And the only way to prevent this imminent catastrophe, Lowboy believes, is for him to lose his virginity. To this end, he steadily moves toward finding the one girl who showed a modicum of sympathy and interest toward him at his old school: Emily.

Will flits from one train to the other on New York’s subway system in first trying to reach Emily and then in escaping from the authorities who are out to stop him before he turns violent. Ali Lateef, a “green” car-driving, puzzle-loving detective, is on staff at the Missing Persons Unit and hopes Will’s mother, Violet, will lead him to her son before he hurts people. As it turns out, Will was institutionalized precisely because of an earlier violent episode that involved his friend, Emily. Violet, of course, only wants her son safe and hopefully, cured of his psychotic episodes.

Lowboy is a marvel of a book utterly compelling in its narrative and its voice. Wray, whose research for the book has been exhaustive, takes the reader into the mind of a schizophrenic teen extremely effectively. The simplest of phrases and situations speak volumes. He refers to the institution as “the school,” for example—not merely “school” as most teens his age would. This one simple word beautifully captures the teen’s situation caught in the ravages of a disease he has no escape from. When he is off his meds, he simply can’t interact with society, there are too many voices in his head. On the other hand, when he is on the meds, he feels like he is being pressed under glass. In a spectacularly written situation, Will tries to buy cupcakes for Emily. Such an act that most people would have no trouble executing, proves to be extremely trying for the troubled teen—his interactions with the clerk and eventually the way he makes peace with the situation—is wonderfully rendered by Wray.

“He decided to get out at Columbus Circle. To his surprise it happened very simply. He stood up and guided himself into the funnel of exiting bodies, feeling the space around him compress like air into a jet, and let himself be spat onto the platform. The people around him never pitched or stumbled. It’s only when you think about things that they get hard to do, he thought,” Wray writes of Will’s experience on the subway. This precise description, early on in the book, leads the reader slowly into a mind where even the most mundane of tasks must be worked slowly through with the utmost concentration. You must focus on guiding yourself “through the funnel of exiting bodies” so that you can get to where you are going.

The author has said that he wrote much of the book on New York’s subways and Lowboy sets this underground mood and the comings and goings of these sleek, efficient machines, wonderfully. “Its [the train’s] ghost blew into the station first, a tunnelshaped clot of air the exact length of the train behind it, hot from its own great compression and speed, whipping the litter up into a cloud,” writes Wray when describing a subway car pulling into a station. You can almost feel the wind in your face. In yet another instance, a cigarette wrapper “skittered up the platform, dancing past the bench coquettishly: a bashful totem.”

The book intersperses Will’s underground escapades with chapters that show Detective Lateef and Violet interacting with each other and trying to reach the troubled teen. Here too, Wray’s characters shine. One’s heart aches for Violet, an immigrant who has nobody but Will to cling to, and who worries she has smothered the boy beyond repair. “What’s it like to have a child, only one, and to feed that child all of your own old ambitions. It’s wrong for other parents, of course, but you feel different, free to indulge yourself, because your child is very close to perfect,” she rationalizes, “he takes over your life completely.

With Lowboy, John Wray has delivered an absolute tour-de-force. Yes, you might see the inevitable, shocking end hurtling full speed down at you, but really, by then, you are way too deep in this to get out of the way. As the book moves on—and the meds wear off—Lowboy’s voice slowly amps up, portraying in full energy, the sheer terror of a child who finds himself in a mind he cannot control and from which there is no escape.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 55 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 3, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on John Wray
EXTRAS:	FSG page on Lowboy  Gothamist interview with John Wray
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another one of our reviews for Lowboy  Other books you might like.. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Bibliography:

• The Right Hand of Sleep (2001)
• Canaan’s Tongue (2005)
• Lowboy (March 2009)