Broken in Brooklyn
A must-read from the best author you've probably never heard of

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The population of Brooklyn hovers around 3 million, as compared with the resident population of Manhattan at around 2 million and The Bronx at a million and a half. The three are the most populated boroughs of New York City and home to concentrations of immigrants from everywhere in the world.

Boyle’s eighth book is named after his Brooklyn street in the southwestern corner of Long Island: Saint of the Narrows Street. It’s a screwy title and an unfortunate dust jacket, but it’s a treasure of a book written by the doyen of American crime fiction. 

I’ll go out on a limb and say that William Boyle may well be the most skilled, nuanced and underappreciated American novelist working today. No matter how highly esteemed he is by those who’ve been exposed to his flawless presentations and many awards, he remains in the shadow of marquee nobility. 

I’ll also confess that I have been brooding over just how to present Boyle’s “Saint of the Narrows Street” to “Murder Ink” readers.

I was stunned by the story of 28-year-old Risa Taverna and her unfortunate choice of husband, Sav Franzone, their infant son, Fab, and Risa’s younger sister, Giulia. They illustrate how small dreams can turn into large problems, and good people can get trapped in poverty, hopelessness and violence. They seem to find themselves on an emotional and legal ledge with abominable exits that will change who they are and why they pray to an unhearing God. Bad things happen to good people, and minds are ruined and futures obliterated for want of simple comforts and basic honor.

“Saint of the Narrows Street” is the story of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn has history, diversity and personality. And Brooklyn has rules of bad behavior bred in the brownstones. I found myself stunned by the perfect confluence of dread and hope. I sat for hours with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, not knowing what to say about my view of Brooklyn through the eyes of William Doyle.

You must read this book, even if it’s the first or last book you read, in its free-verse poetry in narrative form. You will never forget your hours in Gravesend, the oldest Brooklyn neighborhood, settled by the English in 1645. The book begins in Risa’s kitchen, where Giulia has come to comfort her sister over Sav’s open courting of Sandra Carbonari and the drunken battering Risa is subject to when Sav gets home from the bars each night. 

Without plot-spoiling, Boyle’s book begins with Sav’s sloppy drunken entrance with a handgun he bought from a guy at the bar. He boastfully points the gun at Risa, tells her what a piss-poor woman she is, then points the pistol at 3-month-old Fab and pulls the trigger on an empty cylinder. Next, Sav announces that he and Sandra are leaving Brooklyn the next day for a life together in a better place where he’s not always looking over his shoulder for the bookie to whom he owes a staggering few hundred thousand.

Sav throws a handful of damp, wrinkled hundreds on the vinyl kitchen table, tells Risa he never wanted the pest of a kid anyway, pulls his macho gun from his waistband and slaps it on the table, daring Risa to shoot him. He laughs when Risa recoils and begs him to leave. Sav sneers then staggers into the closet to ransack some of his clothes for his getaway and comes back to find his gun missing. He demands to know where it is. Giulia tells him she threw it down the sewer outside. Sav points out that she hadn’t the time, then begins to paw clumsily at her chest and nuzzles her neck. Risa is so enraged she takes hold of a cast iron skillet from the stove, comes up behind Sav and swings it at the side of his head making an awful, echoey thud that stuns Sav into falling backwards, smacking his head on the corner of the table, making an indentation on his temple and falling onto his back with blood streaming across the linoleum as if a faucet had been opened. 

What to do now? Calling the police is their first thought, their second is that the police are always a source of trouble in Gravesend. But these two are on an upper floor of a tenement building. I’ll leave you with this scene.

Henry Wise, author of “Holy City,” is quoted in the book’s front few pages saying, “William Boyle’s ‘Saint of the Narrows Street’ is incisive, beautiful, brutal – a book that examines what happens in a small world when big secrets are held down. Set in a neighborhood you will smell and feel as if it’s your own, this novel presents a cast of characters you’ll swear you’ve known or known about for years, and yet they’ll find a way to surprise you. Death echoes, rumors kill and the living are cursed on ‘Saint of the Narrows Street.’” 

Buy this book; you’ll be impoverished if you don’t. And ask Maria’s Bookshop for their generous 15% “Murder Ink” discount. ?