Published by Soho Crime on February 4, 2025
Saint of the Narrows Street is a story of people who are searching for identities to replace their lost lives. What happens to people who lose their dreams, or who never have dreams to chase? Near the novel’s end, Fab ponders that question when he walks into a seedy bar: “The joint’s a real den for degenerate drunks. All he can think is they were once little kids. Stood in schoolyards and mouthed the Pledge of Allegiance. Ate their sack lunches. Said their prayers.”
Fab is only eight months old when the story begins. Risa, his 28-year-old mother, has already made a life-defining mistake by dropping out of Staten Island College and marrying Sav Franzone. Sav thinks Risa is boring. In an abstract way, he’s proud that she gave birth to his son, but he’s already itching to split. Sav is out most nights, drinking and cheating on Risa with Sandra Carbonari.
One night Sav comes home drunk with a gun and a plan to travel to Florida with Sandra. He waves the gun around, points it at Risa and Sav, packs a bag, and gets into a fight with Risa’s sister Giulia. As he’s choking Giulia, Risa hits him with a cast iron pan. Sav hits his head on the corner of a table as he falls. Risa calls Sav’s childhood friend, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who comes over in time to watch Sav die. They haul the body away and bury it on rural land that belongs to Chooch’s mother.
The story follows the main characters as they live troubled lives for the next eighteen years. Risa lives with her guilt by telling herself that Sav would have killed her or her son if she hadn’t killed him. Chooch lives with his unrequited love for Risa and his feeling that, unlike his father, who “had an identity as a New Yorker and as an Italian American,” he has nothing but the property he inherited from his parents. Giulia lives a life of dissatisfaction, broken only by a drunken yet memorable sexual encounter with a woman.
Collateral characters contribute to the theme of broken lives that end in violence. Sav’s brother Roberto returns a few years after stealing money from a vengeful man and running away with his wife. A drunken priest with a gambling addiction tries to blackmail Risa with his half-formed hunches about her role in Sav’s disappearance. When he’s ten, a young troublemaking friend of Fab goads him into “living on the edge” until the friend pays a price. Optimistic people believe it's never too late to start over, but some people are perpetually “pinned forever to the void of this moment, the terror of regret.”
Saint of the Narrows Street gives the impression that some people were born to lose. Sav and Fab, Roberto and the gambling priest, fit that profile. Other people might be able to live fulfilling lives but, for reasons of their own, go in the wrong direction. Risa, Giulia, and Chooch never took the risk of looking for a better life. By the novel’s end, they’re in their forties and wondering what’s left.
The story culminates with Fab’s search for his absent father. Conversations with Sandra and other people who knew Sav offer clues about his father’s fate. Tension mounts as Risa realizes she can no longer hide the truth about her father’s death from Fab. But how will he react to the truth? Will all the central characters come to a violent end?
The story is bleak, but only because it takes an honest, unflinching look at certain kinds of lives — the lives of people who are stuck, who have abandoned hope or never had any. Poignant takes on characters (Risa thinks her father’s “version of God seems to have nothing to do with love and everything to do with shutting the door”) sharpen their personalities. Sharp prose and full characterizations contribute to one of the strongest novels I expect to read this year.
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