The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Novel | Trevanian

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Novel | Trevanian | Rough Childhood in the 30s

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The Crazyladies of...

	The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Novel Trevanian Three Rivers Press, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

?Nostalgic, richly textured. Sweetly evokes an innocent if hardscrabble lost age.?
?Publishers Weekly

Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned?again?by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany, New York. For the next eight years, through the Great Depression and Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, surrounded by ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. Pearl Street is also home to a variety of ?crazyladies?: Miss Cox, the feared and ridiculed teacher who ignites Jean-Luc?s imagination; Mrs. Kane, who runs a beauty parlor/
fortune-telling salon in the back of her husband?s grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War; and Jean-Luc?s own unconventional, vivacious mother. Colorful though it is, Jean-Luc never stops dreaming of a way out of the slum, and his mother?s impossible expectations are both his driving force and his burden.
As legendary writer Trevanian lovingly re-creates the neighborhood of his youth in this funny, deeply moving coming-of-age novel, he also paints a vivid portrait of a neighborhood, a city, a nation in turmoil, and the people waiting for a better life to begin.

?Literary time travel, meticulously remembered and set down. . . . This book is in some ways a key to our country; America was made by people like this.? ?Washington Post

TREVANIAN is the author of Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction,
The Loo Sanction, The Main, The Summer of Katya, Incident at Twenty-Mile, and Hot Night in the City. Visit www.trevanian.com for the Crazyladies cybernotes, Trevanian?s commentaries, items from the author?s desk, and more.

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Nostalgic

I must admit that this story brought back my childhood in the South Bronx. The accuracy of life during the depression could only have been described from personal experience, and I wanted to write to Trevanian to tell him how much I enjoyed his autobiography, for it could not have been anything else. Later I learned that this was so, but that he had died in 2006.

I have purchased several copies and sent them to family and friends who also experienced the 1930s when they and their families struggled to simply put food, any food, on the table; and children worked at any menial job that paid a few cents to assist.

When Travanian talked of shining shoes, delivering newspapers, carrying parcels, hiding and reading in the public library, all was familiar to me and my brothers.

The book is also very readable and enjoyable... as most of his are.

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Rough Childhood in the 30s

Although this is listed as fiction, the details of Jean-Luc Lapointe's rough childhood in an Irish slum in Albany ring too true to be imaginary. The boy's escape came through hours of solitary story games where he plotted and acted all the characters. The responsibilities of helping his often-ill mother and vulnerable little sister weighed heavily on him during the depression years and the outbreak of WWII.
A nitty gritty bio that draws you in the way Angela's Ashes does. I became mesmerized by the flow of words and the pictures he evoked.
I've not read Trevanian's highly touted novels (Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction, etc.), but think I should give them a try after seeing his wonderful effort here.

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The immigrant sanction

Trevanian is a wonderful and intriguing author. This thoroughly enjoyable and mostly autobiographical book was a delightful read, but in a far different way than the author's other books. No international intrigue going on here...just good old immigrant neighborhood intrigue. A wonderful journey into the childhood of a first generation American. The characters were extremely sympathetic. I especially loved the parts where jean-luc is playing by himself: where he is all the actors playing all the parts in the fantastic stories of his imagination. Brought back great day-long games of make believe from my own childhood.

- C.A. Wulff, author of Born Without a Tail

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Step back in time..

This book was just like listening to my Grandfather tell a story. He is the same age as the author and also from New York. The author does a wonderful job of engaging all your senses as he describes the memories of the past.

Disappointing last effort

Trevanian has been one of my favorite authors for a number of years, so when I learned of his death it felt as if an old friend had left me. As soon as his last book - Crazyladies of Pearl Street - was available, I purchased a copy, and the first half of the book kept me spellbound.

Unfortunately, as the book progressed, I began to see Trevanian as a bitter, angry socialist, possibly because of his own failures in early life, possibly because of his mother's poverty, who knows? At any rate, the Trevanian who I had grown to love became a stranger to me - I just never perceived him to be so un-American, his previous books certainly didn't give any hint of that.

Quite a bit of the anti-American, anti-Republican, anti-Bush, anti-business sentiment is expressed in the "cybernotes" that are published on Trevanian's website. I wish I'd never begun to read those notes, and indeed stopped reading them about 3/4 through them - it was just too much to read how he hated my country and its leaders.

I guess Trevanian felt that he was safe in letting the cat out of the bag in his final book, since he was already in very poor health at the time. I only hope that his illness affected his mind, and that the author I enjoyed so much in "Summer of Katya" and "Incident at Twenty Mile" had left long before "Crazyladies" was written.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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