If you’re in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of pizza, you go to Totonno’s or L&B Spumoni Gardens. If you’re not in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of life there, reach for William Boyle’s seventh novel, Saint of the Narrows Street.
Though Risa Taverna’s husband, Saverio Franzone, has plenty of friends in the neighborhood, to his wife, Sav is a terror. She knew he was “a bad man” soon after marrying him, and his abuse has increased since the birth of their son, Fabrizio. When Sav comes home drunk one night, starts an argument and waves his newly acquired gun around, Risa clonks him on the head with a frying pan, and he hits his head for the second time on the kitchen table as he falls to the floor. Goodbye, Sav.
It’s probably not a great loss to the world, but it’s an immediate tragedy for Risa and her sister, Giulia, who witnessed the whole thing. Risa and Giulia are basically upstanding citizens who, in a moment of crisis, did what they felt they had to. Hoping to protect Fabrizio from the fallout, the women enlist Sav’s best childhood buddy, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, to help them dispose of the deceased and make a pact to let sleeping dogs—and husbands—lie.
Over the next 18 years, Sav’s memory rests uneasily, occasionally threatening to upend the carefully guarded alibi. But the resemblance between father and son goes deeper than just the image in the mirror, and Fabrizio, who never knew his dad, inevitably has questions, some of which might best be left unanswered.
Boyle, who grew up in the neighborhood he depicts, has a pointillist’s eye for detail, with every image meticulously crafted in a way that seems effortless. You can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar, the freezer lasagna being reheated when the priest drops by uninvited, the moist earth covering a grave whose secrets can’t be buried nearly deep enough. Fans of Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos will find Saint of the Narrows Street as authentic and satisfying as Spumoni Garden’s Sicilian pie, but unlike their menu, there’s no hero in sight.
