Crumbtown

Megan O'Grady

A dark screwball comedy, Crumbtown ambitiously serves up pratfalls and coincidence as emblems of the claustrophobic inevitability of life for those who can't afford to believe in the benevolence of fortune. Alas, Connelly's cultural critique starts to blur as the novel progresses. After the scathing social commentary that fuels the book's early sections, Connelly preoccupies himself with making Don's reality as weirdly artificial as the television show about him. — The New York Times

Don McLeese

This self-indulgent, antic novel from the author of Bringing Out the Dead, which was made into a film by Martin Scorsese, concerns a TV series involving Don Reedy, who was convicted on a robbery charge but paroled to serve as a consultant for the story of his arrest. In Crumbtown, Connelly writes, "dummies like Don were a dime a dozen." The streets have names such as Felony, Delinquency, Lemmings and Marginal; residents have unlikely backgrounds such as that of Tim and Tom, "half twins, same birthday, same father, different mothers." The plot, such as it is, involves the interaction of TV reality and real life, with actors and the citizens of Crumbtown confusing their identities. There are some effective flashes of black humor and social commentary (parolee Don discovers that his cell phone is as much of a prison as the cell he's left), but Connelly too often settles for pointless jokes.

Publishers Weekly

Lean, mean and comically incompetent-so run the characters of Connelly's riotous sophomore effort (after Bringing Out the Dead) about a crime junkie and the town that defeats him. Don Reedy's been down on his luck for as long as he can remember, and a recap of his past reveals a collection of stolen vehicles, botched stickups and robbed banks, the last landing him in jail with a 15-year term. He's just been granted conditional parole and is being shipped back to Crumbtown (a neighborhood in the fictional city of Dodgeport, "where dummies like Don were a dime a dozen") to act as consultant on a TV movie of his life of crime. On the set, he watches his infamous bank robbery replayed, complete with his triumphant trademark of tossing dollar bills in the air while speeding away with the big bucks. He's also keeping a lustful eye on Rita, a tough-talking Russian barmaid running from an abusive husband who can't seem to resist Don's charms. A ridiculous scheme to rob the staged bank on the set reunites Don with inept twin robbers Tim and Tom, the same pair who bungled the original bank robbery but this time manage a clean getaway. Could the cameras still be rolling on Don's new grift? This mangy hit parade of hardscrabble locals is kinetic. Connelly sustains a reckless, devil-may-care mood-a dramatic shift from his stark and harrowing debut-with clipped, fast prose and serpentine plot that offers plenty of opportunities for satire. (Mar.) Forecast: This darkly comic caper may bewilder fans of Connelly's noirish Bringing Out the Dead, but critical plaudits will emphasize this writer's versatility and his gifts as a prose writer. An arresting jacket will lure browsers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

If William Burroughs had ever set out to write a noir novel, the result might have been like this follow-up to Connelly's Bringing Out the Dead, made into a film by Martin Scorcese. Set in a phantasmagoric dreamscape that is part New York City slum and part absurd parallel universe, Crumbtown is a place in which little is as it appears. The story centers on Don Reedy, in prison for a Robin Hood-style bank robbery, who is freed from jail to act as a consultant on a TV show based on his life. Once out, he quickly falls for Rita, a Russian emigre bartender, and teams up with half-twins Tim and Tom, his former partners-in-crime, who sold him out to the police 15 years earlier. With them, he plots a new robbery set to take place during the filming of the bank robbery scene of the TV show. The result is a wildly inventive and darkly satiric take on a world constantly shifting between reality and media image. Recommended for most public libraries.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The worst town in the world starts to seem like not such a bad place after all. Second-novelist Connelly (Bringing Out the Dead, 1998) rips the lid off another simmering stew of malcontented urbanites, his prose leaping off from the opening line ("Don Reedy was a boy so briefly he often forgot it happened") and barely taking a breath thereafter. Don Reedy is a sad-luck loser: in just ten pages he goes from bad car thief to feloniously bad driver to mafia lackey to stickup man—with generous dollops of jail time between each ill-advised career move. Cut to the present, and Reedy’s been paroled in order to serve as technical adviser on a new TV show being shot in his home city of Crumbtown—a falling-apart East Coast burg. The show is loosely based on the exploits that most recently landed Reedy in jail: a series of bank robberies in which Reedy and his cohorts were famous for throwing cash into the air afterward and creating mass hysteria in the streets outside the banks. Of course, his first day on the set, Reedy falls in love. Rita is a hard-bitten Russian waitress with a psychotic husband she’s been trying to leave for years—who’s fallen for Reedy as well. Complicating Reedy’s life on the set are Tim and Tom, a pair of drunks who bungled most of Reedy’s bank jobs and now manage to stumble idiotically into trouble on just about every other page. Connelly’s junky auto prose—it rattles along endearingly—sings out from every page of this broken-down dream of a book. The men are laughably pathetic, the women are tougher than nails, and the characters have an amazing propensity for getting run over by old cars. A mournfully funny ode to the worst in everybody: "Itwasn’t a race thing; it wasn’t a religion thing; it was a crumb thing."