Gangster
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Overview
Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant saga of American murder, forgiveness, and redemption.Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family—the criminals who preside over early 20th-century New York. His bloody rise from soldier to boss will lead him into ever more barbaric betrayals...until he meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection.
A sweeping panoramic with riveting characters, Gangster travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas and to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. Setting a new standard for this acclaimed author, Gangster is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate—and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, a century.
About the Author:
Lorenzo Caracterra is the author of the memoir A Safe Place and the New York Times bestsellers Sleepers and Apaches. He has written scripts for movies and television and is currently at work on his next novel.
Synopsis
Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.
Publishers Weekly
"I was now well-prepared to be a career criminal... I just didn't have the stomach for any of it." Carcaterra's latest crime novel is the tantalizing coming-of-age story of orphan Gabe, groomed by longtime New York City mob boss Angelo Vestieri to be his successor. The novel opens in the 1990s as Gabe, now middle-aged, keeps watch over Vestieri on his hospital deathbed. Slipping back in time to the Depression, the narrative tracks the rise of the famed mob boss from Italian immigrant to lord of Manhattan's underworld, when Gabe, 10, walks into Vestieri's bar after running out on his latest foster parents in 1964. Vestieri takes the impressionable boy under his wing and ushers him into the world of organized crime. Gabe runs numbers, collects debts and learns loyalty and the price of betrayal. Yet when the time comes for Gabe to take over the operation, he refuses, choosing a normal life despite his deep love for Vestieri. As he did in Sleepers and Apaches, Carcaterra shows dexterity in humanizing the denizens of the urban underbelly. Through a fine characterization of the enigmatic Vestieri, he provides a stirring perspective on the ways of mobsters and their history. Yet the book's central theme, the complex choice facing Gabe, is poorly developed, rarely penetrating the surface of his rejection of gang life. Carcaterra's portrayal focuses primarily on violence as the source of Gabe's revulsion, only touching on Gabe's understanding of how mobsters--through fear and corruption--influence society in much deeper ways. (Feb. 1) Forecast: From its bold title and catchy cover to the publisher's plans for major ad/promo, including a six-city author tour, this novel promises to perform. Its major push, though, will come down the road, from a four-hour ABC miniseries already in the works. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn his succinctly titled second novel, Gangster, Lorenzo Carcaterra (Sleepers, A Safe Place) turns his hand to an archetypal story: the evolution of a powerful American crime lord. An episodic narrative that ranges from turn-of-the-century Salerno to contemporary New York, Gangster recounts the life and times of Angelo Vestieri, a poor Italian immigrant who achieves a distorted version of the American Dream.
The novel begins in 1996. Angelo, who is 90 years old and has outlived his enemies and friends alike, is dying by degrees in a Manhattan hospital. At his bedside are Gabe, an orphan and de facto member of the Vestieri family, and Mary, an enigmatic older woman who was once Angelo's lover. Their combined reminiscences form the substance of the narrative, which recapitulates, in fragmented fashion, the high points of Angelo's career.
A key element of the story takes place in 1906, when Angelo's father, an impoverished shepherd named Paolino Vestieri, murders Carlo, his eight-year-old son, rather than allow the boy to fall under the influence of a local Mafia chieftain. Paolino then flees to America with his pregnant wife, who dies giving birth to Angelo during a stormy Atlantic crossing. Father and son eventually settle in the slums of New York and begin to pursue their vastly different destinies.
The law-abiding Paolino takes on a series of menial jobs, while Angelo encounters the three individuals who will shape, and warp, his life: a streetwise Irish delinquent named Pudge Nichols; a hard-edged, maternal tavern owner known as Ida the Goose; and Angus McQueen, a leading figure in the Manhattan underworld. Angus gives Angelo his first real "job" and his first taste of the highflying gangster lifestyle. From that point forward, the novel takes us through Angelo's rise from small-time hoodlum to embattled ruler of a lucrative, illicit empire. His volatile career encompasses gang warfare, murder, and personal betrayal, and reflects several decades of radical social change. It also costs him almost everything he values and isolates him permanently from the "civilian" world of family, friendship, and everyday human concerns.
Gangster is not an especially literary book. The prose is serviceable but not eloquent, the dialogue often stilted, and the basic material a shade too familiar. It is, however, an intensely cinematic novel that moves swiftly and cleanly through an extended series of vivid set pieces, most of which should play very effectively in the four-hour miniseries currently in development. Gangster may lack the mythical resonance of The Godfather, but it's an energetic, headlong narrative that offers some violent, visceral pleasures of its own.
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).