(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
“The Street Sweeper” (Riverhead-Penguin) by Elliot Perlman tells rather than shows its way through a 640-page saga that’s been called both inept and wonderful.
Perlman, the acclaimed author of “Seven Types of Ambiguity” and “Three Dollars,” weaves the narratives of Lamont Williams and Adam Zignelik and their connected friends, lovers, and families into an ambitious depiction of the power that memory has over our lives, according to the publisher.
Basically, you’ve got a black guy and Jewish guy in contemporary America with history up the kazoo. If you can struggle through the first 150 pages, Examiner believes you might like the book. Things finally start to come together.
On the other hand, be forewarned that critics as diverse as one for the San Francisco Chronicle and David Gates in The New York Times got bogged down. Wrote the Chronicle reviewer:
“If only he stuck with his telling-it-straight delivery. Simply stated, Perlman is a consummate storyteller, but he is not a literary one. On the few occasions he attempts to elevate his prose with poetic pyrotechnics, the results backfire:
“‘They were the rabbits his hair-trigger imagination hounded down black holes of anxiety.’" Honest, that’s what Perlman wrote and the publisher actually let slide.
Gates wrote in The New York Times: “All these passages suggest a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn’t engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won’t or can’t take the work of fiction seriously. However earnest “The Street Sweeper” may be about its material — I’ve seldom read a more humorless book — as a novel it’s deadly frivolous.”
Actually, Gates was even harder on Perlman than that, but it’s not fair to repeat his critique because, on balance, readers may detect some saving grace in the story once it gets under way. Here’s the story (as summed up by the publisher):
Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter.
Adam Zignelik is a struggling, non-tenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves.
At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve.
The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross-generational literary symphony, according to the publisher.
Examiner found the passages where history became a matter of lecturing and not showing awfully boring, but that’s the sort of thing every reader must decide for their own temperament.
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