Pros: Compelling fiction from a master storyteller
Cons: Still not the the faint of heart
The Bottom Line: A slightly new and exciting direction for a writer who's explored the dark side of urban youth, crime and punishment. Top-notch writing and compelling, action-packed plot.
RonFranscell's Full Review: Lorenzo Carcaterra - Street Boys
Blessed are peacemakers, for they says things like “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
Gandhi was right, of course, but what if the orphans and the homeless fought back?
That’s the premise of Lorenzo Carcaterra’s new novel, “Street Boys,” in which a ragged brigade of children rises up against a cold-blooded enemy in World War II.
“Street Boys” is a departure from Carcaterra’s engaging but darker stories about crime and punishment on New York’s meanest streets. But like the best-selling “Sleepers,” “Apaches,” “A Safe Place” and “Gangster,” survival and rootless youth are the threads that bind them all.
But this isn’t Hell’s Kitchen or the Bronx. It’s no man’s land: bombed-out Naples in 1943. Among the last people in the evacuated city are lost, abandoned children whose only goal is to survive another day.
Survival transforms them into fierce commandos, facing a Nazi tank division sent to demolish the ancient Italian city before Allied armies arrive. The sadistic orders from Hitler himself: If the city can’t belong to the Fuhrer, it will belong to no one.
When Corp. Steve Connors, a 25-year-old American soldier assigned to scout the city ahead of Gen. George Patton’s advance, suddenly finds himself cut off from his own Army, he finds new comrades among Naples’ young resistance fighters.
Armed with salvaged guns, unexploded German bombs, and their own ingenuity, Connors and his army of children are determined to deflect the Nazis and save the city -- or die.
But Carcaterra has seldom made conflict easy. His good guys are often a little bad, and his bad guys are sometimes gifted with endearing, even redeeming, qualities. In our real world, such complexities are a fact of life; in commercial fiction, it’s rare.
Col. Rudolph Van Klaus, the proud Nazi commander in the mold of the upright enemy Erwin Rommel, is shamed by his own malicious mission, but feels duty-bound as a soldier to carry out his orders. The conflict in his heart burns as hot as the great war he is resigned to losing:
“He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, finding himself fatigued for the first time by the very thought of armed conflict. He stared out at the barren fields around him, at what had once been lush olive groves and vineyards, now left in ruin and decay. Soldiers never get to see a country at its best ... Every stretch of land he had seen in his military career had been charred and every foreign face belonged to an enemy.”
Carcaterra’s ambitious cast of characters is deftly drawn. Vincenzo Soldari, a 16-year-old history buff determined to follow in ancestors’ footsteps, is the real leader of the children’s army. He‘s helped by Carlo Maldini, a middle-aged drunkard desperate to redeem himself, and his daughter Nunzia, a ferocious guerilla who falls in love with the American GI who comes to their aid.
Carcaterra is now working on the screenplay for a film version of “Street Boys,” to be directed by Oscar-winner Barry Levinson. The book lends itself to good cinema: Intricate characters, underdogs facing insurmountable odds, a desperate mission, and lots of explosions -- the stuff of our best American war movies, from “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to “Saving Private Ryan.”
No less complex than World War II novels by Norman Mailer and James Jones, “Street Boys” explores a different perspective on the war, and rides a fast-paced plot toward a heroic ending. The end of the war and the Allied invasion of Italy are well-known, but it is the transformation of characters along the way that defines the quality of historical fiction.
In “Street Boys,” Carcaterra paints a vivid portrait of children at war, not as its helpless victims, but fighting back.
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