Advertised as a coming-of-age story, Trebay’s beautiful book is more like a coming-to-terms story about his own fugitive needs ... Trebay is an efficient and pleasingly wide-eyed guide to "the teeming microecology of downtown New York" ... A memoir that, for all its fictive energy, returns a little political realness to the pre-election miasma.
Mr. Trebay is withholding, so that by the end we are surprised at what we don’t quite know about him ... Mr. Trebay asserts that "from the end of World War II until President Gerald Ford told New York to drop dead, the hardscape of the city remained in most ways static." This is not really true: Whole neighborhoods were transformed by a postwar building boom. Yet in other ways Mr. Trebay captures the era with poetic veracity, as when he translates the raw carnality of Manhattan’s derelict Hudson River piers into a vivid chiaroscuro of longing.
His sentences are long and often languid, rife not with verbiage but the voice of a skilled and patient storyteller. He offers nuanced personal recollections ... By virtue of the fact that Trebay filters everything through his introspective gaze, it’s occasionally difficult to feel present in the scenes he describes; that distance sometimes results in a formality heavier on facts than immediacy ... A generous and deeply felt memoir.
The rambling anecdotes don’t always move the narrative forward, but they coalesce into a rich portrait of the city and its characters. The result is an engrossing story of family dysfunction redeemed by self-reinvention.
