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Summary
Summary
North River
Author Notes
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. to Irish immigrant parents on June 24, 1935, Pete Hamill attended Mexico City College, Pratt Institute, and The School of Visual Arts before starting a career in journalism. In 1960, Hamill accepted an entry-level job at the New York Post, becoming a columnist five years later. Hamill subsequently worked as a columnist for the New York Daily News and the Village Voice.
Later working as a contributing editor at Esquire, Hamill has written articles for the New York Times magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, and Playboy magazine, among others. He is also an accomplished novelist, having written more than a dozen books, including his national best-selling memoir, A Drinking Life, and the novels Snow in August; Why Sinatra Matters; and Lost Cities, Vanished Friends.
Pete Hamill died on August 5, 2020 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamill's quietly engrossing novel skillfully conjures the gritty world of lower Manhattan during the Depression, weaving elements of suspense, comedy and romance as Jim Delaney navigates the melting pot city. Strozier reads Delaney's part with gravelly and wise authority. He transforms his tone convincingly as Delaney, a newly widowed doctor and war vet, finds his bitter heart starting to thaw when he is left to care for his grandson Carlos. Delaney hires a Sicilian immigrant, Rose, to help care for the child, and Strozier offers a credible take on her thickly accented, husky but womanly voice. Strozier also gives impressively distinctive voices to a long cast of well-drawn characters such as a good-hearted mobster, a brash young Jewish hospital doctor and assorted recent Irish immigrants who depend on Delaney's comforting ministrations. Listening to Strozier read Hamill's evocative descriptions of Delaney walking through Union Square, Greenwich Village and Chinatown and his encounters with a wide variety of New York denizens, one can almost feel that former Manhattan resurrected. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 23). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
SO here's the joke I recently heard at a party: "Hey, you know what the definition is of Irish Alzheimer's? They only remember grudges." Maybe it's wrong to begin a review of a serious novel with a joke, one that reflects a cultural stereotype no less. But it's in perfect alignment with Pete Hamill's "North River," which pours much of its 341 pages into the plight of the Irish poor in New York during the Depression. I am not put off by the joke (O.K., I think it's funny). And I wish Hamill had used it, because then there would have been some snippet of relief from the aching theme of Irish Misery. Irish Misery in New York is not a new creative discovery, of course. It has become a cottage industry in literature and film, ranging from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes," published in 1996, to the 2003 Jim Sheridan film "In America." Fair or unfair, no other ethnic group so easily lends itself to such fertile inner conflict, resilience and pride, the legacy of Joyce and Yeats mixed up with booze and self-hatred and stubbornness as an art form and too many children and never enough money. The contradictions are irresistible to writers and filmmakers. But the ground has been covered so often at this point that it risks cliché. Presumably the only trick left is to go even farther than your predecessors did, pile on the misery even thicker. Which is what Hamill does with his main character in "North River," who's burdened by a tale of woe so woeful he makes Quasimodo look positively light on his feet. So let's meet James Finbar Delaney. He is a 47-year-old doctor ministering to patients in the tenements of the lower West Side who occasionally appreciate him but much of the time don't listen, refuse to go to the hospital, irrationally blame him for deaths of loved ones, and collect cases of the clap like pennies when they aren't brutally beating their wives and then sobbing over it. And that's only the beginning. Delaney originally wanted to be a surgeon, but then he went off to World War I and ruined his arm, and the dream died. Speaking of dying, both his parents were killed in an influenza outbreak in New York while he was in a French hospital recuperating from his war wounds, so he didn't even get to attend their funeral. His wife, Molly, whom he first met when she was having a miscarriage, is furious with him for volunteering for duty overseas; unable to shake off her angry feelings of abandonment, she eventually walks off to the North River, another name for the slice of the lower Hudson that divides New York and New Jersey, and vanishes. That leaves him with a daughter named Grace, whose idea of family time is to dump her toddler son in Delaney's lap without notice so she can go to Spain to try to find her husband the revolutionary. There's still more for the nobly beleaguered doctor - it is the height of the Depression, after all - no money, no steam heat, no love life, tortured by sleepless nights and dreams of his disappeared wife and his disappeared daughter and the carnage of the battlefield in France that left his arm ruined. He of course does have the requisite copy of Yeats by the bedside, which he reads for sustenance. He shadowboxes in the morning, perhaps to make the point that the Irish are as into fitness as they are into self-flagellation. But mostly he stews in guilt and self-doubt and emotional impotence. Until his young grandson suddenly appears. Little Carlito is 2 going on 3. Since his father is of Spanish descent, he doesn't know much English. So silence here is a definite virtue. But Hamill insists over and over that we hear him speak in his actual vernacular: "evvafent" instead of "elephant"; "moo-zick" instead of "music"; "tray" instead of "train." The appearance of Carlito sets in motion other crucial events. Jim Delaney must find a housekeeper to take care of the child so he can continue his regular rounds as a living grim reaper in those tenements of hard luck. And into his life comes the mysterious and beautiful Rose. She's Italian, and she has a back story of woe to match Delaney's. As Rose and Delaney circle each other, the good doctor also has to deal with a mobster mope named Frankie Botts, who's angry at Delaney for treating the bullet wound of a rival and refusing to reveal his whereabouts. Will Delaney survive the threats? Will he and Rose end up together? You get the picture. For nearly half a century, Hamill has been one of our finest writers when it comes to New York, through his newspaper columns and journalistic essays. His 1996 piece in Esquire about the death of boxing still holds up, containing the following fat gem of a sentence to describe the atmosphere of the old Madison Square Garden: "Before the fights, the lobby was jammed with neighborhood tough guys and off-duty cops, old fighters with crumpled faces, gamblers with dead eyes and pearl-gray hats and velvet collars on their coats." His Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 2005, in which he somehow twinned up the deaths of the critic Susan Sontag and the actor Jerry Orbach into a seamless whole, is a model of economical writing. Hamill, now 72, is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir "A Drinking Life," about his longtime bout with alcoholism. He has also written nine previous novels, including several best sellers, so he must be doing something right. But the puzzle of "North River" is that it reads like the kind of first novel you would expect from a journalist, in which observation and eye for detail and reportage have been replaced by sentimentality and dead-on-arrival descriptions. An olive tree in Delaney's garden, wrapped in tar paper to protect it during the winter, looks like "a giant ice-cream cone." He lives in a "large, drafty house." He feels fear that "opened and closed in his stomach like a fist." Hamill is at his best when he writes about his city. He knows New York present and past, and he is able to make us taste the early-20th-century time frame of "North River" - Times Square with its "midnight places like Rector's and Shanley's and Churchill's" and Delaney "inhaling perfumed shoulders on dance floors"; the 10th Avenue el slicing through buildings; the six acres of Washington Square covering over the bones of the poor, since it was once a cemetery; a sweet little glance of Jolson at the Winter Garden Theater. That's the Hamill I admired so much as a young would-be journalist growing up in New York in the 1960s and '70s. That's the Hamill with the gift for detail that made him so special. "North River" has its share of those moments, but they aren't enough to overcome the book's pitfalls. So let's consider "North River" a blip in an otherwise marvelous and deservedly distinguished writing life. Dr. James Delaney has no money, no steam heat and no love life; but then the mysterious Rose turns up. Buzz Bissinger grew up in New York City and is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is the author of "Friday Night Lights" and "A Prayer for the City."
Library Journal Review
North River is an evocative account of life in New York City in 1934. As the effects of the Depression rage all around him, Dr. James Delaney tries to serve the needs of his mostly Irish and Italian patients. His life had been disrupted a year earlier by the disappearance of his wife, but an even bigger change occurs when daughter Grace -deposits her three-year-old son, Carlito, on his doorstep while she goes to Spain to search for her Marxist husband. The doctor hires a Sicilian immigrant, Rose, to look after the boy and finds himself changed forever by the two. Hamill diminishes the sentimental nature of his tale by having James and Rose caught up in a conflict between warring mob factions. Henry Strozier narrates in an engagingly gruff manner yet provides vivid, credible voices for Rose and Carlito. Recommended for popular collections.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
