High winds derailed the floating book shop today. Meanwhile, here’s a four star review of Killing, posted at Amazon, from Bill Brown, aka Nick.
Unless I mistake my guess, Vic Fortezza wasn't trained be a writer. That is to say, he didn't study writing at school, didn't get a degree in literature, and didn't teach composition or literature in a school or college. He only took up writing full time after retiring, and has written diligently since then (he has written 50 short stories and at least three novels). But Vic is a real writer: he has an excellent ear for how people speak and is able to render dialogue into written words; he knows what to write about it, and he writes about it well.
In this case, he writes about killing - not a particular killing or someone who specializes in killing - but killing in all its forms (killing in general): warfare, abortion, suicide and murders that are committed for any number of reasons (hatred, jealousy, revenge, etc.). As the reader might have guessed from my inclusion of "abortion" among the various forms of murder, Vic is a moralist: he is against killing, and that means, due to his desire to be consistent (and thus be truly moral), he is against all killings, all forms of killing. But he is also a realist, and so he realizes that, at certain times and in certain conditions, killing can be justified. Thus, though a moralist, he is not moralizing. He asks difficult questions but does not claim to have definitive answers to them. In fact, the very last line of this novel is a question and an invitation to intelligent discussion: "Wanna talk?"
Set in Bensonhurst (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY) during the first year or two of the 1990s, "Killing" is the strictly chronological narrative of the life of Dante Gentile, a Vietnam veteran who currently works as a carpenter. Dante is surrounded by family members, all of whom are well drawn, true to life: his wife and their two children, plus Dante's mother and father (all of whom live in the same house) and friends from his job (they ran the gamut from the intelligent, well-read Jew Benny to the uneducated boor Sandy). A good man trying to do right, Dante does his best to help each one through the difficulties that they face and stay true to himself, despite the wrongs that they might inadvertently or intentionally inflict upon him: unplanned pregnancies, extramarital affairs, tours of duty in Iraq, difficulty with a mobbed-up construction firm, etc. etc.
My only criticism of this excellent book concerns its structure. The omniscient narrator never breaks away from Dante himself and remains focused on him exclusively. Though suitable for a short work, this technique (or, rather, Vic's reluctance to experiment with his narrative technique) becomes tedious over the course of a longer work. The same lack of willingness to experiment affects the novel's climatic scene: instead of loading the entire thing on to the book's ending, as Vic does, it might have been broken in half, with the first half of this episode placed at the novel's beginning and its second half placed at its end. This would have created enough suspense to last the entire book and provided for an exciting ending. Without such a split construction, the episode in question seems tacked on, almost unnecessary (it concerns a planned assassination that is not carried out), and possibly worthy of outright deletion.
I make one final point with some hesitation. This book comes with a "Glossary" of the "Brooklyn Sicilian" slang that is used in it. A good number of these words are denigrating terms for Jews, gays, blacks and women who engage in extra-marital sexual intercourse. Having met Vic, I know that he is not a bigot. But those who haven't met him may well think so when they read that the meaning of the offensive slurs "moolinyon" and "tootsoon" is "darkie," which of course is an offensive slur in its own right.
Thanks, Bill.
Visit Vic's sites:
Vic's Third Novel (Print or Kindle): http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3
Vic's Website: http://members.tripod.com/vic_fortezza/Literature/
Vic's Short Story Collection (Print or Kindle): http://www.tiny.cc/Oycgb
Vic's 2nd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/6b86st6
Vic's 1st Novel: http://tiny.cc/94t5h
Vic's Screenplay on Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/cyckn3
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