In fact, he did kill someone-his first wife, smothered to death in a jealous rage. Carcaterra’s discovery of this crime at the age of 14, and the way it changed his feelings toward his father from a mixture of fear and love to one of fear and hate, is the crux of this remarkable book. His mother, who had known about it since shortly after her own marriage, waited until she and Lorenzo were safely 4,000 miles away in Italy to tell him. Having a murderer for a dad was tough on young Carcaterra: “I could not lose this new image of my father … a fierce, vicious thug suffocating the life out of a half-naked woman,” he writes. It took him eight years to work up the courage to confront his father, and the response, predictably, was delivered with a closed fist. The reader, though, is entitled to wonder why Lorenzo is so affected by the long-ago death of this woman he never knew, when his own mother, or for that matter he himself, day after day narrowly escape death at the same hands.
Everyone knows that the worst injuries an abused child suffers are psychological. But in Carcaterra’s matter-of-fact account, life wasn’t really so awful once you picked yourself off the floor and got to the hospital. Perhaps this is because, unique in the literature of abuse memoirs, the Carcaterras were not a respectable family hiding their dark secret from the neighbors. On his best day, Mario Carcaterra was a conniving bum deep in hock, and he lived among the dregs of the working poor in a New York neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. The only fathers young Lorenzo knew who didn’t beat their wives and kids were the ones already in jail. “My father’s behavior fell right into what was an acceptable norm in Hell’s Kitchen,” he writes.
But that’s his problem; everyone else who reads this book will be kept going in hopes that someone will stick a richly deserved lead pipe in the ear of the father, this monumental creep and bully whose idea of an outing was to take his son to a gang fight. No one ever does, though; the old man died in bed in 1988, still served by his obedient wife and no longer feared by his son. And with the fear went the hatred. The “safe place” of the book’s title may refer to Carcaterra’s life today, as a television journalist and a husband and father living in one of New York’s tonier suburbs. But it also recalls his earliest memories of awakening from a nightmare to take shelter in the brawny arms of his father-a man who really could lick any other daddy on the block. No wonder his son couldn’t help loving him.
JERRY ADLER
In Jesus’ Son (160 pages. Farrar Straus Giroux $19), Idaho-based Denis Johnson’s masterfully bleak sequence of short stories narrated by a young heartland lowlife, brutality is unpredictable and unremarkable: shootings, stabbings, guns held to heads, heroin overdoses, gruesome car wrecks-and confrontations that don’t turn violent only because the antagonists can’t stay focused. But scarier still is when the narrator betrays his chronic state of hallucinatory befuddlement. “It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other,” he tells us at one point in his wanderings. “The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can’t find.”
As in Johnson’s 1991 novel “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man,” everybody’s in that shape. His narrator goes to buy opium, and finds one friend shot by another; they’d started for the hospital but ran into a shed: “Everything was completely out of hand.” Automobiles are bumpcars, a psychiatric ward is a “playpen” with “Haldol by the quart.” As grunge sociology, “Jesus’ Son” is claustrophobic; as art, it’s exhilarating. Johnson has hit on the right tone-surreally inarticulate-and right form. The riskiest stories, like “Two Men,” don’t build to a revelation; they just go on and then stop. Is this the imitative fallacy-a lazy assumption that if life has no pattern, writing need not? No. These stories have appropriately enigmatic shapes, but they’re built to last.
DAVID GATES
