Belmondo Style

A friend of mine recommended this book, after the Publishing Triangle Award finalists were announced. I could not put this book down. While there is a gay theme that runs through this engrossing novel, it is most poignantly a coming of age story and the very delicate relationship between a father and son. Berlin doesn't seem to feel the need to make his characters likable so the effect is that they are more realistic, and their love for each other that much more real. I would never typically say this, but this book would make a great movie! I will definitely be reading this writer's other books.

I was happy to see that Belmondo Style is a finalist for The Publishing Triangle's 2005 Fiction Award. I read Adam Berlin's novel last summer and thought it a powerful book, one that has stayed in my head long after I finished it. An anti-gay hate crime is the catalyst for this moving novel between a live-for-the-moment father and his thoughtful sixteen-year-old son. These are fascinating characters with a bond that breaks easy father/son cliches. I hope the award nomination renews interest in this beautiful, layered novel.

This book reads like a screenplay. It's beautifully written, moves quickly and ends with a bang. The characters are well developed, and you're able to suspend reality just enough to believe the plot lines. While not critical, I recommend watching "Breathless" before reading the book; you will be able to fully appreciate the depth of Berlin's imagery and intensity of the plot. This book stayed in my head for weeks, and I hope some smart Hollywood type makes it into a blockbuster so I can enjoy it in another medium.

This book was a dream to read. I loved it from the very beginning. The father is one sexy man and you want to get to know him better. His son is absolutely lovely and the kiss, oh my lord his first kiss is sweet and was the first time an author made a kiss between gay lovers excited me the same way a kiss between heterosexual characters makes me feel. The trauma and tragedy made me zoom through this book. I loved every minute. The trip to Miami was wonderful and the ending was definitely Belmondo Style! Nice work Adam Berlin!

Adam Berlin's second novel expands on themes explored so well in Headlock, his debut: the lengths and depths to which family members will go for one another; the boundaries they will cross; the sometimes devastating results of going too far. Sixteen-year-old Ben Chiziver and his father, Jared, form the close-knit family unit here: the son a good student, a promising track star, and the book's all-too-wise-narrator; the devoted dad a ladies' man and pickpocket who pays the bills by "plowing fields of pedestrians, separating wheat from chaff, money from man." Jared is an aficionado of foreign films, especially of Breathless, from which he's shaped an image of himself in homage to Jean Paul Belmondo. Jared has "learned his moves from the movies," liking "simple movies the best, movies based on character and not plot." Berlin plays on this preference for character development in the early chapters of the book, writing nuanced dialogue and introspective interior monologues for Ben, and introducing Anna Partager, the one woman who will change the father/son dynamic. But when the threesome is forced to flee Manhattan after Jared avenges a vicious attack on his son, Berlin shifts into cinematic overdrive. The technique works equally well to elicit sympathy for Jared, who just can't operate in any "style" other than Belmondo's, and for Ben, who imagines the events that change his life until they become "as vivid as real memory, as vivid as a movie scene seen over and over again." Berlin uses his considerable talents to understate rather than overemphasize, to write about violence in brilliantly executed spare prose, and with that to convey both emotional depth and high-stakes drama.