Saint John of the Five Boroughs

Falco is a master: of craft, of character, of tension. Saint John of the Five Boroughs is literature, really good literature that actually moves (runs, hops, leaps, etc.). What thrills me most about this novel is the way in which it explores a very physical drama involving love relationships, the current war in Iraq, and mobsters, while also digging into the psychological tensions between the book's diverse set of personalities. Falco disrupts expectations, discovering a string of somethings less expected and all the more real and compelling within each of the characters in the novel. Read it for its intelligence, for its craft, or for its drama--but read it. And when you're looking for more work by Falco (you will be), check out Wolf Point and In the Park of Culture, or anything else Falco has written.

I stepped into page one of this novel and couldn't put it down. Ed Falco's writing flows seamlessly, the story building in momentum from the very beginning. Falco is brilliant in the way he develops characters who are real and intriguing. I found myself empathizing with these characters and thinking again and again about the complexities of their choices and actions. Through Falco's writing (novels, short fictions, poems, and plays) I visit places and lives that are very different from my own. But the layers of his characters' emotions - and the essence of their struggles - resonate with me. In the smallest of details, Falco reveals the aching places that exist in each of us.

I read St. John of the Five Burroughs in three sittings; couldn't stop wanting to find out how the plot and characters were going to evolve/resolve. Excellent excellent book. Falco's richest and most complex so far. Such great, multi-layered characters -- even when they're making really terrible decisions I totally understand and sympathize with their logic. There's so many things to think about with each of them -- the various questions they raise about responsibility and obligation -- to self, family, art, spirit, society. All woven smoothly into a compelling narrative.

Falco writes hard-edged novels whose characters often descend into the depths of what human beings are capable of. Sometimes they emerge from those depths better for having endured such a descent; sometimes not--but they are always changed. In Saint John of the Five Boroughs, Falco's characters--Avery, Grant, Lindsey, Hank--all make that journey into the underworld darkness, and each discovers that world has been around them all the time. The difficulty is coming to terms with that, and in emerging whole. Saint John of the Five Boroughs takes us into the darkness and back--it is a terrific novel.

This is the second novel I've read by Ed Falco (and novels are just the half of it: the guy's a master of short stories, and if the world were just his stuff'd be everywhere heralded) and, like his last book (Wolf Point, also from Unbridled), St. John is a dynamite book focused on 'unorthodox' relationships, the battles and fatigue that come from those relationships, the ways in which people wish to be and the ways in which they deal with and/or handle (or, often as not, fail) all aspects of self. I'll admit to being baffled that anyone'd complain about this book being a drag, or slow-moving, or hard to get into: if anything, Falco's writing's deceptive precisely *because* it's so fast moving--stuff happens at a quick, cinematic pace: in the first fifty pages the reader sees a party, sees a relationship strained, sees the instigation of two strange relationships...there's tons. The richness in terms of plot is more than worth the price of admission. And it's deceptive because, at speeds like those Falco works, a reader might be used to a book which is simpler, shallower--a read that'll provide the popcorn frizz of fun but not the real satisfying heft of Truth or Reality. Falco's working the latter category, strongly. Stress that word 'cinematic,' actually: I can think of few books--hell, few writers--with as keen a sensory focus as St. John: Falco's work is immersive and rewarding in all sorts of ways, not least of which is that we can, in the best way, both feel and feel for the characters, and we're able to feel so much because we see them so clearly, can see the scenes--we can see that party at the start, can smell and feel what's happening (meaning, of course, that Falco's about as generous an author as one could hope for, willing to give the reader enough to get fully invested not just in the story but in the whole world of the story). Plus there's ideation/theme stuff: we've all read books in which a character is merely a stand-in for some idea the author's trying to hawk or use to prop certain thematic developments; we've all read books in which the characters are, ultimately, beautifully rendered but without any depth or substance, characters which don't offer the reader a way to trace larger currents running beneath the story. But Falco gives us, instead, Avery and Grant (there's a whole set of characters, but these are the two you'll miss most at the book's close), flawed, complicated, confused, trying-damn-hard people. If great writing's made of sentences which honor the world's complexity, which honor the confused and confusing ways each of us tries to balance desires and fears, to balance hope for what's next and frustration with what we've already done, Ed Falco's St. John is right at the highest echelon of great writing. Buy the book. Read the book.