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Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff.
Review: At least Eggers is good for one thing -- maybe his name stuck to this great book will actually get it in the hands of readers. (Dave, don't you just wish you wrote as well as Wallant?)Most people can't remember when writers actually wrote good books -- this is one of them. This guy also wrote "The Pawnbroker", another great novel. Wallant is tough to describe: urban, gritty, but with real imagination and passion and dark humor. He knows a lot about anguish, a lot about being broke and battered spiritually. He's really a modern-day naturalist, like Frank Norris or Stephen Crane (of the shorter works...) or even Dos Passos (of Manhattan Transfer). Maybe people are really sick of reading crap? Richard Yates's books are coming back (he was buddies with Wallant in the early 60s), now Wallant's...All we need to do now is get Brian Moore's early novels back in print. After you read Wallant, find Moore's "Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" and "An Answer from Limbo." You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: An unknown masterpiece
Review: Readers will not be able to comprehend that something so profoundly written has not been reckognized into mainstream literature. I've never seen so many beautiful, exact and vivid sentences compacted into one work. The story is humorous and emotional, while striking into the heart of universal themes and characterization. Wallant should be considered as great of a writer as Faulkner or Melville.
Rating:
Summary: An unknown masterpiece
Review: Readers will not be able to comprehend that something so profoundly written has not been reckognized into mainstream literature. I've never seen so many beautiful, exact and vivid sentences compacted into one work. The story is humorous and emotional, while striking into the heart of universal themes and characterization. Wallant should be considered as great of a writer as Faulkner or Melville.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't make the same mistake I did.
Review: This book was described as "an unknown masterpiece", which makes one ask, "Why is it unknown if it's so good? Is it because it's not good? Is it bad? Am I going to regret this?" Bad yes, regret no. It's a quick read and at times one may find one's self interested, but overall it's nothing special. This book is like The Supper with Joe Pesci. The rent collector of a slum lord, his loser brother Norman, becomes engrossed in the lives of the tenants and is determined to fix their housing problems, hoping it would better their lives as well. As Norman improves the apartments, he also improves himself, which is highly unlikely since most people cannot experience such a huge personality change, especially not in such short a period.
In the beginning Norman is stoic and timid, but by the end he has a zest for life and delivers his opinions freely. This book is not a "comic tour de force" as the cover claims. I encountered no funny parts, but it didn't seem like the author was trying to be funny. There were many characters in the book, each of them with distinctive personalities and problems, however, the author avoids going into great detail with them so that it's easier to distinguish the Nazis from the old men, gay jazz musicians, and aspiring authors. I don't recommend buying this book, or even checking it out at the library because there are much better books. It's not a terrible book, it's just not good, which makes it not worth reading. It does have a nice shape though.
Rating:
Summary: lyrical, musical, surprisingly earthy
Review: Wallant takes a fairly common premise--Norman Moonbloom works as an agent for his brother Irving's tenements, popping into and out of the tenants' lives to collect the rent--and makes it into an effective and moving vision of moral and social dislocation. There are elderly Holocaust survivors, stoned jazzbos, a young married couple, an od married couple, old cranks, a horny young Chinese-American guy, even a James Baldwin character, all of whom seem somehow marooned and desperate for Norman's attentions. Wallant presents each of them with grace and economy, sketching a vision of early-60s NYC that's somehow cheering despite the pervasive despair. By turns lyrical and earthy, this novel is wonderfully thought-provoking as an allegory (is Norman a Christ figure?) and equally enthralling as a minutely-noted tour through a vanished city.
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