Rating: 
Summary: Worse than Gigli
Review: This isn't writing, it's pus. To add insult to injury, it has a manufactured, writing-school bred sense of inauthenticity about it. It's a catalog of human degradation with a tiny amount of story thrown in. As an ex-NY'r, I hate to see a man sloppily in love with the trash he's been psychologically conditioned to find glamourous.The incidents in this book, such as a young boy watching his mother inject heroin into her private parts exceed the widely dilated standards of late 20th century decency. Killing off said mother in a car accident when what little narrative there is runs of a steam like a tricycle pushed uphill is exploitation of the most obvious type. The book also includes a rather unromantic use of a sink. The narrative is structured around images, as if it were the rough draft of a screen play. Let us hope that no trendy director turns this into a cinematic account of the excursion into the armpit of one of the homeless men in the book. We're given exceptionally smelly sex between subway tunnel dwellers, a horrific, graphic beating, the depths of drug addiction and we don't want any of them. There is a tiny passage concerning the experiences of an iron worker on high steel that is worth reading, but you don't need to buy the book for that. This book couldn't exist without book company publicity. The cover says its an international best seller. That could include the sale of two copies in an Amsterdam restroom. For example, if McCann the author were ever to admit he wrote it in a stupor, and that he traded his real name for the name of a chain of cheap NY bars where he did his scribbling, his publicist would address this admission by insisting that a stupor is really a type of eastern european sub-compact car wherin the author pecked out the tale on a back seat typewriter. This book is a blemish on the consciousness of the human race. Not as big as the unfaceable degradation of true poverty, which I really couldn't handle, but a mess nonetheless.
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