Coney

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and original
Review: Young Harry Catzker is coming of age in a topsy turvy world, which starts when he falls off his bike and smashes it to pieces, setting in motion a series of other events, but that is the least of his worries. Coney has been described (see flyleaf) as a dark comic novel and that is what it is. I had perhaps unfairly expected a little "schmaltz", but Ducovney doesn't give an inch in that department, except perhaps at the Café Royal. Harry's mother keeps repeating to her husband "always with the jokes." She finds terror underneath the joking. The reader is on her wavelength. Harry will suffer in this world, but he will turn out all right. He seems to have an instinct for survival. By the time the novel finishes, however, no one else will be spared.

Set in 1939 in Coney Island, New York, the story presages and parallels the coming Holocaust. As Harry's father (serial novelist for a Yiddish newspaper) tells Harry, in Poland there is no freedom and the law is on the side of the "Pogromchiks", in America the law is on your side, but you may not be able to exercise it. The three main adults are all immigrants, and as it becomes clearer and clearer, they are not safe in America either. Aba, poet and family boarder, wonders how many Jewish lives will have to be given before there can be a State of Israel. Unfortunately, he is eerily prescient. The reader desperately wants justice or a happy solution and the lesson is that there is none.

This gritty book assaults the senses. It is difficult and at times even disgusting to read some of the passages, page after page of grime and cruelty, tempered occasionally by kindness - the love of his father, Aba's life lessons, and by visits to Fifi, the fat lady. From the opening chapter where a pack of dogs are tearing each other apart, the reader is in for a dizzying descent into hell. There are gangsters, circus freaks, and adults whose lives are confused, in tatters and beyond their control. At first it looks like a good guys versus the bad guys and an attempt to shock. Even the landscape is bleak, the glory days of Coney Island when it had Luna Park and Dreamland, is past, and most of the novel takes place in the off season when the summer people have gone. Yet, as the novel builds momentum, the parallels to Hitler's rising power in Europe inform the book more and more and give it coherence.

Often the language is awkward and convoluted. Harry, his father, Aba, and his mother go into reveries and fantasies in ways which confuse the reader, although the concept is good. Moise, the father, speaks out loud to Freud and then turns and speaks to real people, for example. However, there is a lot of good imagery. Coney will get under your skin much as the particles of sand under the boardwalk and provoke you into confronting the biggest issues of our existence.