Trying to Grow Up
BELL, MADISON
Trying to Grow Up The Breaks By Richard Price Simon & Schuster. 446pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Madison Bell Author, "The Washington Square Ensemble" The author of the present work arrived nine...
...Thrust further onto his own resources by an act that is really beyond apology, Peter must confront another thing his father has told him: "You do it for .you...
...To Price's credit he makes it interesting...
...Elsewhere in the English Department is Tony Fonseca, a bearish failed writer whose only support system is a rotating student cult...
...Crown's departure upsets Peter because he himself has no vocation...
...That technique usually functions best when practiced from a remote point of view, as in the first two novels...
...Out of Stony's engagement with the problems of friendship and family life came Price's best novel to date...
...When Peter learns that her ex-husband is Tony Fonseca he knows he is drifting into deep water, though he can not anticipate exactly how deep it is...
...Like Kenny Becker, Peter is often tediously self-obsessed...
...Not getting into law school damages Peter's image of himself as the family success story...
...In this and other Price novels, for "father's job" read "death-trap...
...Despite this good fortune, Peter still has trouble connecting with people...
...The elder Keller's reaction is eminently reasonable, if a little too nervous: "Don't do it for me, my son...
...Ten-year-old Peter Keller, a typical son of the lower-middle class, moves with his widowed father to a white-flight high-rise in Yonkers...
...All the people he comes across (his father, Vy, Fonseca, Crown, and Fat Jack, who is perpetually leaving his wife) are trapped in their own cones of isolation...
...His puppyish efforts to be pals with Fat Jack are met with patient resignation more often than not, and Peter is smart enough to notice and be hurt...
...The latter remark immediately seizes Peter, who begins calling in bomb threats to any public place where he knows his parents are going...
...Instead of an entire street gang of troubled youths, Blood-brothers featured one, Stony De Coco...
...Then he turns to phone soliciting, but drives away his co-workers with his eagerness to be friends...
...Price's rejoinder to formalist criticism must be that the world is not a tidy place, and neither is the mind...
...Peter, who somehow shares all of Price's knowledge about fiction, turns his section into a creative writing class and throws himself into teaching with nervous intensity...
...Kim herself is almost too much for Peter, while Fonseca is older, more cunning and very much crazier...
...she has been married and lives with her 10-year-old son...
...At the other end of the spectrum is Crown, a brilliant teacher who soon after Peter's arrival returns to New York to resume his neglected acting career...
...Kim is a little more than Peter is looking for...
...He has broken through to his father, yet only by permanently terrorizing the man...
...Yet the pronounced disorderliness of The Breaks is so clearly intentional that perhaps it is wrong to regard it as a weakness...
...Price's latest effort, another first-person novel, seriously attempts to climb out of that box...
...Fonseca is a scary example for Peter-how he could turn out in 20 years if he's not lucky...
...by contrast, Ladies' Man focused on abject loneliness...
...In his earlier work Price wrote brilliantly about adolescents and middle-aged men who were adolescent at heart...
...This kid in The Breaks is me," the author has declared...
...When internalized, as in The Breaks, the method tends toward chaos...
...Peter, however, is the first of his characters to do irreparable damage in this context: He might read the bomb threats as a backward gesture of affection, but his father will never see matters that way...
...Price is expert at portraying father-son relationships defined by twisted forms of love that wound as much as they comfort...
...At the novel's beginning, Peter becomes the first Keller to graduate from an Ivy League school...
...Both Price and his alter-ego fall short of their respective marks, though not by much...
...Having strung his family along with the notion that he'll reapply to law school, Peter is consequently terrified when he finally learns that his father doesn't care...
...Like Kenny Becker, Peter is without companions or real family ties...
...teaching is only a layover and he knows it...
...Realizing that he is close to another breaking point, Keller samples the town's singles action and miraculously falls in love with his first pickup, Kim...
...To overcome his loneliness he tries slave work in the garment district...
...Caught on his fourth call, he barely avoids a jail term...
...Now Peter is out of the house for good...
...Instinct correctly informs him that war with the older man is inevitable, and his response is to run toward the danger...
...Here is a small but crucial victory...
...Nevertheless, his second novel, Blood-brothers, surpassed his first by being more orderly...
...He also blows a dating service interview with his one-word self-description: "Drowning...
...That criticism is probably irrelevant to Price, who has always demonstrated precious little interest in formalism...
...Examining the wreckage of Fonseca's life, Peter realizes he need not ruin his own...
...The real vexed question of The Breaks is what Peter wants to do...
...In his spare time, Peter gets anxiety attacks by reading the "Up and Coming" section of People magazine...
...Richard Price weighed in as a realist right from the start...
...If The Wanderers had a flaw, it was diffusion: Anecdotally loose in structure, the book resembled a series of linked stories more than anything else...
...After graduation, he spends a few weeks idling in his parents' Yonkers apartment, mentally replaying his constant failures to get close to either his father or his hopelessly neurotic stepmother, Vy...
...The post-collegiate alienation Peter suffers is a common syndrome...
...Trying to make contact with somebody, anybody, he blurts out unedited sections of his endless interior monologue, embarrassing himself and his listeners...
...Reviewed by Madison Bell Author, "The Washington Square Ensemble" The author of the present work arrived nine years ago with The Wanderers, a very accomplished first novel about Bronx housing-project adolescence that handled its material with the discipline and proper distance of mature craftsmanship...
...Completely solipsistic without being aware of it, Kenny almost bored himself to death in the course of a fairly small number of pages...
...he was what a grown up Stony De Coco might be...
...And as he declared in an interview this spring, writing from personal experience is a matter of principle for him...
...Going down for the third time, Peter accepts a job where his father is employed, the Post Office...
...Previously Price specialized in male friendship...
...Equal to Peter's confusion about his goals is his devastating, persisting solitude...
...He daydreams of becoming a stand-up comic, and in a spirit of competition he forces himself to perform in an amateur hour at a New York bar...
...Although, the move seems a recipe for disaster for anyone in his condition, he is rescued from the doldrums by his former English teacher, Fat Jack, who gives him a job teaching freshman composition...
...I don't want to wind up murdered in my sleep some night...
...Understandably irritated by critics who can't distinguish his territory from truly burned-out sections of the Bronx, he draws the class lines more clearly here...
...He is used to regarding himself as special, but his law school disappointment takes away his basis for that feeling, and there's nothing immediately to replace it...
...On the other hand, he's smarter and ultimately more interesting than Stony De Coco or any of the dead-end kids of The Wanderers...
...Price's strategy consists of piling up an almost unbearable sequence of verisimilar events...
...The Breaks reads curiously like an adolescent novel, but it represents an authentic effort to deal with the issues of maturity...
...By doing something for himself alone, Peter touches the source of the strength that carries him through an overt battle with Fonseca to the conclusion of the novel and the beginning of his adult life...
...Afterward he reflexively turns to Fonseca for approval, doesn't get it, and is amazed to discover that he can do very well without it...
...Still vibrating from his brush with major trouble, Peter goes back to the upstate town where he went to college...
...his dialogue was the authentic language of his setting, virtually unmodified by stylistic devices...
...Narrator Kenny Becker was pushing 30 and stuck in a premature mid-life crisis, mainly expressed as sexual angst...
...Peter Keller's struggle to grow up parallels Price's search for language to describe more sophisticated emotion...
...The queasy friendship that develops between these two is based on a shared fear of failure that involves both their unspoken rivalry for Kim and their careers...
...With Ladies' Man the novelist undertook a risky move to the first person, losing much of his detachment and control in the process...
...Peter is physically afraid of Fonseca, who has some slight reputation for violence...
Vol. 66 • April 1983 • No. 7
