Teaching Angels to Fly: Stories - Hardcover

Like his 1990 novel, A Time for Wedding Cake, this second collection of stories from La Puma, who won a Flannery O'Connor award for The Boys of Bensonhurst (1987), is a disappointment: 14 snippets of melodrama and sentiment, only sporadically deepened by authentic ethnic flavor. The best pieces here are simple, undramatic glimpses of working-class childhoods: a sleepy 11-year-old boy in 1940 Bensonhurst (an autobiographical stand-in, presumably) helping his father with after-hours baking; a Puerto Rican teenager shlepping dresses over mean Brooklyn streets to help out his seamstress mother in her illegal home sweatshop. Other slices-of-life, however, are overdrawn or maudlin: a mock-wedding between two homeless people; the marriage and hard-won happiness of a mentally handicapped but financially secure couple--as narrated (a clumsy device) by the husband. Elsewhere, an earthy, somewhat mannered style can't disguise B-movie material: a bookie and his ruthless moll on the run from the Mob; adultery and cocaine addiction in an upper-class milieu; a Mafia godfather under pressure from slimy federal officials. (The most promising story, ``The Hangman,'' about a young G.I.'s experiences on a corrupt Army base in 1952 Japan, remains underdeveloped and blurred.) And weakest of all are four vaguely supernatural, painfully precious anecdotes--involving several ghosts (an old girlfriend, dead spouses, a departed pet cat) and one angel with a broken wing. Crude, thin work--ringing false whenever La Puma moves away from straightforward evocations of Brooklyn neighborhoods. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fourteen stories, many infused with the hard-edged realism of the ItalianAmerican neighborhood of Brooklyn's Bensonhurst, others shimmering with the enigmas of magic realism, make up this collection by the author of A Time for Wedding Cake . La Puma's tales bridge a variety of narrative styles, weaving unpredictably in and out of a fantasy world, with sudden interjections of lyricism and humor. The characters range from gangsters to angels, but all are confronted by the random hand of love. The bookie in "In Delphine's Bed" steals half a million dollars from two high rollers so he and his lover can live the good life, but they are tracked down by an unlikely nemesis. Perhaps a little mad with loneliness, Joe, the protagonist of "Photograph," is in love with a ghost named Goldie. Unmoored from the conventional world, the story unreels through a shifting exchange dialogue means two for four voices, undifferentiated by quotation marks or narrative connection. In "Lightning," the mother of an apprentice angel dispenses advice in the cadences of a Sicilian matriarch. "Murderous Myrtle" arrives at an assignation "with ice in her blue eyes and a fresh razor blade between her teeth." La Puma's dialogue has perfect pitch; his maverick imagination marks him as a writer of real gifts.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.