Customer Reviews

God's Pocket

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've read a lot of books in the line of city/street type fiction and Dexter has it down cold on the likes of Richard Price and even Pellecanos. It's a very lived in book and a very funny book and every single character is eerily believable. I can't understand why this book doesn't have more reviews. Hopefully readers just assume it speaks for itself, since it's as close as you can come to a classic. Wish he'd left the newspaper guy out though. The book is stronger than rockets without him.

I wrote this last year for Forgotton Books at Pattinase. GP is back in print; there is a God.

GOD'S POCKET, like all Pete Dexter's novels, ends sans sunshine. Should Pete ever find a ray at the end, his sales would increase tenfold. I would read them three times instead of twice. I would still marvel at the sentences, at the characterizations, at the overwhelming sense of place, but I wouldn't feel like my mom forgot my birthday for the third year in a row.

Rereading Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, I have to believe his spectacular opening twenty years later pays homage to God's Pocket. Pete was living in South Philadelphia at the time and set the novel where he was, the same way I do mine. No, set is the wrong word, that's what I do. Drenched or soaked or maybe swallowed does God's Pocket justice; so lights-out, totally there that I knew this section of South Philadelphia in thirty pages like I know Chicago after fifty years. For my money, these two novels are the Old and New Testament if you want to read or write place as a character, urban America without the apologies or the fashion statements.


Style? The seamlessness of Elmore Leonard at his best, but with the bite of the early masters, the truth between the lines, slowly closing the doors, dimming the lights, walking you down an alley until you're naked and alone. If they ever find a vaccine for grinding, inevitable hopelessness, it will have been extracted from Pete's dead-on renditions.

Charlie Newton
Author: CALUMET CITY

Its a must read page-flipper. It arrived yesterday and I finished it today. I've read most of Dexter's books and this is the pick of the litter.

This is a sardonic, blackly humorous tale of an evil young man who is murdered by a good-hearted construction worker because of the young man's sadism. The comedy of errors that ensues is both poignant and tragic.

The young man's mother becomes infatuated with the alcoholic journalist who is investigating her son's death. Everyone in the story is either ridden with ulterior motives, misled, stupid or crazy.

Dexter's view of the world is jaded but not that far off the mark. Nothing is as it seems yet everything has an impact on something else.

This is a beautifully written story of a decent man, who happens to become a low level mob associate, retailing stolen meat. It has a fast moving plot, emotional power, and, at times, laugh out loud humor. The man is not much of a thinker, a "simple man", and the prose style tends to shorter sentences and paragraphs. The words are
well chosen, and there is a nuanced portrayal of the man's wife, and their relationship.

"God's Pocket" is the neighborhood where the couple lives. Dexter is very harsh on it, and I wouldn't blame someone from there for thinking Dexter was biased: not one of the neighborhood people is sympathetic. I would also have wished the newspaperman character was more sympathetic; he is a drunk, so his portrayal is believable, but like another reviewer, I am not convinced his character need have been written as it was.

God's Pocket is a tremendous book. A great look at an insular society and an outsider's mistake in trying to understand it.

This book was allright in the beginning but some parts were boring. It was okay but it was worth 2.5 stars. The story was sad but moving but it fell apart later.