Customer Reviews

My Dreams Out in the Street: A Novel

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Kim Addonizio is a marvelous original. She writes like a divine union of Flannery O'Conner and Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler. She's one of the most unadorned, artful spiritual writers I know.

My Dreams Out in the Street has everything I look for in a contemporary novel.

Rita, its lead character, is compelling. Alternately sexy, mysterious, stupid, resourceful, and inept, She moves through San Francisco's underbelly with unflagging desperation. Struggling to survive, Rita is one of those people who never got an even break. She wants to climb out of the hole she's in to a better life, but doesn't know how. She's hungry to get right with God, who appeared to her once in a childhood vision but has been woefully absent since, and she wants to find Jimmy, her husband who left their apartment one night after an argument and disappeared. Along the way, she sees something she shouldn't, is hunted by a psychotic deadbeat, and hooks up with a married private investigator who helps her and promises to find Jimmy.

The story alternates between these three points of view, and Addonizio does a masterful job of interweaving the characters' separate-yet-parallel stories, especially through the last third of the book as the plot quickens and various elements come together in surprising, satisfying ways. Without giving away everything, I can tell you that I lost two good nights' sleep fearing that Rita would soon be murdered.

All through the narrative, Addonizio's eye for nuance, description, and detail is a gifted poet's eye. Her depictions of homelessness and desperate urban street life are achingly poignant and scary. And yet, and yet! She believes in grace, in spiritual integrity:

"The streetlights came on all together. Lights began flaring in windows up and down the block, where people were returning to families or friends, looking forward to the holiday; soon they would give thanks, grateful to spend a few hours with those they had chosen or been given to love, those they had gathered around them to help them live."

I wish I'd written that! Reward yourself for any little or big thing and spend some time with this book. If you're paying attention, if you've got a pulse, you can't help but fall in love with these characters and their creator.

--Robert McDowell, the Poetry Mentor & author of Poetry as Spiritual Practice, which is coming (July, 2008) from Free Press/Simon & Schuster.

I have been a fan of Kim Addonizio's work for several years now. I own and have read almost all of her poetry and fiction. Her latest novel "My Dreams Out in the Street" amplifies her versatility as a poet and fiction writer. She is an inspiration to any woman who seeks to write vivid and honest stories or poems.
I finished this book in three days and later felt bad for going through it so fast, but it was that compelling. The pictures she paints of Jimmy and Rita's lives are gritty and beautiful at the same time. The reader feels every thing that they feel with Addonizio's precise, descriptive language. I highly recommend this book as well as her other works. She'll have you hooked.

This novel set in 1990's San Francisco is a grim, painful look at what life can be like for those who enter the big old world already behind the proverbial eight ball, perhaps having suffered tortured upbringings, and expected to survive with no useful education or job skills. The author makes no effort to sugarcoat an existence of drifting in the streets, sleeping on grates or in parks with the fear of violence ever present, often forced into turning tricks in the most disgusting of situations, and succumbing to the temporary, numbing relief found in a bottle or needle.

This is the setting for twenty-something Rita Jackson, who finally ends up in San Fran still with the psychic wounds from her mother's murder and her own abuse. An attractive girl, she survives for a while as an exotic dancer and even marries the good looking Jimmy D'Angelo. But their drug use and fighting eventually overwhelms their genuine love, resulting in their literally losing contact and her life sinking ever downward.

It is truly discomforting to see the vulnerability of those with no protective resources (giving the lie to "nothing left to lose"): being attacked while sleeping, having their meager belongings and last dollar stolen, or more generally finding themselves in environments that are illicit with a threat of harm attached. Rita witnesses a crime in a seedy hotel and now must protect herself against the perpetrator as well the possibility of being accused of involvement. Fortunately, a sympathetic investigator Gary Shepard finds his way to Rita, but her fragile beauty gives him a chance to escape his dying marriage. Unfortunately, his seduction of Rita is in the end simply an example of exploitation of the vulnerable, as she repeatedly expresses her longings for Jimmy, believing that Gary will assist in her search.

Hope is almost an extravagance in these circumstances; even thinking that way is asking for its thin thread to be cut. But Rita keeps getting back up; she will not cave in. Perhaps that is the message: in the face of bleak reality, a small light can be a beacon. Just maybe, one can get closer and closer to that light.

Well, this is an amazing book. I've known Addonizio was a phenomenal poet (my personal favorite), but now it seems she is a fantastic fiction writer as well. This book has easily made my list of favorites. It's a tragic love story that picks up where her book of poems, Jimmy & Rita, leaves off. It's a quest that these two young people have in finding each other and the pitfalls that life places in their way. I look forward to more from Addonizio.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so the saying goes. But what if, in your desperation, you are alone, with nothing but the clothes on your back? And, then, what if you lose those clothes, too? Such are the desperate times of 24-year-old Rita Jackson, who finds herself homeless on the streets of San Francisco, trying to avoid heroin and prostituting herself for money for booze, cigarettes and cheap motel rooms. Rita is the sad, lonely and unforgettable protagonist of Kim Addonizio's new novel, MY DREAMS OUT IN THE STREET.

After a nasty fight, Rita's husband, the dashing and only slightly less dysfunctional Jimmy, storms out of their apartment. By the time we meet them a year later, they have lost each other in the city. Rita circles the city, visiting the places they frequented together. She has lost everything in the previous year, starting with her husband, until she is homeless and strung out --- with no money, no ID and eventually no clothes. She is haunted by her past --- a childhood filled with abandonment, rape, abuse and even murder. Without Jimmy (and even with him), she drinks to numb herself but feels guilty and ashamed of her actions and even for the things done against her.

Jimmy is looking for Rita, but with less intensity as Rita's search for him. He is working as a waiter in a fancy restaurant and has an apartment where he can listen to his blues records. He hangs out in bars with friends, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to stay out of trouble. He gets a tattoo with Rita's name under a heart, but twice he sees her, disheveled and alone on the street, and doesn't go to her. He, too, is overcome with guilt and shame.

After Rita witnesses a crime in the hallway of a scummy motel, she meets Gary Shepard, a private investigator assigned to the case. Charming and strong, Gary at first feels like a safe presence for Rita. But his attraction to her becomes too intense, and she's still in love with Jimmy. Soon, Rita's life is spiraling down faster than ever. She and Gary end up together in a motel with no belongings and very little money, and a killer is after her because of what she saw in the motel hallway. After leaving Gary, she becomes vulnerable to the madman's clutches; still, she seeks Jimmy and holds on to the hope of their reunion.

MY DREAMS OUT IN THE STREET is intense and gritty. Rita, Jimmy, Gary and the other shadowy characters are all damaged and depressed, violent to themselves and to others. But this is also a love story. Jimmy and Rita seem, in the traditional literary sense, destined to be together --- it's just a matter of finding their way to each other again. We are not given a concrete conclusion but are left feeling hopeful for the couple in the near future (although to contemplate their long-term success doesn't engender much hope at all).

Addonizio's prose is light and forthright --- a realism verging on lyricism, without sentimentality but not lacking beauty. MY DREAMS OUT IN THE STREET is short but doesn't feel sparse at all, and in fact readers may be left wanting more. This is a dark and disturbing, yet oddly romantic, summer tale worth checking out.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman