Saint John of the Five Boroughs [Paperback]

Edward Falco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 2009

When 22-year-old Avery Walker, a senior at Penn State, meets Grant Danko, a 37-year-old performance artist from Brooklyn whose stage name is Saint John of the Five Boroughs, her life changes radically as she leaves college to live with Grant in Brooklyn and pursue a life as an artist. Out of concern for Avery, her mother, Kate, and her aunt, Lindsey, and Lindsey s husband, Hank, all travel to Brooklyn, where they all face a crisis and they are all forced to make life-altering choices. Grant Danko is a bad guy with a curiously attractive personality and a coterie of bright, artistic friends. He uses his good looks and his accomplishments (and the accomplishments of those friends) to get as many women as possible into bed. He s at times screwed up on drugs, winds up murdering someone as a result of taking a job working for his gangster uncle. He s inclined toward sex as an act of violence, has violent sex at least bordering on rape with his best friend and with Avery, a college student fifteen years younger than he. He mocks religion in his performance personae, and at the point where we first meet him, he s locked off from any kind of relationship with a higher power. Grant is about as lost as a man can get. So, when he finally chooses to risk death rather than to murder yet again, something extraordinary has happened. He s at the beginning of redemption and change, almost a kind of grace. Saint John of the Five Boroughs is beautifully turned, a stunning and layered novel about the effects of violence, both personal and cultural, on its characters lives. It s about the way violence twists character but it s also about the possibility of changing paths for the better. This novel explores why we make the choices we make both the choices that are so bad for us in their ultimate consequences, and the choices that save us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Family turmoil, existential crisis and artistic yearnings fill this wide-ranging but slow-moving novel. Avery Walker is a college senior when she meets Grant Danko (Saint John), a 37-year-old struggling artist who persuades her to ditch school and come live with him in Brooklyn. But Grant's career is off track since a violent episode left him unable to write, and as Avery falls in with his successful friends, Grant turns to a nefarious uncle and an unlikely involvement with the mob. Meanwhile, Avery's widowed mother, Kate, enlists her brother-in-law Hank (who harbors feelings for Kate) and his wife, Lindsay (whose brother is in Iraq), to leave Virginia and accompany her to rescue Avery. Falco produces some excellent writing, especially when he's exploring Grant's complicated past, but these sharp and nuanced passages unfortunately expose the other, more pedestrian sections. Avery serves as the linchpin between the two plots: the Virginians lost in New York and Grant's struggling. But except in Avery's head, these two worlds never quite become a whole. (Oct.)
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About the Author

Edward Falco grew up in Brooklyn and teaches at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is director of the MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the prize-winning author of several books including his new and selected stories, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and, most recently, the highly acclaimed novel Wolf Point.

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books; 1st edition (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961887
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961881
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #998,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ed Falco's novel, The Family Corleone, based on pages extracted from Mario Puzo's Godfather screenplays, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on May 8, 2012. His most recent books include the story collections, Burning Man (SMU, 2011), and the novel Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled, 2009). Other books include Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled, 2006), Wolf Point, a novel,(Unbridled, 2006) and In the Park of Culture, a collection of short fictions from The University of Notre Dame Press. His earlier works include the novel Winter in Florida, the hypertext novel, A Dream with Demons, the hypertext poetry collection, Sea Island, and a chapbook of prose poem, Concert in the Park of Culture, as well as two collections of short stories: Acid and Plato at Scratch Daniel's & Other Stories. Acid won the Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame, and was a finalist for The Patterson Prize. He has won a number of other prizes and awards for his writing, including an NEA Fellowship in fiction, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction from The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, The Mishima Prize for Innovative Fiction from The Saint Andrews Review, a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, two Individual Artist's Fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and The Governor's Award for the Screenplay from The Virginia Festival of American Film. His stories have been published widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and TriQuarterly, and collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies, including, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium. An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Falco's online work includes Self-Portrait as Child w/Father (Iowa Review Web), Circa 1967-1968 (Eastgate Reading Room), "Charmin' Cleary" (Eastgate Reading Room), and "Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales (with photographer Mary Pinto, in Volume I of The Electronic Literature Collection).

Falco lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is the director of Virginia Tech's MFA program, and he edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ed Falco's Mastery, October 24, 2009

By 

Weston Cutter - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Paperback)

This is the second novel I've read by Ed Falco (and novels are just the half of it: the guy's a master of short stories, and if the world were just his stuff'd be everywhere heralded) and, like his last book (Wolf Point, also from Unbridled), St. John is a dynamite book focused on 'unorthodox' relationships, the battles and fatigue that come from those relationships, the ways in which people wish to be and the ways in which they deal with and/or handle (or, often as not, fail) all aspects of self.

I'll admit to being baffled that anyone'd complain about this book being a drag, or slow-moving, or hard to get into: if anything, Falco's writing's deceptive precisely *because* it's so fast moving--stuff happens at a quick, cinematic pace: in the first fifty pages the reader sees a party, sees a relationship strained, sees the instigation of two strange relationships...there's tons. The richness in terms of plot is more than worth the price of admission. And it's deceptive because, at speeds like those Falco works, a reader might be used to a book which is simpler, shallower--a read that'll provide the popcorn frizz of fun but not the real satisfying heft of Truth or Reality. Falco's working the latter category, strongly.

Stress that word 'cinematic,' actually: I can think of few books--hell, few writers--with as keen a sensory focus as St. John: Falco's work is immersive and rewarding in all sorts of ways, not least of which is that we can, in the best way, both feel and feel for the characters, and we're able to feel so much because we see them so clearly, can see the scenes--we can see that party at the start, can smell and feel what's happening (meaning, of course, that Falco's about as generous an author as one could hope for, willing to give the reader enough to get fully invested not just in the story but in the whole world of the story). Plus there's ideation/theme stuff: we've all read books in which a character is merely a stand-in for some idea the author's trying to hawk or use to prop certain thematic developments; we've all read books in which the characters are, ultimately, beautifully rendered but without any depth or substance, characters which don't offer the reader a way to trace larger currents running beneath the story.

But Falco gives us, instead, Avery and Grant (there's a whole set of characters, but these are the two you'll miss most at the book's close), flawed, complicated, confused, trying-damn-hard people. If great writing's made of sentences which honor the world's complexity, which honor the confused and confusing ways each of us tries to balance desires and fears, to balance hope for what's next and frustration with what we've already done, Ed Falco's St. John is right at the highest echelon of great writing. Buy the book. Read the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Double Excellent, October 25, 2009

By 

Eric Nelson (Statesboro, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Paperback)

I read St. John of the Five Burroughs in three sittings; couldn't stop wanting to find out

how the plot and characters were going to evolve/resolve. Excellent excellent book. Falco's

richest and most complex so far. Such great, multi-layered characters -- even when they're

making really terrible decisions I totally understand and sympathize with their logic. There's

so many things to think about with each of them -- the various questions they raise about

responsibility and obligation -- to self, family, art, spirit, society. All woven smoothly into

a compelling narrative.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gangsters, New York art scene, infidelity and love, October 24, 2009

By 

M. Lapus "@ Starting Fresh blog" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Paperback)

Reviewers have rightfully stressed the seamless writing, the well crafted world building, and the book's quick cinematic pace. On the one hand, the book reads like a well crafted indy film. Edward Falco creates unorthodox characters that are painfully real in their motivations and logic, which is part of the book's appeal.

On the other hand, I found the unorthodox and real characters to be too "real" at certain points. I could easily picture Lindsay's response to her brother's deployment and her demand that their family relocate to New York City, but just as I could readily imagine Lindsay, I found her to be flighty and annoying.

While I might not have enjoyed Saint John of the Five Boroughs as much as many of the other reviewers, it was just not my thing. Other readers will surely appreciate the clearsightedness with which Edward Falco creates his characters.

Publisher: Unbridled Books; 1st edition (October 20, 2009), 424 pages.

Review copy provided by the publisher and Unbridled Book Tours.