Customer Reviews

Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (American Lives)

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Skoyles's "Secret Frequencies" is extraordinarily funny and moving--his sense of character is unbelievably vivid, as is his sense of what is at once dark and comic in a scene. This is the best memoir I've ever read of growing up with the hopes for a New York City, a life of bars and restaurants and clothes and taxi cabs, a life the narrator glimpses the summer he travels each day from Queens to work at Paramount Pictures in Times Square. Totally recommended!

I find it hard to understand why this book hasn't received more attention, as it is both beautifully written and a hilarious page-turner. Its teenage protagonist, an endearingly naive Queens Catholic-schoolboy, is on a desperate mission to lose his innocence to the world of oddball adults (jaded, entrancingly perverse, or psychotically needy) he encounters while working in the Paramount Pictures mail room in Times Square in l965. Skoyles portrays the seamy vivacity of Times Square right before its decent into hard-core inferno and that portrayal and his treatment of the various characters who influence the 16-year-old John are illuminated by the author's vision of the fascinating oddness of people, their individuality. John, an innocent voyeur, is a perceptive foil and his growing-up over the summer feels both satisfying and wistful. The book has many pleasures but most striking to me is its humor -- I simply couldn't stop laughing while reading it.