7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like a hit of tar from a tin foil pipe, November 11, 1999
By A Customer
Madison Smart Bell has a way with violence--in his novels it always seems to happen to the people you care about. "The Washington Square Ensemble" is the perfect book for those who like their characters seedy (these are a group of Washington Square Park drug dealers), their perspective close (told from a multitude of first persons), and their prose poetic. Perhaps it helps that a pair of num chucks make an apearance before it's over--a sort of deus ex machina for fans of "Ninja Magazine". Who knows. The real pleasure is the insight into these drug denizens' lives. From an alterboy-turned Attica ex-con with a habbit to the NBA size Muzlim who used to eat and wear rats (?), Bell reveals his characters like a flashlight on your kitchen cockroaches--you see a hidden world, then it's gone in a flash. Read the first page in a bookstore or library. If you aren't compelled to take the book home with you, I suppose you just wouldn't get it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The value of friendship, December 17, 2011
The Washington Square Ensemble starts with a few lyrics of a Tom Waits song but the novel is like an extended version of Tom Waits, a story of downtrodden life on the streets, of mislaid hopes and shattered dreams. The sections narrated by the central character, Johnny B., read like a prose version of beat poetry spoken with Waits' gravelly voice. There are, unfortunately, too few of those sections. If the entire book had been written in Johnny B.'s voice, it would have been a more successful venture. Still, Madison Smartt Bell's first novel provides an enjoyable glimpse of the writing ability that he refined later in his career.
The titular ensemble consists of several sketchy characters. Johnny B. Goode, a/k/a Gianni Dellacroce, a/k/a Enrico Spaghetti, is a drug dealer in New York City's Washington Square. His ex-friend Porco Miserio is an alcoholic musician and scam artist who recently acquired a Storytelling Stone. The other characters sell drugs for Johnny. Yusuf Ali is Johnny's muscle. Despite his drug dealing, Yusuf is trying to be a devout Muslim, a delicate balancing act made necessary by his belief that he must live in the world he can see, not in the realm of spirituality. Santa Barbara is a Puerto Rican who practices Santería. Holy Mother is an ex-con, a former mob member and current addict.
The novel is structured as a series of short chapters, each narrated by one of the central characters. Bell reveals each character piece by piece, building them into whole men, gritty and sad, by the end of part one. While Bell deserves credit for giving each character a distinctive voice, I wasn't always convinced that the voice was authentic. Santa Barbara, for instance, sounds more like a caricature of a Puerto Rican than an actual Puerto Rican, particularly not one who came to the United States at the age of five. I had a similar reaction to Yusuf, whose voice struck me as artificial, the voice of a cartoon Muslim.
Uneven storytelling is the other significant flaw in The Washington Square Ensemble. I was fascinated by Holy Mother's story, including his life in the mob and his accidental involvement in the 1971 Attica prison riot. Porco's story is almost as good; his attempts at philosophy add welcome humor to the darkness. The stories told by the other characters are less interesting.
About halfway in, the characters' backgrounds having been established, a plot begins to take shape. My affinity for all the characters (whether I believed them or not) grew as the story progressed. The plot -- and there isn't much of one -- has an unfortunate tendency to meander before fizzling out altogether. I thought more might be made of the Storytelling Stone, or of Santa Barbara's Santería, but the talking rock is just a device to get the story moving and Santa's witchcraft merely furnishes an excuse for an amusing examination of comparative religion.
Fortunately, rooted beneath the seemingly random events that occur during the course of the novel is a story of friendship. Even when they don't want to, even when they're not supposed to, even when there's no profit in it, the characters care about each other, help each other. Bell makes the oft-forgotten point that even the lowliest members of society, even those who live beyond the bounds of society, need (and are made better by) friends. Friendship is the plot thread (thin though it may be) that redeems the novel -- friendship and humor and enough solid writing to make the reading experience worthwhile.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bell's Debut, September 30, 2004
Bell's first novel is a quasi-phantasmagorical journey with a band of weird heroin dealers in Manhattan circa 1980. The story (such as it is) is, takes place over the a weekend, and is told in alternating chapters through the voices of seven characters. Through flashback chapters, we are given the backstories of this wretched band of pushermen. Their leader is Johnny B. Goode, who survived New York's internal Mafia wars of the '60s and '70s, and now finds himself quietly building a tidy little nest egg through his gang's Washington Park concession. His right hand man is Holy Mother, and their friendship dates back to the Mafia days, when the latter was a no-questions-asked, stone-cold hitman for the mob. However, he was incarcerated and found himself caught in the middle of the famous Attica prison riot on 1971, and hasn't been the same since. Joining the two ex-Mafia in the heroin trade are two religious weirdoes. Yusuf Ali is a huge black man from the Bronx, who was orphaned and raised himself in a basement of rats before discovering Islam. Santa Barbara is a loco PR, deep into santeria and generally off in his own world. On their periphery is Porco Miserio, a down and out saxophonist who had been part of the group and is now in exile.
The book begins with a night of dealing which ends in a bizarre encounter with Porco, who wields a strange stone of seemingly magical power. After a heart-warming scene in a diner where the dealers wind up the night and divvy up the proceeds, they split up. The book then takes on the tone of a dark comedy flirting with absurdism. Weird stuff happens. Strange conversations take place. Scripture is recited. A cop is told about their dealing. Someone ODs. A saxophone is played. Part two of the book occupied the final third of the book and takes place the next morning, and revolves around the policeman's attempt to take the gang down. The climax involves an epic battle pitting nunchucks against a group of Rasta soccer players in the middle of the park.
This probably makes the book sound pretty wacky and out there. In one sense it is, but without the vivid sense of discovery one hopes for in such works. The NYC scene is kind of interesting, but the ramblings of Santa Barbara and Yusuf Ali bring things to a dead halt whenever they appear. And the mystery of the stone ends up being a touch too cryptic. Ironically, the most gripping part of the book is also the most straightforward, and that's a twenty page chapter in which Holy Mother recounts his Attica experience. That's something that's been more or less forgotten some three decades later, and the fictional retelling is fascinating. Would that the rest of the book were equally so. Bell does some nice things with wordplay and language, but on the whole, it's skipable unless one had a particular interest in fiction about New York.
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