The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

Pearl Street is in Albany, New York, and the year is 1936. We are planted in the Great Depression and moved into WWII by 6-year-old Jean-Luc Lapointe, whose father has deserted him, his mother, and his little sister. Read by Lee Leoncavallo, whose name augurs a great storytelling ability, this novel becomes one of the fine histories and collections of forgotten facts of that era. Leoncavallo's voice at the beginning catches the listener like that of an evangelist preacher. His expansive oration is the result of his desire to tell this story and to make it heard. He makes hearing about the life of this child and the people the child encounters an important event in our own lives. J.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

May 9, 2005
In this nostalgic, richly textured autobiographical novel about growing up on a poor Irish block in Albany, N.Y., prolific author Trevanian (Shibumi
; Hot Night in the City
; etc.) recalls his childhood during the Great Depression through World War II. In 1936, six-year-old narrator Jean-Luc La Pointe, his mother and younger sister leave Lake George Village for a gritty tenement in Albany to reunite with their deadbeat father and husband. He never shows up, and the penniless family makes do on their own: Luke's mother finds work as a waitress, and he fetches day-old bread on credit from the Socialist Jewish grocer across the street while steering clear of the Meehans from down the block, "a wild, drunken, dim-witted tribe... related in complex and unnatural ways." Affectionate portraits of the titular eccentric women punctuate Trevanian's sprawling tale: Luke observes the beleaguered and self-destructive Mrs. Meehan and meets the reclusive Mrs. McGivney, who perpetually relives a happier past while caring for a catatonic husband. Luke's "defiantly independent" mother, another "crazylady," marries the decent upstairs neighbor, but continues to idealize her con-man first husband. Though Trevanian's reminiscences make for a more atmospheric than carefully wrought novel, he sweetly evokes an innocent if hardscrabble lost age.