What Sammy Knew

January 25, 2021
Seventeen-year-old Sam Stein doesn’t know very much and is slow to learn in Laskin’s lackluster debut novel (after the biography The Family), a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of revolutionaries and rock and roll in 1970s New York City. As a high school senior and aspiring writer, Sam becomes innocently embroiled in radical politics after he meets teenage femme fatale Kimberley Goodman at a New Year’s Eve party, leaves his cushy Long Island suburb, and moves into an old friend’s drug-saturated East Village apartment. Sam is soon “intoxicated and flattened” by the allure of Manhattan, and is unknowingly lured into a gun-running weapons scheme involving Kim’s new friends, the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. It’s a reckless endeavor that endangers Sam’s parents’s Black domestic, Tutu, and Tutu’s 21-year-old grandson. Unfortunately, an author’s note explaining that Tutu was inspired by a woman who worked in Laskin’s house growing up is more touching than the novel itself. The pedestrian plot and straightforward prose style are unlikely to keep readers interested as the commonplace story wends its way to its predictable conclusion. Laskin’s nonfiction work makes a greater impact.