The sad moan of the telephone wires in Brooklyn
The sense of place is so strong that it seems like the purpose of this evocative novel.
The ‘place’ are the streets, houses, bars, shops and piers at the watery, rundown end of Brooklyn. None of the characters ever jumps into the subway, or a big yellow taxi, for the more familiar cityscape of Manhattan, for instance. Theirs is a small area in a vast city. Pochoda has set out her stall even before the first page, by including a sketch of a Red Hook street map. The couple of dozen Brooklyn blocks lapped by the Hudson is all there is. Quite literally, that’s all she wrote.
