Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.
Sup.
While this seems the appropriate salutation for a gangster review, I’m 500% sure, fellow suburban-softies, that it’d be the one sure way of getting my butt kicked to the curb if I tried this type of “I’m-cool-I-promise” stunt with actual mobsters. If Zack Slingsby’s book, Ballad of the Gangster’s Daughter, has taught me anything it’s that crooks despise inauthenticity.
So, hi y’all, I’m excited to talk about this book.
Liars made lousy killers. Killers often told the truth about everything else except who they’d killed. Thieves were quite likable, as a rule, and thieves were different from liars by nature, and many saints were not thieves or liars by an inch (58).
Back in mid-April, a few months into living in Nashville, my husband and I sat down at a table for a local Catholic school’s fundraising event, and we sat down next to the MC, Zack Slingsby. I’d met his wife at a park rosary group, and was excited to be included at a fun, young table with fellow minnows and plankton.1 With half-a-dozen loose sheets of 8x10 paper poised on his knee, Zack scribbled a few last-minute remarks, looked at my husband and I with confident fluster, and said, “I’ve no idea what I’m doing.”
We did the familiar social pirouette where you laugh politely enough to agree with the self-denigrator but not enough to make it seem like you really think he’s trash (manners y’all, they’re delicate things), all while truly trying to decide if this guy really does need to get his act together, or if he’s one of those master sharks grinning at you from across a green-felt table. When he proceeded to rock the room with humble quips and complimentary remarks, we knew. After transitioning between a high school choir performance and an address on man as homo viator by the key note speaker2 with a joke about how this Catholic event’s parking lot had more transit vans than an Amazon distribution center…we knew we were dealing with a professional.
Which leads me to his book.
Published just a few weeks ago, the back cover promises to deliver, at least, a rockin’ good story. And it doesn’t lie. But just like his “rude am I in speech” intro before he dazzled a room of hundreds, this novel begins deceptively like “merely a genre novel,” until it rises above. The structure, y’all, the volta, it got me.
But, paying due respect to structure, let me lay out the three reasons I’ll give for why I think you’ll enjoy reading this book:
the character insights
the similarity between gangster manners and Jane Austen manners
the volta
Penultimately, you should know a rough sketch of the novel for context:
The story takes place from the 1960’s through the early 2000’s, mainly in the Bronx and suburban Connecticut, though Florida, Chicago, Philadelphia, Arizona, and Rome make appearances. Gerard Magic is the father, and boss. Serena Magic is the protagonist, and the middle child of seven daughters. In every part, a sister dies. There are seven parts.
Lastly, I have chosen not to give spoilers.3 A book as indomitably dedicated to plot as this one deserves an unspoiled first read. So I’ve slit the throats of all my pretty explicatory passages, and will just gift you the three bullet points above.
Y’all ready? Let’s talk about why you’ll have a great time reading this novel.
Character Insights
When any father, loved by his daughter, violates his daughter’s ideas of goodness, she can either give up the ideas or give up the love. This bride-to-be was full of love (142).
Front matter matters, so I read the “Advance Praise” on the first page. It included compliments like, “meticulous humanity,” “keen eye for social observation,” “insight into his characters minds,” and “an irresistible narrative peopled with characters who live on the page.”
Choosing to trust these first readers, I looked for truth of character. For the first 57%4 of the novel, I was ready and underlining but unsure.
On a first read, of a new novel, which doesn’t have generations of acclaim behind it, where I don’t have the end (or even the barest hint of the ending) to play itself back over the whole, I, personally, must constantly fight credulity.
To fight that proud, insufferable critic within, I keep in mind C.S. Lewis’ advice that to read a work well one must start from a position of trust. To start incredulous is to not read.5 So, acting on trust, I rejected the know-it-all-class-pet-inner-Hermione voice trying to constantly raise it’s hand and blurt out, “But is it really like that?,” and instead simply noted passages and mentally dog-eared insights into the characters.
Below are some of those noted passages.
The first excerpt is from Part Two, and it is a good representation of the type of insightful, puzzling fare Slingsby dishes out in the midst of action. In this instance, the below quote interrupts a scene where Serena Magic, in her early 20’s, is driving with her sisters to a Manhattan penthouse to confront a sadistic, ex-monk criminal about his recent masterminding of the kidnapping of their baby sister.6 With that as the surrounding context, you just kinda gotta underline in pencil and keep moving, because the action isn’t going to wait.
Liars made lousy killers. Killers often told the truth about everything else except who they’d killed. Thieves were quite likable, as a rule, and thieves were different from liars by nature, and many saints were not thieves or liars by an inch. Heroes died as pathetically as anyone. Leaders lost their way. Prophets were good at nothing practical, and a lover’s heart could break a hundred ways, yet a true lover would learn no caution from pain.
These were convictions Serena would develop near the age of forty. Before then, she would, like now, wade timidly through the labyrinths of thugs and brutes, the same way she would later navigate intellectuals, columnists, and suits, manager types and the elite barbarians of California, Washington, and New England, not yet knowing their names, what to call them, but certain they were never who they said they were (58-9).
“Hmmm,” was my marginal note. Which is my code for: What to do with this? Is it right? Does the author think it’s right? Not sure yet, read more to find out.
Then here’s a passage from Part Three.
The people Serena had graduated with had become as successful as they’d hoped to be—and seemed, on each successive visit, more insufferable for it. They liked appliances and loved to talk about the ones they had just bought and were to buy soon…But she could not take away that they all worked very hard and had great taste in linens and dinnerware and did not pretend they were improving the world, merely their lots in it. She would not be able to say any of these things about generations to come (86).7
That above excerpt I knew to be true. It encouraged trust. So when the following excerpt came, I was ready to accept Slingsby’s sketch of this character.
Brighton didn’t know what would prompt a guy like that to return to this part of the world. [John] mixed into any squad of hooligans like a prune in whiskey. But that’s how Gerard [Magic] wanted it, so Brighton brought John along where he could, offered him a beer if he was having one, and tried to listen to the guy talk. The big problem there was Brighton barely believed anything John said. He didn’t think he was a liar. He just didn’t think his words matched who he was. He thought John was constantly trying on a new set of traits, checking if it would fit, hoping no one would notice he hadn’t found a set to keep (88).
I knew guys like John. They continue to live in memories of my red-lockered high school hallways. One in particular was actually named John. He was known for lifting a lot (and this in the early 2000’s before today’s extreme training excess for amateur athletics. When the John I knew was lifting, coaches were still wondering if stretching did anything, and dismissing diet as playing any real factor in athletic performance), and he was known for being short. But I digress; Slingsby’s got me thinking about the attributes of the times as well as the characters.
Suffice it to say, as you progress through the story Slingsby intersperses enough recognizably true character insights to strengthen your trust in his verisimilitude. I kept gathering underlines that bolstered the belief that he was being honest with his characters. That he wasn’t forcing them. That they are full, three-dimensional people full of contradictions and consistencies.
So firstly, read for the characters.
Gangsters Have Strict Manners
I love Austen novels. I love the dialogue. I love how the plot is driven almost entirely by what people can and cannot say, and should and should not do.
Watching a business-deal-turned-murder go down in Rome, I saw that gangsters have strict codes of conduct as well. There are certain manners, specific ways one must play the game well, or the game collapses.
The comparison between seemingly tranquil Regency England parlors and obviously lethal Mafia go-between deals, is in keeping with the comparisons Slingsby, true to his genre, makes throughout this work. I think part of the reason we love crime stories is because of the comparisons they draw between obviously illegal actions and ostensibly legal actions.8 Slingsby includes juxtapositions between Serena’s father’s “legitimate business enterprises,” and those of D.C., the music industry, and social initiative programs, to name a few. True to his genre, the comparisons expose the different ways many people orchestrate outcomes to make the money clean.
But let’s pause here. Because I want to admit that I don’t usually like these kinds of comparisons.9 Why? Call me naive, but I don’t think the world is merely full of honest crooks and dishonest ones. Call me a stay-at-home suburban mom, but I don’t think everyone’s actions are shaped by power. Call me a Christian, but I think there is something in the world which defies the world, which seems ridiculous to the world, which makes no sense to modern Machiavellians, but which, absurdly, unexpectedly, truly changes the whole fabric of reality. I think the child wins. I believe the victim triumphs. I think the weak outmuscle the strong. I don’t think power has the last say. So call me soft, but on a random Friday night in June I don’t like turning off the screen at the end of a crime show and feeling like the whole world is corrupt. I’m not merely bothered by the suggestion, I’m bothered that there are people who believe it. I believe in mimetic art. Art which reflects reality. And while there’s a place for ending a story before the ending, so you’re left to wrestle with evil, I prefer a story that gets to the end and shows the truth that the good guys always win.
And to my relief, Slingsby appears to agree that monsters don’t decide everything.
Ballad of the Gangster’s Daughter shows similarities between law-abiding citizens and crooks, but doesn’t end in relativism. There’s culpability exposed on both sides of the legal line, but not to justify the gangsters. They aren’t heroes. But they’re also not virtue-less. You’ll have to read to see what I mean.
To wrap up this point, let’s return to Austen. There are characters in Austen’s novels who break the code. Who use manners, not as a means of expressing themselves truly, but as a tool to manipulate social situations for power and position, or as a mask to hide their true face. Think of Emma’s Mrs. Elton, the social upstart who continually disrupts society and almost ruins Jane Fairfax’s future. Think of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Wickham, that girl-seducing rake who disguised himself with mannerly shows of charm.
Worlds ruled by manners are ordered and protected by them, but they are also susceptible to being broken by the very manners that hold them together.
Slingsby’s gangster world gets broken into by two upstarts who disregard the rules of the game.
In three decades on the map, the law had never stopped [Gerard Magic] and no heavy had ever bent his knee. The Magics were owed many favors, were personally beloved in every thug-owned saloon from there to White Plains, and had won the loyalty of enforcers.
This affluent Connecticut family was feared and respected and left to itself the way any private family ought to be. But two sewer rats didn’t know the score. They weren’t told or forgot or were too drunk and stoned to remember (146).
Society, whether it’s Austen society, polite society, or crook society, is fragile.
So secondly, read for the fun of entering into a foreign, crooked world, which begins to talk smack to your own.
Bonus Section! Let’s talk about love, baby.
Her friends and family had no idea, she often thought, what a thrill it is when big words break free from a man who says so few of them (138).
This section wasn’t in my original structure. But everyone likes (or should like) a good surprise. And Slingsby delivers one, so I’m passing on the favor.
No story is complete without love.
That is truth. That is reality.
And Slingsby delivers. As I said at the beginning, I’ve chosen to be careful in this review not to spoil the story. It’s a limiting choice, but it’s an especially good choice here since the beauty that is love is best seen within the medium of poetic knowledge, not through a review’s explication. Love resides in story. So I will merely say:
There’s a budding romance that you will not be sure is budding for the right reasons. There’s a blossomed romance that is beautiful and surprisingly perfect. And there’s an enduring romance, one which is daily and marital. Slingsby gives you everything you want from love in a story, and all the truth of it too.
Another couple saw something like this between us and didn’t understand it. They had lived in Florida forever and didn’t know about Irish couples born in apartments (162).
The Volta
Alright, here’s our final section, the one where I try to land the knockout punch.
Famously, satisfyingly, perfectly, 8 lines into a 14 line sonnet, there’s a volta, a change, a deeper movement upon the themes that have been shaping the work so far. It’s the, “and yet...” It’s the, “but…”
Mathematically, 8/14ths is .57142857142.
4 parts through this 7 part novel, exactly .57142857142 in, there’s a distinct change. Coincidence? Only if Slingsby’s pretty damn lucky. Masterful execution? I’ll let you do your own pirouette to decide.
After reading 57% percent of this novel, you turn the page and there’s a profound voice shift. It’s stunning. It sends you down into the final six lines the final three parts with the momentum of dawning insight.
The first four parts are written in 3rd person narration, and for those first 160 pages I was along for the ride, not really knowing exactly where we were going, but staying up late for the story. And at the end of Part Four, Slingsby broke my heart.
Then I turned the page, needing something, hoping for what I thought I hoped for, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Part Five burst quietly into the story in the first person. I looked for more action, needing to know what was next in the plot, and I got a gently reflective letter from Serena Magic to her sister. All those 160 pages, Serena had been an outsider, just another character in a broad cast. Suddenly, and quietly, I saw her interior, and it was good.
Up to this point, Slingsby had written his story along ancient, tried-and-true, omniscient narration lines. Then suddenly but subtly, the novel’s tradition of first person narration came to do it’s profound work upon me.
In the 10 short pages of Part Five, everything began to change.
From there, Part Six arrived with the depth of insight I’d been reading for. And Part Seven brought everything to the right ending. It was really, really well done.
All I will mention about those pages after “the turn,” is that I think one aspect you’ll enjoy is the question Slingsby raises about what it means to be American. Every sentence of his story ties himself more closely to a specific time and place. By doing this, and by placing a priest, a cop, a doorman, and a crook at a bar, he examines the ambitious, American drive to “make something of yourself,” as well as the value of people and place.10 There’s more in these last pages than just this, but you’ll have to read to find out.
Horace Eaten said, “If the whole country thought like that, we’d be in a heap of trouble—and the most dangerous part is, we would never know it until it was too late.”
“Horace, I promise you: I’m only thinking about a decade or two ahead of the country” (187).
A Final Note
At his book launch, Zack mentioned that the first book he fell in love with was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. After that book, he knew he loved the beauty of words. But it took some time, he said, to marry a love of words with a good story.11 This book is that marriage. It’ll keep you up past your bedtime just to see what happens, and it’ll keep a pencil in your hand just to underline favorite passages. Have fun.
Jimmy wondered…whether they’d be wise enough to know Time could never lose—or if they’d start believing, like Tagletti, like long-dead rulers, like most New-Yorkers, that Time is killable and men are not (108).
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
Google tells me these are the opposite of “whales” (i.e. big donors), and I love it.
the key note speaker was the one-and-only Joseph Pearce. Listen to him discuss man as the homo viator here on this episode.
No, the above story sketch did not already break this rule. This novel has so much plot, that the above sketch is barely scratching the surface of the action.
This percentage is purposeful, not pedantic, I promise.
C.S.Lewis gives this advice most directly either in An Experiment in Criticism or On Stories. If you find the exact passage, please share. However, he gets at a similar idea in this excerpt when he says that only those who love a genre should write criticism within that genre: “It is very dangerous to write about a kind you hate. Hatred obscures all distinctions. I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me: if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel…Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett…If you have not enjoyed a thing and do not know what it feels like to enjoy it, you will hardly know what sort of people go to it, in what moods, seeking what sort of gratification” (C.S.Lewis, On Stories, 82-3). Summary: If you don’t start from love, you’re blind. Ain’t that a lovely irony on the old quip.
It says something about the density of plot in Slingsby’s novel that I do not consider any of this information a “spoiler.” In my usual Austen fare, this kind of event would be the one enormous tragedy that would break into and reshape the whole thing. In this story, it’s just all in a day’s work.
An aspect of Slingsby’s work I will not touch on, is his impressive knowledge of culture. To reiterate, this novel is set in America’s 1960’s through the early 2000’s. And every single page has political, cultural, and social references. It is fully rooted in a specific time and place, every line, every page, every part. Bravo.
This is probably an asininely obvious observation to lovers of the crime/gangster/mob genre. Forgive me, as I partially break C.S. Lewis’ previous advice here because I’m not an aficionado of this genre. However, I think I’m safe from being censored by beloved Jack on two counts: 1) I’m not criticizing Slingsby’s crime book, because I genuinely like it; and 2) I think the fact that I enjoyed this book (that is assuredly not in one of my preferred genres) bares testament to its ability to engage readers outside of The Godfather’s prime audience, and suggests that it “rises above” its genre.
Here’s where I’ll reference my previous footnote (#8) where I admit I am not (typically) a gangster genre lover.
Admittedly, I’m currently reading a book on Benedictine education, which may have shaped my reading. Observe this section, which has to be the antithesis of the self-made-man drive: “In Newman’s words, the gift of the Benedictines is a way of being in the world that ‘let’s each work, each occurrence stand by itself—’…At times, our tendency to analyze, measure, and manipulate needs to be foregone in order to return to a childlike, simple state of perceiving reality that opens up to a sacramental way of living—seeing in visible things the invisible grace of God. The Benedictine vision reminds us that to see the totality of things and to live a contemplative life in the ordinary work of manual labor and repetitive daily routines requires an attentiveness to the present moment and commitment to particular people and places” (xvi). And, “The [Benedictine] monk proposed to himself no great or systematic work, beyond that of saving his soul” (xvii). From the Introduction by Margarita A. Mooney to A Benedictine Education; the Mission of Saint Benedict & Benedictine Schools by John Henry Newman.
You know what this world needs? A class on how to write book reviews, taught by you and @davidkern. Please and thank you. Based on this review, I just bought the book via Goldberry’s bookshop.org. ❤️
Jessica, your review is brilliant! The Ballad of the Gangster’s Daughter just went to the top of my DBR stack! Thank you!