Table Money - Softcover

Breslin, Jimmy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140100466 ISBN 13: 9780140100464

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1987

Synopsis

Returned to his Queens home in 1970 after winning a Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, Owney Morrison works at digging tunnels during the day and escapes with drink at night--from everything, including his wife Dolores and their child

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

By the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author (Table Money, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight), this funny, gutsy "fable" treats harsh truths with bitter irony. The grim comedy begins when orders from the Vatican send Fr. Cosgrove from his post in Africa to stamp out sin (i.e., illicit sex) in America. With his companion Great Big, a sometimes backsliding former cannibal, the priest arrives in New York City, where he learns about real sin. Through Baby Rock, a young black boy who befriends them, Cosgrove and Great Big become involved with the city's homeless and hungry, victims of "public assistance," and soon all hell breaks loose in Manhattan. There is hardly time to gasp between the swift developments, when the missionary and hungry Great Big declare war on all the exploiters of the have-nots: the pious rich types who pretend to help the poor, the bureaucratic flunkies who euchre welfare clients out of sustenance, even the Mafia. The dialogue is straight on and mean, the ethnic types funny and recognizable, with the feel of the city throbbing between the lines. This is Breslin at his bestpurely unbeatable. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

In Vietnam, Owney Morrison was a hero, winner of the Medal of Honor. Back home in Queens, married and father of a baby daughter, Owney is following family tradition and working as a tunnel builder. He is also following the family tradition of heavy drinking, and he is losing the battle of the bottle. Desperate, his wife Dolores leaves him, determined to make her life more meaningful than the lot usually decreed for Queens housewives. This is more than simply another novel of marital problems. By focusing on the Morrisons and their extended families, their friends and neighbors, Breslin dramatizes the changing relationships of men and women, parents and children, in contemporary America. This is a serious book that is frequently very funny, filled with Breslin's trademark hilarious dialogue and his usual supporting cast of zany eccentrics. Easily Breslin's best novel. Literary Guild dual main selection. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0140100466
• ISBN 13: 9780140100464
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 608