Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

 

I requested this book through the library after a review that made it sound right up my alley, and it's ... pretty close, really. It's a novel about like neighborhood criminals, from the POV (mostly) of people who kinda got dragged into at least the fringes of that life without any real desire for it. It's a grim and tragic novel, but a human one, and one that makes it clear that the bad things that happen are consequences of ... choices the main characters make, which are at best morally gray. There are some vague problematic hints of something approaching bioessentialism--there's a kid who seems a lot like his dad, in spite of his dad's absence from his life--but there are plausibly other factors at play, even there. There's a kind of claustrophobia to the novel, the characters barely seem to get more than about twenty blocks from where they live, and that seems very true to some of those old neighborhoods and the people in them. The prose frequently slants toward beautiful, and there are some truly amusing turns of phrase embedded. It's not a perfect novel for me, but it's a very, very good novel.