Growlings He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

By R.Z. Sheppard

Jimmy Breslin is happiest when he is making himself and others angry. He has successfully done so as a New York City newspaper columnist, a sporadic television personality, and the author of six novels. He got his big break in the early '60s at the New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues included the Richmond dandy Tom Wolfe. The contrast between the two journalists was stark. Wolfe, elegant and soft-spoken, paralyzed his victims with a distinctive satire for which there is still no antidote. Breslin looked like a dented truck, talked loud and dirty, and went after his targets (the city's rich and powerful) with a meat-ax.

The contrast continues to be obvious in He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners, a novel that mugs New York while the city is still woozy from Wolfe's best-selling The Bonfire of the Vanities. Typically, Breslin is less concerned with the refinements of structure than with the shock effects of tabloid anecdote and an outraged moral tone. On the city's welfare system, for example: "The Poor are the most important people in New York, for their social welfare billions blow through the air for all the well-off to grab; where are the rich supposed to get their money from, the rich?"

To underscore his high-minded intentions, he calls his book a fable. This is somewhat misleading, since there are no animals that talk like people but plenty of human characters who sound feral. A Mafia bill collector: "You either got $220 for me or I take your f------ ear home with me." An unwed teenage mother: "I waited to have a baby until I was 15. That's a long time. From eleven to 15 waitin' to have a baby." A slumlord: "The original reason I went to Dobermans was that I fell in love with their teeth. I thought they had more teeth than other dogs. They remind me of sharks. Teeth growing all the way down the throat."

Breslin explores the urban jungle through the innocent eyes of Father D'Arcy Cosgrove, an Irish priest who has been transferred from his mission in Africa to crusade in New York against sexual activity not sanctioned by Holy Mother Church. Father D'Arcy is accompanied by Great Big, a 7-ft. African with a craving for potato chips but not much to say. Great Big is, however, credited with the novel's title line ("I got hungry and forgot my manners"), which is Breslin's blunt way of making the historical point that people who do not have enough to eat are not concerned about which fork to use on the fish.

Cosgrove and his giant sidekick are farcical figures meant to illustrate the failures of both church and state when dealing with morality and poverty. The novel's principal setting is Howard Beach, a working-class section of the borough of Queens, described a bit too graphically by Breslin as a "white finger of land that sticks into Jamaica Bay by Kennedy Airport." Across a field of tall bulrushes is East New York, a Third World of crime, drugs and hunger.

As a journalist, Breslin gave Queens a picturesque notoriety long before All in the Family folksied up the place for national consumption. He Got Hungry pushes the Archie Bunker mentality over the edge of realism into absurdity. Howard Beach mobsters like the Chief and Frankie Five Hundred seem to be overdone holdovers from Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1969). The kinks in New York's welfare bureaucracy are authentic and darkly humorous, but the black characters are not developed beyond their jive. Father D'Arcy's mission is unfocused, his misadventures a blur, and his conversion from guardian of orthodoxy to radical activist unbelievable, even for farce. Breslin's populist reflexes and ability to throw a punchy line remain in good working order, but this time it seems he got indignant and forgot his story.