In this compelling family saga set during a tumultuous era in Boston history, 1960-1984, James Carroll chronicles the lives of two brothers, Nick and Terry Doyle, as they strive to move beyond the strictures of their working-class Charlestown neighborhood to" the city below." Though one brother is drawn to the worlds of politics and real estate and the other to the underworld of organized crime, their fates remain inextricably linked as each struggles to break free of the blood tie holding him captive to the past. As in his previous best-selling novels Mortal Friends and Family Trade, James Carroll seamlessly blends fiction and history to create a gripping tale of family bonds and ethnic violence, vows and betrayals, and political intrigue in the inner sanctums of both church and state.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
From the author of Mortal Friends comes a pithy, absorbing and piquantly topical tale again set in a vividly evoked Boston--and again probably bestseller material. Here Carroll writes of a bond between two Irish brothers that is battered by gusts of furious love, guilt, betrayal and jealousy. In 1960, Terry Doyle, a sober older son marked for the priesthood, chooses instead to follow his black friend Bright in campaigning for the Kennedys; he later becomes a successful, though self-loathing, businessman. In his arduous ascent, he leaves behind Charlestown, a fractious working-class enclave that boils with racial hatred during Boston's busing crisis, and his younger brother Nick, a sweet-talking crook who hitches his star to the Mafia. Carroll's superbly detailed vision of Boston is at once elegiac and hard-edged: the tight-knit embrace of Charlestown turns to ugliness as a mob spits on black schoolchildren and rages at Ted Kennedy, their last and most tarnished prince. Occasionally predictable plot turns--twice fueled by the cliche that Catholic guilt insists on destruction as payment for pleasure--mar an otherwise excellent chronicle of three decades during which starry-eyed idealism was brought low by political cynicism and personal greed. Author tour. (May)
Library Journal
In this sequel to Mortal Friends (LJ 4/15/ 78), we again meet the Doyle brothers, who are no longer inseparable. Coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, Nick has turned to organized crime, while Terry has left the seminary for the promised Camelot of the Kennedys. Boston is a maelstrom of religion, politics, bigotry, and racism. Indeed, the city itself is the central character in this Cain-and-Abel saga. Terry returns home often as a Kennedy campaign worker and later as an aide to Senator Teddy, and with each return he clashes with the dark underbelly of Boston and with Nick. From the busing conflicts and church reforms of the 1960s through the longstanding turf wars between the Irish and Italians to the real estate boom of the 1980s, Terry's idealism is sharply at odds with Nick's calculated opportunism. This intense and powerful novel skillfully weaves together history and fiction against the backdrop of one of our country's most famous and beautiful cities. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/93.]-Susan Clifford, Hughes Aircraft Co. Lib., Los Angeles
Mary Carroll
The city is Boston, and the time is the recent past: from the presidential election of 1960 to Beantown's mid-1980s real-estate boom. Carroll's ninth novel is a Cain and Abel story that follows brothers Terry and Nick Doyle from the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown--from which Boston is indeed "the city below"--through a lifetime of alliances and betrayals in religion and politics, in business and organized crime. Past Carroll novels drew upon the author's relationships with the Catholic Church (he was a Paulist priest) and his FBI agent father; in "The City Below", he takes on the ties between brothers (his own followed their father into the Bureau), probing the connections between brothers by birth, brothers by choice, and those who share, not family, but ethnicity. Unfortunately, the novel has problems: Terry Doyle's priggishness and brother Nick's sleaziness, as well as the brothers' spousal and sexual entanglements, threaten its believability. In the end, however, Carroll's vivid portraits of cardinals and Kennedys, Mob bosses and antibusing demonstrators, street toughs and seminarians will keep readers involved in this entertaining yarn.
From the Publisher
"a rich, seductive meld of characters real and fictive, of history and fancy" The New York Times
Read More
Get Free eBook Sample
