The Washington Square Ensemble (Contemporary American Fiction)

By Madison Smartt Bell

Book Overview

Madison Smartt Bell's debut novel: a story of drifters, outcasts, junkies, and dealers surviving in the heart of 1980s New York City Over one busy weekend, small-time heroin dealer Johnny B. Goode and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670750050
• ISBN13: 9780670750054
• Release Date: February 1983
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 4.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Like a hit of tar from a tin foil pipe

Madison Smart Bell has a way with violence--in his novels it always seems to happen to the people you care about. "The Washington Square Ensemble" is the perfect book for those who like their characters seedy (these are a group of Washington Square Park drug dealers), their perspective close (told from a multitude of first persons), and their prose poetic. Perhaps it helps that a pair of num chucks make an apearance before it's over--a sort of deus ex machina for fans of "Ninja Magazine". Who knows. The real pleasure is the insight into these drug denizens' lives. From an alterboy-turned Attica ex-con with a habbit to the NBA size Muzlim who used to eat and wear rats (?), Bell reveals his characters like a flashlight on your kitchen cockroaches--you see a hidden world, then it's gone in a flash. Read the first page in a bookstore or library. If you aren't compelled to take the book home with you, I suppose you just wouldn't get it.