In 1973, after a disastrous year of failing as a college instructor because of my own immaturity and complete and the fact that I was unsuitable for the post, I returned to mommy and daddy to hide out, lick my wounds, grow up, or kill myself. A good friend's brother and I were talking books one night in a bar where the theatre folk gathered after whatever, and he mentioned Catch-22. I still had my copy, and the next day I read the first chapter, laughed my head off, and finished the book several days later. By the time I reached the final chapters and the account of Snowden's death, I no longer laughed. I wept, I keened, I mourned. It was gard to read the pages through the tears. No other book ever affected me so strongly until I read Gwen Cooper's novel about Manhattan's Lower East Side between 1975 and 1995, grubby politics and the cruelty it does to the poorer people it represents, a record store, a rock star, family estrangement, personal ambitions vs marriage, Jewish family dynamics, and the music of our lives, much of it observed through the eyes of a young cat named Prudence.
