Oh, Manchester, So Much To Answer For

Adam Berlin's novel Belmondo Style is a lovely book, a real find, written in an original voice about an original (to me, at least) situation. Its narrator, Ben, is a 16-year-old NYC denizen, a talented runner who's also gay. He lives with his father Jared, who lives life according to an ersatz code picked up from Jean-Paul Belmondo in (of course) Breathless, and whose profession is pickpocketing. Jared, a notorious ladies' man, appears to have met the one (shocking him and and his son), when Ben is the subject of a gruesome hate crime. What's most important, though, isn't as much the events of the novel as the way they're told. In Ben, Berlin has a superb storyteller, a teen wise-beyond-finish-the-cliché-yourself who's largely unflinching in all ways to all people. And his father is the kind of character film producers beg for, though I'm not sure this could (or should) be well-adapted for the screen. Maybe HBO? A fine way to start 2005, with one of '04's finest novels. A