Leader of the Pack
Four young men attain suburban success, but their old gang leader pulls one of them back to disaster.

Reviewed by Stephen Amidon
Sunday, May 21, 2006

WHITE GUYS

A Novel

By Anthony Giardina

Farrar Straus Giroux. 371 pp. $25

Timmy O'Kane is a man with plenty of secrets, but none of them reveals as much about the troubled narrator of Anthony Giardina's powerful new novel as the music he listens to while driving home from his job as a textbook salesman. Believing that "great music never corresponds as closely to the heart's crude longings as lesser music does," Timmy surfs the FM dial for the easy listening pabulum of his youth, deriving sly comfort from Bryan Adams, Lionel Richie and "Afternoon Delight." It's a habit that suggests a man whose dangerously romantic conception of his past could easily cloud his judgment.

Sure enough, when the time comes for Timmy to act with the inspired rationality of a Bach concerto, he instead behaves with the passion of a Thin Lizzy guitar solo. Temptation arrives in the form of Billy Mogavero, the charismatic leader of the boyhood gang that Timmy grew up with in a working-class neighborhood on Boston's North Shore. While any 12-year-old boy could be forgiven for being drawn to Billy's rebellious attitude and crude masculine power, only an adult who has gone seriously astray would let Billy play a key role in his life.

Before this ill-fated reunion with the former leader of his pack, Timmy's rise to yuppiedom was running as smoothly as the automatic door of a brand new minivan. After the gang was split apart by Billy's arrest for a violent prom-night prank, Timmy joined his three remaining friends to climb the ladder into the upper middle class by virtue of hard work and a felicitous marriage. Although the novel's title, White Guys , refers to a nickname given the staid American Literature anthology that Timmy peddles, it also perfectly defines the status these boys sought in Reagan's America.

During a boozy, nostalgic night out together, they decide to visit the old neighborhood, where they find Billy working as a paint salesman. One of the old gang, Freddie Tortolla, offers Billy a better job, and soon he is part of their high-powered world, using his charisma to impress colleagues and to bed yuppie women. Billy proves reluctant to leave the old life entirely behind, however. Although he holds down a lucrative job and wears expensive suits, he continues to drive a beat-up car and marries Patty Shaughnessy, a freckle-faced, tough-talking product of the South Boston projects. You can take some boys out of the 'hood, it seems, but it remains tattooed on the soul of others.

In the novel's first half, Giardina charts the transition of these young men from their dour, bare-knuckled working-class roots to white-bread suburban success with wry intelligence and potent details. "Our hair was shorter then, Reagan-era short, and we were off pot and into shots of Stoli," Timmy remarks of the early days of their escape. "Our faces had begun to take on some of the weight of larger salaries and single-guy takeout and seats in the tenth row behind the visitors' dugout at Fenway."

Giardina is especially skilled at capturing the deep unease that accompanies this evolution. Novels chronicling yuppie angst are thick on the vine, but few writers have charted the move from the working class to the gilded suburbs with such evocative precision. Timmy and his mates are all forced to make deep compromises to flee their past. Timmy allows his overbearing father-in-law to fund his suburban castle, while his friend Johnny Lombardi's prime headhunting job is a gift from his wife's family. Freddie Tortolla's work for a developer involves tearing down neighborhoods similar to the one they grew up in, while Kenny DiGiovanni works for the district attorney's office, putting away guys not very different from the ones they once were.

At first, Billy's promise of outlaw virility helps them forget their guilt over these compromises. After all, if Billy still hangs out with them, they cannot have betrayed their past altogether. Soon, however, the gang tires of his retro-delinquent antics -- all except Timmy, who continues to spend long drunken nights with Billy in their old stomping grounds. This complicity suddenly threatens to tear Timmy's world apart when Billy and his wife are involved in a terrible crime while visiting a South Boston housing project.

The police initially believe Billy's assertion that the perpetrator is an African American. Timmy, however, soon suspects the truth might live closer to home.

The investigation plays out with all the expected racial turmoil and media clamor, though Giardina chooses to keep his focus primarily on the inner workings of Timmy's soul. While this decision might disappoint readers in search of a more conventional mystery, it ultimately proves a wise one, deepening the themes of disaffection and compromise introduced in the book's first half. For the real mystery here is not whodunit but rather why a man who has achieved the best that suburban America has to offer would allow himself to be seduced by a cheap, forgettable, three-chord tune. Through a careful accretion of detail and a deftly controlled narrative tone, Giardina comes as close to answering that troubling question as anyone can. ·

Stephen Amidon is the author of "The New City" and "Human Capital."