Books: Just One More for the Road

Nine hundred feet below the pavement, Owney Morrison works on a tunnel that will bring water to millions of New York City taps. Drill, blast, drill, blast, 45 ft. a day, 225 ft. a week. The job will take years and men's lives. Some will get careless and fall down shafts; others will be blown up when they stick their drills into holes containing unexploded charges. Most will succumb to what can euphemistically be called the sandhog's life-style, a grimy regimen that scorns the world of paper pushers and blots out feelings with alcohol.

Booze is the thematic undercurrent of Jimmy Breslin's fifth novel, a brutal slab of working-class life set among the Irish in the New York City borough of Queens. This is where Breslin learned his own trade as a newspaperman, reporting on the ways and means of the Archie Bunker set. His headlong bowling-ball prose can currently be found in the New York Daily News, where he is a Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist. There, as here, Breslin's lack of subtlety is his greatest strength. His characters are undereducated, abusive and conflicted by feelings of pride and shame. Table Money is burdened by stereotypes, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. Breslin knows what few members of the gentility are willing to acknowledge: that there would be no stereotypes if groups and classes did not demonstrate distinguishing characteristics.

Owney Morrison is descended from a long line of drinkers. He likes beer for breakfast and whiskey and beer chasers at lunch. "Just one" after work frequently turns into one too many. Sometimes Owney sleeps it off overnight in the hog house, the dressing room at the construction site. This does not please his wife Dolores, who wants to study medicine but is stuck at home with a baby. Dolores is a latter-day stereotype and one that Breslin is less sure of than he is of the guys and dolls along Queens Boulevard. Still, she is vital and feisty enough to make his point about the gulf between blue-collar men and their women.

There are two kinds of courage in Table Money. Owney's is physical, as he displayed in Viet Nam by winning a Congressional Medal of Honor. Dolores proves her valor by overcoming generations of inertia and fatalism. She does it by demonstrating that behind the male swagger there is usually an unsteady little boy in need of a firm maternal hand. When a neighborhood Rambo threatens to shoot at police from his window, Dolores arms herself with a basket of wet wash and gets him to help her hang it: "She held her hand out and Ralphie gave her the blue pajamas. She pinned them to the line and then moved them out, boldly, the pulleys on the far end of the line, on the telephone pole flush against the garage, squeaking loudly and comfortingly." Ralphie is calmed by the childhood ritual. He hands Dolores bedspreads, sheets and then his rifle.