The City Below by James Carroll

On a brisk spring morning in the year that John F. Kennedy began his run for president, a pair of burly micks in overalls and tweed caps sat on the bench in front of the monument on bunker Hill in Charlestown.

Opening to The City Below by James Carroll.

When does something become a cliche?  Can the status of cliche be applied retroactively? 

It's not completely fair to open with those questions because it implies that I did not like The City Below, which is not true.  I found much to enjoy in The City Below.  The novel is about two brothers who grow up in the Charlestown section of Boston.  The brothers are Irish.  They are raised by a single mother and their somewhat crusty grandfather.  One brother is destined to become a priest the other a gangster.  There is an alcoholic priest.  There are ties to the Kennedy's.  There is a sense that we've all been down this road many times before.  But the book was first published in 1994, almost 20 years ago.  How often had we been down this road in 1994? 

Even a cliched story can offer the reader rewards, and The City Below does offer them, but whether or not you stay with the book long enough may depend on how you react to the following passage which occurs at the end of the first part.  The would-be--priest brother has had a crises of faith.  He may not enter the seminary after all.  After his mother dies while he is away from home working on John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, he goes to confession.

He had not been to confession since May, when he'd decided against entering the seminary. He knew he had not caused his mother's death. And he knew he had not blinded Bright. Or deliberately lied to Didi. Or abandoned Nick.  Yet moments later, on his knees, curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church, he whispered dryly to the shadowy ear a few inches from his mouth, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

And for the first time ever he knew it was true.

Curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church.  I almost gave up then and there.  But I kept reading.  The City Below won't make it to my top ten reads of the year list, but it did serve a function more literary fiction does not.  The City Below occupies a status between literary fiction and more pulpy, supermarket type fiction.  This middle ground makes it possible for books like The City Below to address contemporary issues, like birth control, like busing, like crime, like the loss of faith in ways more literary fiction avoids.   And it can present a cast of characters one can readily identify with, maybe because they are a bit cliched. 

Within the cast of characters who make up The City Below there is one original character,  Bright McKay, a young African-American man Terry meets while working for John F. Kennedy.  Bright is the son of an Episcopalian minister.  He grows up in the once thriving Roxbury section of Boston, is successful in college, works for a succession of Kennedy brothers.  Does very well in life.  He's also secretly gay.  This is a story I for one would like to read.  It's a story that I've not heard yet, in 2010 and one that certainly would not have been cliched in 1994.