After a plethora of books about racism, multinational interference with voting, the recent emergence of multiracial people into the American political scene and presidential biographies, I needed a break.
The title of this new book Kings County, published this past July by David Goodwillie, caught my attention. Several generations before the story, I lived a part of my childhood in Kings County Flatbush populated then mostly by Jews and Italians.
The author, born in Paris, has had careers in professional baseball, as a private investigator and as an expert at Sotheby’s auction house. Previous publications include a novel American Subversive and a memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.
It is 2000 and Audrey Benton arrives in Manhattan on a bus from the Mid-west. Audrey has contempt and anger for her mother who is unable to identify which of the various men with whom she cohabited could be Audrey’s father. She moves from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where she becomes involved with an indie-rock band and garners a reputation in the music world. She forms a love relationship with Theo Gorski, a would-be writer, who is a stabilizing person in her life. For a time Audrey works at Cape Canaveral and the Banana River among the crowds watching our spacecraft launch.
The tale is not chronological but presented in episodes in which Audrey struggles desperately to attain a meaningful life. Audrey’s adventures and misadventures lead her to relationships with fascinating friends and acquaintances.
This book has everything, and I really mean everything. I couldn’t put it down.
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