THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508240724
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
SLEEPERS
LORENZO CARCATERRA
Ballantine Books. 404 pp. $23.
If there is a shred of truth in Lorenzo Carcaterra's allegedly nonfiction best seller Sleepers, a tepid urban ``buddy'' tale of abuse, rape, revenge, murder and deceit, it would seem to be only that - a shred. This is the most preposterous memoir since Gulliver's Travels, but, alas, without Swiftian wit. That it lacks a lengthy, descriptive subtitle should be tip-off enough: This is fiction, and lilliputian fiction at that.
Carcaterra, author of A Safe Place: The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder, disclaims in his prologue: ``I have changed all the names and altered most of the dates in order to protect the identities of those involved.'' He has been on the defensive with doubting critics since the book's publication; but bad press can only help to promote the eventual movie, for which Carcaterra already has received $2.1 million.
In the 1960s of New York's clannish, working-class ``Hell's Kitchen,'' life is as good as it gets for the adolescent Lorenzo, nicknamed ``Shakes'' - for the Bard, not the D.T.s - and his three musketeer pals, John, Tommy and Michael. While their Irish or Italian fathers drink, cheat and beat up on their wives, their dutiful mothers fret with rosary beads, put dinner on the table and worry for their sons, scrappy captains of the street, blood brothers in hell.
Carcaterra revels in the romanticism of male adolescence and loyal friendship: ``Your friends gave you an identity and a sense of belonging. . . talk about sports and movies. You could even share your secrets and sins, dare tell another person what you thought about important childhood issues such as holding a girl's hand.''
But then the glass shatters: A prank with a hot-dog stand goes awry, resulting in serious injury to an elderly man, and the Musketeers - basically good kids; they even read! - are sent up the juvenile river, for hardened criminal treatment by four sadistic guards. Years later John and Tommy, stripped of their souls by rape and brutality at the Wilkinson Home for Boys, chance to meet their chief tormentor and blow him away.
By the time the boys land at Wilkinson, however, Carcaterra has strained credibility beyond redemption with his impossible-to-know-or-recall ``colorful'' details (soundtrack songs are big), impossible-to-witness scenes and impossible-to-reconstruct dialogue culminating in precious punch lines. (After watching a debtor-bridegroom get gunned down in the street, Lorenzo cracks, ``So much for getting married.)
I doubted many details - would the boys talk about Mario Andretti, the 1969 Indy 500 winner, in '63? - and blanched at every canned wisecrack. I also stopped caring about the boys, all of whom seemed stylized characters in an updated ``Dead End Kids'' movie. Sleepers reads like a self-conscious screenplay, one that appropriates the likes of Barry Levinson's ``Diner,'' Stephen King's ``Stand By Me,'' James Cagney's ``Public Enemy,'' Michael Cimino's ``The Deer Hunter,'' Burt Reynolds' ``The Longest Yard.'' (There's even a little ``Casablanca'' thrown in.)
Carcaterra may be the Quentin Tarantino of ``faction'' - the uneasy blend of fact and fiction first associated with Truman Capote's masterpiece In Cold Blood. But Capote named names and stuck to the truth, albeit a dramatized truth.
Believe it or not, Michael, a neophyte district attorney, prosecutes the two fallen angels for the former guard's murder - only second degree, despite the cold-blooded hit - and deliberately throws the case. The laughable trial hinges on the inexplicable introduction of a ``character witness'' for the victim, without whom sweet revenge could not be exacted. A priest's unlikely perjury, suborned by Carcaterra, provides the killers' even more unlikely alibis.
Remember when De Niro and the other boys belted out Frankie Valli's ``Goin' Out of My Head'' in the pool hall scene of ``The Deer Hunter,'' just before three of them shipped out for Vietnam? Well, here, the boys do the Four Seasons' ``Walk Like a Man,'' in a Manhattan restaurant, while they enjoy ``the last time we would ever be together again.''
When pressed about unlikely events in Sleepers, Carcaterra recently told a Time magazine reporter: ``The what, where and when these things happened were not as important to me as the fact that they did happen.'' Then he stopped talking.
Very convenient, even noble, this resort to mythology, but what then is left of the truth? And how can any of his facts be independently verified? All sources are missing in action.
I suspect that the only relevant question for Carcaterra was a marketing one: How on earth could this sensational, but hackneyed spin on lost innocence be sold if the story were made up? The writing simply doesn't rate. Hey, maybe a true-crime story . . . now that's a thought.
Fiction or not, Sleepers is a great con job.
- MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor for The Virginian-Pilot.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Lorenzo Carcaterra
by CNB