“Time was so ... weird,” deems a main character in the multi-layered Saint John of the Five Boroughs, “the way it went slow and fast simultaneously.”
It’s the kind of paradox at the core of Edward Falco’s all-encompassing but accessible new novel as it finds a parallel between the various narrative actions and the juxtaposing impulses, deliberations, interior monologues and characterizations. Indeed, as it’s split up into a scorecard of personalities or plopped down into this or that subplot, reading Saint John seems to go “slow and fast simultaneously,” and can alternate between an eight-to-the-bar page-turner to an only slightly-less-than fascinating rhythm.
Still, when boy meets girl he hits the ground running and doin’ her wrong – though the girl meets him half way. (Nobody seems to “meet-cute” these days – maybe in keeping with the times, they meet-weird.) There’s an inevitability in the romance of 22-year-old Avery Walker, a senior at Penn State, and Grant Danko from Brooklyn — dark and moody, pulled from central casting — a 37-year-old former religion-mocking “performance poet” whose stage name is Saint John of the Five Boroughs, struggling writer, sometime druggie, working part time for his gangster uncle while watching his artist friends go onto success as he increasingly feels like a “fraud.” Oh, and he’s also been a notorious womanizer.
So what’s different about Avery? “There was that electricity about her,” Grant surmises, “…and there was something about the balance that was attractive, the chaos and the order, as if they were both extreme in her…”
At the beginning of the relationship, however, Avery had her own ardent and obsessive – and guardedly requited – feelings about Grant when she savors "the feel of him in her belly, the way he pulled her apart." She’s also bold enough to act upon her impulses, asking Grant to take her to Brooklyn with her, to which he readily agrees. So cue the coterie and family, the members of which kick into high gear of concern and wariness – or encouragement — as Avery quits college to hightail it to New York City to pursue life as an artist, and Grant’s long-worried friends ultimately come to believe that Avery may be the best thing to happen to him in a long time, just the person to get Grant back on track to being the artist or writer he once was. (Ever since he had to fatally shoot a hijacker in self-defense years ago while on his trick driving job he’s had writer's block.)
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