South Street

by David Bradley

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684186748
• ISBN13: 9780684186740
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Down and dirty and hysterically funny

David Bradley is better known for his novel "The Chaneysville Incident"; it's too bad "South Street" has all but faded into obscurity behind the other book, because on its own, "South Street" is an incisive, perceptive, and devastatingly funny novel about life on the street. "South Street" takes place in Philadelphia and introduces us to Adlai Stevenson Brown, a young black man trying to make his mark as a writer; tired of being kept by his upper-class girlfriend, he leaves the rarefied air of her high-rise luxury apartment and heads for the down-and-dirty environment of the ghetto, where life is lived raw on the street. The locus of much of the action is Lightnin' Ed's Bar and Grill, presided over by Leo the bartender, a benevolent 300-pound Buddha who keeps with a pool cue behind the bar just in case, addicted to soap operas and the losing Phillies, fending off the perpetual advances of Big Betsy, an aging hooker way past her prime. Other regulars include Vanessa, a pretty young streetwalker wise beyond her years, her sister Leslie, bitter beyond her years, cheating on her devoted husband Rayburn who ekes out a marginal existence as a janitor and defends his honor with a razor; Leslie's paramour Leroy Briggs, the neighborhood bully (South Street is supposed to tremble when he walks), and Jake the wino, brilliant but wasted, dedicated to drinking himself to death. Brown gets to know all the denizens of Lightnin' Ed's as they get to know him, and the reader comes to respect him for being his own person, true to his own principles, beholden to no one and able to see the true value of a person behind the gritty facade. Bradley evidently liked the characters he created, and even the bad guys like Leroy have their sympathetic side; we can see their vulnerability and pathos hidden behind the viciousness. He's also a master at dialogue, and some of the exchanges between the regulars at Lightnin' Ed's will have the reader on the floor laughing. "South Street" is very much an affirmative novel, because Bradley knows, and conveys to the reader, that behind all the dirt and the garbage and the crime statistics, the ghetto is made up mostly of decent people scrambling to eke out a living, warm and vibrant and full of the joy of life despite the odds. It's a story of men and women who "keep on keepin' on". It's a great book by a very accomplished writer that deserves a much wider audience.