Thursday, July 18, 2024




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Review of South Brooklyn Exterminating, a novel by Ian Maloney

The Wildlife State of Gaia. Ethical Dilemmas in Public Philosophy.

Animal Dignity, a book edited by Melanie Challenger, reviewed by Gregory F. Tague

Poetry by Vaneshran Arumugam

Letters to My Sheep by Teya Brooks Pribac - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman

New Book by Jan Deckers - Health Care Ethics and Law

Defending Animals by Kendra Coulter - Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague

Garrett Mostowski, Lunations: Poems - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor Troutman

Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman

Anne Whitehouse poetry book Steady - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman

Oppressive Liberation: Sexism in Animal Activism - book review by Gregory F. Tague

"Zelensky's Passion" - Poem by Nina Tassi (video)

Lichens by Vincent Zonca - book review by Gregory F. Tague

Justice for Animals by Martha C. Nussbaum - book review by Gregory F. Tague

Space Races by Anne Whitehouse

A Better Ape by Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell - book review by Gregory F. Tague

Tribute to Dr. Kathryn Coe

An Evolutionary Case for Veganism

Is there moral justification to eat meat? Read Gregory F. Tague's answer to that question in the Ecological Citizen

Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory by Alice Crary and Lori Gruen

Carlo Alvaro, a Philosopher of Virtue Ethics, Comments on Cultured Meat

The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti - book review by Gregory F. Tague

Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia - book review by Gregory F. Tague

Growing Up In The Ice Age by April Nowell - book review by Gregory F. Tague

A paper, by Gregory F. Tague and Sintia Molina, on the cultural ecology of food in the journal Environmental Sciences Proceedings

Charles Darwin - a biography by J. David Archibald - Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague

Art and Adaptability: Consciousness and Cognitive Culture by Gregory F. Tague

On the Animal Trail - Review by Gregory F. Tague

Arrest Fauci? - Opinion Essay by Ryan Ritchie

Ghosts of America - Novel by Caroline Hagood - Reviewed by Mitch Levenberg

Wattana: An Orangutan in Paris by Chris Herzfeld - Review by Gregory F. Tague

An Ape Ethic - Extended Abstract Essay - in The Montreal Review

Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer - Review by Gregory F. Tague

Speak the Word - Music and Lyrics by Vaneshran Arumugam

Patience is a Virtue - Waiting Poems by Isabel Rimanoczy

Skaidrite Stelzer, Digging a Moose from the Snow – Book Review

Story of Jimmy (video)





Review of South Brooklyn Exterminating, a novel by Ian Maloney

Ian S. Maloney, South Brooklyn Exterminating. 2024. Spuyten Duyvil. 296 pages. $22 U.S. paperback.  978-1-959556-90-9.

Reviewed by Todd Adams

 

Ian Maloney tells the story of a boy Jonah growing up with a driven, complex father in South Brooklyn Exterminating. The novel starts with the father awakening his seven-year-old son at three in the morning. They are headed out to spray a place for bugs in Brooklyn, and the exterminating business serves many purposes in this book. It provides most of the setting and much of the plot. It is also how the father instills the values—a code to live by—of honesty, hard work, and pride in a job well done in his son. Still, it is also a source of much-needed comic relief, for this is not a simple, idyllic story in which father and son live a charmed life together. The father smokes two packs of cigarettes a day and drinks too much. When the eighty-hour work weeks become too much for him to endure, he also takes too many pills. As a result, he has an epic, violent episode and ends up in a sanitorium for six months. How the father gradually wins back his son’s trust is one of the most affecting scenes in a book filled with such scenes.

 

Maloney avoids sentimentality by respecting Hemingway’s admonition that the greater the emotion, the less said. We see and hear the world through Jonah’s eyes and ears because of the first-person narration. We know what he feels and thinks moment-by-moment, but there are no lengthy ruminations on the meaning of life. There is no angst-filled soul-searching. After the violent episode, the two main characters don’t have a tearful reconciliation. They work together on fixing a boat with a hole in it instead, and this metaphoric activity takes the place of words between the father and the son. How to heal breaches is a vital part of the code the father is teaching the son to live by, too.

 

Some of these values may not be for everyone. The father owns a gun and is loathe to give it up even after his outburst. His son has to take the weapon away and hide it. The father never gives up cigarette smoking, but neither of his children smokes. He despises political correctness as an affront to the English language, but the most memorable example is his insistence on using the word “exterminate” instead of “pest control.” More problematic, he indulges in anti-immigrant rhetoric. However, his generous actions toward individuals who have moved to the United States from foreign countries undercuts it. Perhaps most troubling, he has a traditional view of marriage and the role of women. His wife is to be loved and respected—and stay home to raise the kids. Even near the end of his life, he still considers this decision the best one of his life, and his son does not disagree.

 

However, he is determined not to raise his children as he was raised. They don’t live in constant fear and pain as he did when growing up as the son of an alcoholic and abusive father. He abuses alcohol and drugs, but he—or their mother—keeps them from succumbing to the same evil. Most importantly, he gives both his daughter and his son the freedom and emotional support to be who they want to be, unlike himself, and they choose to be artists. His is not a dogmatic love full of unchanging rules and strictures but an open, growing one that imbues the novel with surprising warmth and depth.

 

Hemingway’s aphorism serves Maloney well as he navigates these dangerous shoals of emotion, but perhaps less so when it comes to Jonah’s decision to become a writer and write a memoir about his relationship with his father. That decision is obviously tied to his father’s love of literature and frustrated desire to teach it. They share books with each other. They even recite poetry to each other, and the novel ends with the son’s first draft of a lengthy description of his father. This ending has an emotional effect, but it may also leave the reader wondering what Jonah has learned from writing the book, if anything.

 

All quibbles aside, however, this is an impressive debut novel about a complicated father-son relationship that ends in love and mutual respect instead of the more familiar disaster. Told with verve and style, it is full of compassion, pity and comedy as the reader learns about a rarely described, often ignored profession. I look forward to reading Ian Maloney’s next novel.

 

- Todd Adams is retired lawyer who writes a blog about everything he did wrong writing his first novel and how he hopes to avoid doing in his second one. 

Copyright©2024 by Todd Adams. All Rights Reserved.