ADVERTISEMENT
Betsy Town
Michael J. Malone, author
Three decades ago, a distraught woman stared down an approaching train from the tracks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, infant son in her arms. The baby survived. Growing up in foster care when his father could not shoulder the burden, David Campion has managed to mostly hold it together. But recent developments, including his pending wedding, have compelled David to dig into his mother’s past through those who knew her. David is combating his own grave psychological challenges, and is desperate to hide his increasingly bizarre behavior, including his involvement in the kidnapping of a prominent New York athlete, from his fiancée, Gracie, as their wedding day looms.
Darkly humorous and slyly inspiring, the final installment of Michael J. Malone’s Tompkins Trilogy captures both the colorful characters in New York’s East Village, and the disarmingly charming city across the Hudson where David was born and raised. Betsy Town depicts one man’s struggle for psychological wholeness, and a couple’s efforts to overcome the considerable perils that threaten their partnership.
Reviews
In the last of the Tompkins Trilogy, David Campion, an obsessive-compulsive New York City librarian with a Derek Jeter fixation, wants to marry his news-reporter fiancée, but he feels compelled first to resolve the circumstances of his family history. When David was an infant, his mother—while holding David in her arms—was struck and killed by a train in David’s hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. In a scattered narrative voice, David recounts his visits to Elizabeth, which he keeps secret from his fiancée the way another man might an infidelity. As his behavior becomes increasingly bizarre—he acts on the compulsion to reach for a police officer’s gun and ends up in jail—David emerges as less a man struggling with his past and more one suffering from mental illness. Malone’s storytelling has the same quality of listless meandering as his protagonist. Yet David’s fixation with his roots, seedy Betsy Town, and the tragedy that spared his life, lend poignancy to a novel of flailing through crisis and emerging out the other side. (BookLife)
