"Bloodbrothers" … is a book with a thesis: family loyalty is the ultimate treason to oneself.
Like some proletarian fictions of a few decades back, this story of Stony De Coco, 18, and his clan grinds and blusters from point to point, undeterred by Price's feeling for life or his dramatic gifts. As Stony chooses between the family racket … and realizing his own possibilities in the world of strangers beyond the confines of Co-op City, the Bronx, incidents from the psychopathic behavior of the De Cocos, their wives, friends and other wounded kinfolk, proliferate as illustrations of a subtext about the mutual destructiveness of those who still comply to the hoary doctrine that blood is thicker than water; however, the author never allows his substantial powers of observation and empathy to keep in focus, or perhaps animate this. When all else fails Price's rather distant and contemptuous estimation of what such unpleasant, chagrined, consuming, stupefied proles are about, he introduces a psychiatrist to sermonize to Stony. Or a best friend, who owns a hosiery shop, is made to deliver a summary that recalls what one might hear in Manhattan, perhaps, in therapy.
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