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Belmondo Style
Jared Chiziver is a single father and professional pick-pocket, devotee of Jean-Paul Belmondo and foreign films, and a suave ladies' man. His son Ben is sixteen, a bookish semi-introvert, a star on his school's track team, college bound and gay. Their unusual but quiet and affectionate life in New York City's Greenwich Village is ripped asunder by two singular events. First, Jared finally meets 'the one,' Anna, a photographer of criminals and death scenes - a woman he finds endless engaging. Second, in response to a brutal attack upon his son Ben, Jared breaks his own cardinal rule and commits the big crime, the one that draws the unflinching attention of the police. The only response possible to these events is to leave New York one step ahead of the police and embark upon a journey of both escape and discovery that will irrevocably change their lives.
Told from the point of view of the too-wise and too-adult Ben, Belmondo Style is an unforgettable tale which movingly explores the bonds between an unusual father and a remarkable son.
Told from the point of view of the too-wise and too-adult Ben, Belmondo Style is an unforgettable tale which movingly explores the bonds between an unusual father and a remarkable son.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published April 17, 2004
2 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Adam Berlin
12 books8 followersAdam Berlin is the author of the post-9/11 novel The Number of Missing (Spuyten Duyvil), the boxing novel Both Members of the Club (Texas Review Press/ winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize), Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s Press/winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award) and Headlock (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). His stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. He teaches writing at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and co-edits the literary mag J Journal: New Writing on Justice. For more, please visit adamberlin.com
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 21, 2024
This is a very good novel but I can only review this novel by addressing various aspects that are problematic. The first point is not really connected with my review of the novel but a digression I can't resist. If it bores you skip on to number 2.
1. This novel won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley Award (please see my footnote *1) which is presented to (and I quote from their website):
"The Ferro-Grumley Award is an annual literary award, presented by Publishing Triangle and the Ferro-Grumley Foundation to a book deemed the year's best work of LGBT fiction".
I wouldn't for a moment question the literary quality of 'Belmondo Style' - it is a fine novel by a talented writer but, is it a work LGBT fiction? I would say no because although Ben Chiziver the gay son in the novel experiences a horrific homophobic assault it is, to put it crudely a McGuffin, a device to propel the novel along. Like the McGuffin's in all Hitchcock films it is not essential, it could be extracted and substituted with something else.
I don't believe that having a gay character makes a gay novel, nor does the way the author defines themselves make a gay novel (and Adam Berlin my not be gay). By 2004, and even more so now, 'gay novel' or 'gay literature' was and is a term crying out for definition. Belmondo Style is an example of how far and how quickly the position of gays and society's attitude to gays had changed and was changing. Back in the days of the 'Violet Quill' group in the 1970's or of the 'Men on Men' anthologies of George Stambolian you wouldn't have had a novel like Belmondo Style because the gay son and the homophobic assault are not at the core of the novel, they are not even essential. They are just part of the story, the way gays are in reality.
2. The film 'Breathless' (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg) is the favorite film of Jared Chiziver, father of Ben, and provides him with a 'philosophy' to live by and a leitmotif throughout the novel to justify and explain (or rather avoid asking questions) an increasingly mechanistic plotline whose denouement becomes evident way to soon in this not particularly long novel.
To keep the dynamics of father and son, father and girlfriend, and father, son and girlfriend, within the fraught claustrophobic parameters of the Belmondo/Seberg relationship and the plot of Breathless Jared, Ben and Jared's girlfriend Anna are forced to act in ways that become unbelievable after a moment's thought. Once you do start thinking all sorts of plot problems emerge. Jared Chiziver, like Belmondo in Breathless, is a grifter/petty criminal sustaining himself by pickpocketing and shoplifting. The problem is that he lives not in Paris in the 1950's but New York in the early millennium years (we know this because it is mentioned that the Twin Towers are no more) and to have no 'official' existence - bank account, credit cards etc. - was no longer viable. I was living and working in New York in 1990 and not having a credit card made things like booking a hotel room, or a restaurant reservation, impossible and certainly attracted masses of attention. How Jared rented a flat, even a crappy one, particularly in Christopher Street, is hard to understand. It is also hard to understand how he registered Ben for school without paperwork. Jared's off the radar lifestyle is that of 1940/50 film noir - not of post 9/11 New York. Although the world had not reached today's level of invasive film technology - it existed and the idea that a persistent pickpocket/shoplifter could avoid being caught or run-ins with professional criminal gangs working the same streets and stores is hard to credit (please see footnote *2 below). Manhattan is a big place but when you live and work within very concentrated areas it is hard not to be noticed.
3. Jared is a classic film noir character alone and detached from everything but his son. But it isn't realistic for Ben to be like that. Unless you are rearing a psychopath the basis of growing up is socialisation and seeking it outside the home. Much as I liked Ben he wasn't a character you could believe in because he didn't exist outside of his father. Even if you adore a parent by 16 you are developing away from them by creating, even in a nascent way, a life unknown to them.
4. Jared's response to the homophobic attack (please see footnote *3 below) on his son is to take violent revenge on the perpetrator. The problem for me is that Jared's desire for revenge has nothing to do with Ben, certainly nothing to do with helping or protecting him. It is a way of asserting power, dominance and control over his son. Because Jared's revenge means that Ben loses everything, his home, his school, potentially his chance at University and inevitably his father.
It is always wrong to conflate the author's views with those of his characters but it is also difficult not to believe, because of how they are presented, that some things reflect the author's thinking. I can't help feeling that the whole revenge attack is one that Berlin views with favour.
My overall opinion:
This is a good, but flawed novel, certainly good enough that I will try another of Berlin's novels at some stage. It was also good enough, even though the ending was obvious from the start (maybe if you haven't seen Breathless it helps but I doubt it. But has anyone seen a classic criminal film noir that doesn't end badly for the criminal?). Still I was choked up by the time I finished reading it (but I am hopelessly sentimental). I liked the characters, despite their conceptual flaws, I like Berlin's writing style. What was most beautiful is the father/son relationship - it was complex, deep and real and suggests that when Berlin breaks free of the macho man trope and he places his characters in the 'real' world he could write something really perfect.
*1 The 2005 award was, like all Ferro-Grumley Awards, for novels published in the USA and Canada in the previous year─ i.e. 2004. The other nominees were 'The Master' by Colm Toibin and 'Van Allen’s Ecstasy' by Jim Tushinski. Toibin had already won the award for 'The Story of the Night' in 1998. Tushinski's nomination is perhaps best skipped over with embarrassment, after all it is the winner not the nominees that really matter - isn't it? no I don't believe that either.
*2 When I lived in New York the sites for begging on all the major mid town streets were controlled by criminal gangs. This does not mean that those begging were not poor, homeless or desperate only that even the homeless and desperate had to pay a tax to carry out their work.
*3 My problem with the specific act of revenge in the novel is that for all its technicolor gore it is also utterly unrealistic. I won't go into details but the act of revenge is like one of those staged TV advertisements for children's toys - I am thinking of the one for 'Slinky' which, when I was a kid, showed them self propelling down a flight of stairs. When you tried it at home you realised that on real stairs it didn't work because they were too wide. Jared's revenge is impossible because the logistics just don't work.
1. This novel won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley Award (please see my footnote *1) which is presented to (and I quote from their website):
"The Ferro-Grumley Award is an annual literary award, presented by Publishing Triangle and the Ferro-Grumley Foundation to a book deemed the year's best work of LGBT fiction".
I wouldn't for a moment question the literary quality of 'Belmondo Style' - it is a fine novel by a talented writer but, is it a work LGBT fiction? I would say no because although Ben Chiziver the gay son in the novel experiences a horrific homophobic assault it is, to put it crudely a McGuffin, a device to propel the novel along. Like the McGuffin's in all Hitchcock films it is not essential, it could be extracted and substituted with something else.
I don't believe that having a gay character makes a gay novel, nor does the way the author defines themselves make a gay novel (and Adam Berlin my not be gay). By 2004, and even more so now, 'gay novel' or 'gay literature' was and is a term crying out for definition. Belmondo Style is an example of how far and how quickly the position of gays and society's attitude to gays had changed and was changing. Back in the days of the 'Violet Quill' group in the 1970's or of the 'Men on Men' anthologies of George Stambolian you wouldn't have had a novel like Belmondo Style because the gay son and the homophobic assault are not at the core of the novel, they are not even essential. They are just part of the story, the way gays are in reality.
2. The film 'Breathless' (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg) is the favorite film of Jared Chiziver, father of Ben, and provides him with a 'philosophy' to live by and a leitmotif throughout the novel to justify and explain (or rather avoid asking questions) an increasingly mechanistic plotline whose denouement becomes evident way to soon in this not particularly long novel.
To keep the dynamics of father and son, father and girlfriend, and father, son and girlfriend, within the fraught claustrophobic parameters of the Belmondo/Seberg relationship and the plot of Breathless Jared, Ben and Jared's girlfriend Anna are forced to act in ways that become unbelievable after a moment's thought. Once you do start thinking all sorts of plot problems emerge. Jared Chiziver, like Belmondo in Breathless, is a grifter/petty criminal sustaining himself by pickpocketing and shoplifting. The problem is that he lives not in Paris in the 1950's but New York in the early millennium years (we know this because it is mentioned that the Twin Towers are no more) and to have no 'official' existence - bank account, credit cards etc. - was no longer viable. I was living and working in New York in 1990 and not having a credit card made things like booking a hotel room, or a restaurant reservation, impossible and certainly attracted masses of attention. How Jared rented a flat, even a crappy one, particularly in Christopher Street, is hard to understand. It is also hard to understand how he registered Ben for school without paperwork. Jared's off the radar lifestyle is that of 1940/50 film noir - not of post 9/11 New York. Although the world had not reached today's level of invasive film technology - it existed and the idea that a persistent pickpocket/shoplifter could avoid being caught or run-ins with professional criminal gangs working the same streets and stores is hard to credit (please see footnote *2 below). Manhattan is a big place but when you live and work within very concentrated areas it is hard not to be noticed.
3. Jared is a classic film noir character alone and detached from everything but his son. But it isn't realistic for Ben to be like that. Unless you are rearing a psychopath the basis of growing up is socialisation and seeking it outside the home. Much as I liked Ben he wasn't a character you could believe in because he didn't exist outside of his father. Even if you adore a parent by 16 you are developing away from them by creating, even in a nascent way, a life unknown to them.
4. Jared's response to the homophobic attack (please see footnote *3 below) on his son is to take violent revenge on the perpetrator. The problem for me is that Jared's desire for revenge has nothing to do with Ben, certainly nothing to do with helping or protecting him. It is a way of asserting power, dominance and control over his son. Because Jared's revenge means that Ben loses everything, his home, his school, potentially his chance at University and inevitably his father.
It is always wrong to conflate the author's views with those of his characters but it is also difficult not to believe, because of how they are presented, that some things reflect the author's thinking. I can't help feeling that the whole revenge attack is one that Berlin views with favour.
My overall opinion:
This is a good, but flawed novel, certainly good enough that I will try another of Berlin's novels at some stage. It was also good enough, even though the ending was obvious from the start (maybe if you haven't seen Breathless it helps but I doubt it. But has anyone seen a classic criminal film noir that doesn't end badly for the criminal?). Still I was choked up by the time I finished reading it (but I am hopelessly sentimental). I liked the characters, despite their conceptual flaws, I like Berlin's writing style. What was most beautiful is the father/son relationship - it was complex, deep and real and suggests that when Berlin breaks free of the macho man trope and he places his characters in the 'real' world he could write something really perfect.
*1 The 2005 award was, like all Ferro-Grumley Awards, for novels published in the USA and Canada in the previous year─ i.e. 2004. The other nominees were 'The Master' by Colm Toibin and 'Van Allen’s Ecstasy' by Jim Tushinski. Toibin had already won the award for 'The Story of the Night' in 1998. Tushinski's nomination is perhaps best skipped over with embarrassment, after all it is the winner not the nominees that really matter - isn't it? no I don't believe that either.
*2 When I lived in New York the sites for begging on all the major mid town streets were controlled by criminal gangs. This does not mean that those begging were not poor, homeless or desperate only that even the homeless and desperate had to pay a tax to carry out their work.
*3 My problem with the specific act of revenge in the novel is that for all its technicolor gore it is also utterly unrealistic. I won't go into details but the act of revenge is like one of those staged TV advertisements for children's toys - I am thinking of the one for 'Slinky' which, when I was a kid, showed them self propelling down a flight of stairs. When you tried it at home you realised that on real stairs it didn't work because they were too wide. Jared's revenge is impossible because the logistics just don't work.
September 17, 2010
I found this in the $1 book stalls at the Strand Bookstore (having never heard of the book or the author before), and I'm very pleased with myself :) It looks like this book is now out of print, which is really too bad. The storytelling here is fast-paced, vivid, and witty, and the central relationship between father and son is beautiful -- complicated but breezy, snappy but realistic (think Gilmore Guys with a grittier more "urban" edge). It's also a sweet lover letter to both downtown New York and to "Breathless," with an incredibly honest and realistic coming-of-age/coming out tale thrown in for good measure. Woah! It does have a more YA novel feel than an adult novel, though, and I really feel that that mis-positioning on the publisher's part (no surprise, SMP is a totally incompetent house) probably accounts for why such a strong book by such a clearly talented author totally fell through the cracks.
April 7, 2023
One of the first books that ever STUCK with me! The story grips you at your core. The love between father and son. The struggle of being a teen, especially a gay teen in the early 2000s. There are shock scenes that you can't undo once you read them - beware. Overall, 18ish years later and I still remember details about this book.
September 2, 2018
What an odd book. I initially thought this book should have been classified as a YA novel because the narrator is a teenager. However, I changed my opinion due to two violent scenes in the book and one rather graphic sex scene, all of which would disqualify Belmondo Style for YA status. Ben, the narrator, is so enamored with his thieving father that his view of life is distorted. He eventually starts to see the light and realize his father's behavior is awful but it's too little too late. The father, Jared, is just ridiculous and possibly mentally ill. This was an interesting read that left me with more questions than answers. How does one live in Manhattan (even in a crappy apartment) on money lifted from pick pocketing? People don't even carry cash huge sums of cash on them anymore! Where was Ben's mother and why didn't he have any information about her? Didn't this kid have a birth certificate? Surely his mother's name would have been listed there. Did Anna really know what was going on with Jared? If so, what possessed her to follow this guy and his kid to Florida? I will say reading this book made me want to see Breathless.
July 21, 2008
A very enjoyable read full of vivid characters. An unusual and interesting gay coming of age story with a main character who is at once sympathetic and engaging.
With a father who is a petty thief the hero lives in a world that is both real and unreal. The final chapters of the book are extremely thought provoking and show that so many of life's themes are not dependent on sexuality.
With a father who is a petty thief the hero lives in a world that is both real and unreal. The final chapters of the book are extremely thought provoking and show that so many of life's themes are not dependent on sexuality.
November 4, 2013
ok father/son story. good beach read.
December 25, 2013
For my full review of Adam Berlin's work, please click here:
http://www.15rounds.com/adam-berlin-t...
http://www.15rounds.com/adam-berlin-t...
November 5, 2011
Intense and you get involved in the characters!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews