Shoot the Moonlight Out

Starred review from October 11, 2021
It’s the summer of 1996 in the prologue of this masterly literary noir from Boyle (City of Margins), and 14-year-old Bobby Santovasco and a pal are throwing rocks at cars exiting from the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. What they think of as a harmless prank results in the death of a 19-year-old driver. Meanwhile, recent widower Jack Cornacchia, a Con Ed customer field representative in Brooklyn, seeks solace from his grief by doing freelance vigilante work for neighborhood folks who need wrongs righted. Flash forward to the summer of 2001. Creative writing teacher Lily Murphy, who’s become friends with Jack, confides in him that she’s being stalked by an ex-boyfriend. Jack agrees to quietly handle the situation. Meanwhile, Bobby, now 19, has fallen for Francesca Clarke, an aspiring filmmaker who dreams of escaping the neighborhood. Bobby devises an ill-conceived plan to rob his employer, a crooked local businessman, and then hit the road with his new love. What could go wrong? Plenty, as shown in the tragic ways the lives and fates of these fully realized characters intertwine. This mature, nuanced work is a must for George Pelecanos fans. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel & Weber.

Starred review from October 1, 2021
Boyle returns to the stunted yet fleetingly hopeful lives of various working-class characters in the southern Brooklyn of the 1990s (City of Margins, 2020), again finding lives spiraling downward, the result of bad choices made by essentially good (or not altogether bad) people and the ripple effect those choices have on others around them. In 1996, Bobby and Zeke are bored teens who like to throw projectiles at passing cars on the Belt Parkway. It seems like good fun until it isn't, with the resulting tragedy affecting the arc of their future lives as well as a seemingly random group of characters, connected by Kevin Bacon-like degrees of separation. Those connections come together in June 2001, when Jack, grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, finds himself in a church basement taking a writing class taught by would-be novelist Lily, who is bedeviled by an old boyfriend turned stalker. Meanwhile, Bobby continues to make bad choices, this time involving a recent high-school graduate, Francesca, with whom Bobby dreams of a new life, and his employer, Max, a bumbling Ponzi schemer. As he brings this group together for a violent and heartbreaking finale, Boyle emerges not just as a consummate crime writer but as a poet of the underclass, unwaveringly portraying lives gone wrong but still finding a little moonlight ""spilling its light on the cracks in the sidewalks and all the cracked hearts.

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