FICTION

LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION by Bruce Ducker (Permanent Press: $22; 223 pp.). “Life is closer to drying dishes than to books. Characters in novels never have as much to decide as he does. One simply blows up the bridge. Or holds on to the fish. And Jake Barnes had to figure out where to take Lady Brett for brandy. Nothing major.” Who’d have thought an attorney could write so lyrically, so allusively, so in tune with the quotidian? Bruce Ducker certainly can, but then he’s at least as much novelist as lawyer: this is his fifth work of fiction, and it’s a fine piece of work. Set in 1955 and starring high school student Danny Meadoff, “Lead Us Not Into Penn Station” is a coming-of-age novel written with the insight made possible by experience, and charming largely for what Ducker doesn’t do; a minimalist in the Hemingway rather than the Carver tradition, Ducker skirts around Danny’s sexual initiation, only alludes to the Dodgers’ incipient abandonment of Brooklyn, draws characters mainly through elliptical dialogue. Danny has become a Fuller Brush salesman, hoping to contribute to his family’s shaky finances, but before long his business life mirrors that of his father: the pals to whom he’s sub-contracted some territory have gambled away customers’ down payments at the track, leaving Danny, like his father, to swing. Ducker provides loving, thoughtful portraits of the Meadoff men, who seem easy targets for their exploitative, selfish associates . . . until Danny breaks the cycle in the novel’s climax, standing up for his father in a rage kindled by filial loyalty and a sense of justice. Brooklyn in the 1950s is a familiar fictional landscape, but Ducker brings it singularly, almost cinematically alive. My capsule review: hated the title, loved the book.