Table Money

The year is 1970. Owney Morrison is back from Vietnam with a Congressional Medal of Honor, which is not negotiable currency in the borough of Queen's in New York City. Oh sure, there's a free drink every now and then, which Owney doesn't need. He is in big trouble.

By day, Owney is---almost by heredity---a sandhog, a digger of tunnels whose work is backbreaking and terrifyingly dangerous. But night, his main adversary come at him from inside a bottle, while his wife, Dolores, and their infant child look on helplessly. Owney may not make it; Dolores just may have a shot---but only if she has the heart and the stomach to pay the fearsome cost of becoming her own woman.

Breslin is back on the turf he has made his own: Queens Boulevard with its artful hustlers and blowzy beehives, its dedicated grifters and solid citizens. No one knows them better: Kellerman, the lunatic old union guy, whose wild eyes burn with Trotsky fire; Sharon the barmaid, under whose laconic style lies a parching thirst for retribution; McNiff, a renaissance shyster whose normal courtroom attire features bathrobe and carpet slippers.

From his home base in the caretaker's house in the endless sprawl of a cemetery, Owney blunders forth into a world of his own making, but a world, nonetheless, that want no part of him. Something has to give.

Jimmy Breslin has been at work on this body-blow of a novel for some ten years. He is older now and probably wiser. He has reached a peak power.