I was born in the Bronx in 1950 and moved to the suburbs a few years later. I mention this little bit of personal history because I have read several of Hamill’s books as an adult and it always make me nostalgic for the New York that existed before I did.
In the introduction to The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories, Pete Hamill does identify nostalgia as New York City’s most enduring emotion and I understand that entirely. The city is a very special place but it seems it was always a bit better when our parents or perhaps just a decade or so before we were born.
A New Yorker or even a near New Yorker like me definitely feels the nostalgia. But anyone from anywhere could relate to these stories. Such is the magic of his storytelling. Although the stories are specifically about working-class people in a certain neighborhood, they are really universal.
Pete Hamill is one of my favorite authors so I was pretty sure I was going to like this book. And I liked it even more than I expected. This book is a collection of 36 short stories. Pete Hamill was raised in the tenements of a working-class area of Brooklyn and these stories are set in the Brooklyn of his youth which spanned the Depression and the Korean War. The author is gifted at telling us about the time, place, and characters.
Most of these stories were published in the Sunday Daily News in the early 1980s. The stories vary in length; several are 5 pages or so; some are about 15 pages. Some have happy endings; some don’t; but that’s the way it is.
The nice thing about a collection of short stories like this is that you can enjoy without much commitment. With a longer book, I often find myself in a situation where after reading 50 or even 100 pages that are just OK, I wonder if I really want to spend the time reading hundreds of pages than might be the same or might get better. With short stories the commitment is only a few more pages. By the way, there were no stories in this book that I even considered not finishing.
Definitely add this to your reading list if you like Pete Hamill’s other books. Give it a try if you are not a fan or maybe even never heard of Pete Hamill. Reading a few short stories is not a big investment of time and you may find a new author worth following.