Eddie's Bastard

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4 OCT 1999

In his ambitious, bittersweet first novel, Kowalski explores the world of a boy growing up in a small upstate New York town called Mannsville who must find his place in the shadows of nearly mythic ancestors. In infancy, narrator Billy Mann was left on his grandfather's doorstep, with a note identifying him only as "Eddie's bastard." Billy's bitter, proud and often drunk grandfather tells him that Eddie was a larger-than-life hero whose plane was shot down over Vietnam. Growing up, Billy is regaled with tales of other legendary Manns, whose "natural tendency toward greatness" stretches back more than a century. Yet the grandfather also paints himself as a fool who lost the family fortune with an ill-conceived idea for an ostrich farm. Billy endures a lonely, isolated childhood and adolescence, countered primarily by his rich imagination, his courage and his friendship with neighbor Annie Simpson, whose abusive, poor white trash family is the antithesis of the lineage-proud Manns. Kowalski layers the past effectively, blending the grandfather's oral history with Billy's own coming-of-age narrative. Although the vaunted Mann fortune derives from simple luck--the discovery of blood-tainted, Civil War-era buried treasure on their property--the mythic tales inspire Billy to some noble deeds of his own, and he assumes the mantle of family storyteller so the legends will endure. Though at times it veers into dramatic overload, the novel is ultimately an absorbing, redemptive exploration of a young man's search for himself, wresting an identity out of generations of secrets.