Sleepers

Lorenzo Carcaterra

It's not often that a tell-all bio from someone not inside the Hollywood Beltway spends months on the New York Times bestseller list and gets made into a movie with the kind of high-powered cast that fueled the film version of Sleepers. The movie was compelling enough to require checking into the book; as is almost always the case, the book is a superior form of media. In this case, that's saying something.

Sleepers is the story of Lorenzo Carcaterra and three of his friends. They grew up in Hell's Kitchen, one of New York City's less affluent neighborhoods, and were on the road to the future everyone but they expected for them, a future that was no future at all. Then one of their small-time pranks got out of hand, and the four of them ended up in a juvenile detention facility for varying periods of time. Their tenure at that facility is the centerpiece of the book, but it is in no way the whole story. There is more to the four friends than that. That's what lifts Sleepers out of the ranks of the basic autobiography; while most everything in the book points to its central motif, many of the episodes contained here also point in other directions. Carcaterra paints a bleak picture of Hell's Kitchen in the sixties, but is still able to look back on his and his friends' life of petty crime and quotidian ruin with something approaching joy. Given the trauma of the events that followed, that's something special.

Not to say that the book looks at life through rose-colored glasses. Far from it, in fact. Those who've read Dwight Edgar Abbott's excellent autobiography about the California juvenile penal system, I Cried, You Didn't Listen, will find nothing in Sleepers to surprise them about the four boys' experiences in a correctional facility (others may be shocked). The material is presented in a light that comes off as surprisingly objective, but the reader is made well aware of the pain and suffering Carcaterra and his friends were subjected to at the same time. Unlike Abbott, however, Carcaterra was able to achieve some closure regarding his stay there (covered in the third of the book's three parts), giving the book less rage and more balance. Good stuff.