Book Review: “The Fool of New York City”, by Michael O’Brien

 “I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.” –Mark Twain

I read novels so rarely these days that it’s become a matter of embarrassment. A novel is hard for me to justify given the pile of books about “real” things waiting for me on my reading table. It’s not that I haven’t understood the place of great literature, intellectually, but the silent prejudice directing my personal reading habits has been this idea that a novel is an inferior device for communicating reality. (In my younger days I read some hideous novels.) It is long past time to disabuse myself of this notion: Michael O’Brien has forced me to turn the page, so to speak, which is something he is skilled at doing.

“The Fool of New York City” is a feat of the imagination. It’s not the strangest novel I have ever read, but it comes close, and the strangeness is all the more pronounced because of it’s very plausibility. “This is New York City, after all”, says one of his minor characters. O’Brien takes the reader on a gripping journey of mystery, adventure, tragedy and romance, with a knack for inserting the reader directly into the shoes of his protagonists. And who are these protagonists? The first is a giant nearly eight feet tall, a wholesome Iowa farm boy who landed in NYC on a basketball scholarship, but also a man with secrets; the second, a tormented soul he found nearly frozen in an abandoned building, an amnesiac with a cosmopolitan background and a tragic past he can’t remember. Together, they set off to discover the amnesiac’s true identity …

I can’t say much more than this without getting into spoiler territory. Read this delightful book. It’s comparatively short for an O’Brien novel, and it is infused with realities that one does well to contemplate.