'Boogaloo' dances around a good story

April 19, 2005|Globe Correspondent

Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue, By Mark Kurlansky, Ballantine, 336 pp., $24.95

Sex, drugs, music, murder, and home-cooked meals crowd the pages of ''Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue," which is set in a diverse Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City during the 1980s. With his first novel, well-known nonfiction writer Mark Kurlansky proves that sometimes less really is more.

Nathan Seltzer, the son of Polish Jews who came to the United States before World War II, experiences a midlife crisis while the neighborhood's eccentric characters create their own concoction of chaos. As Nathan develops random bouts of claustrophobia on the subway and begins to lust over Karoline, a German pastry maker's daughter, a killer is running loose. Meanwhile Nathan's father, Harry, is attempting to bring back the dance sensation called the boogaloo that was made famous by Chow Mein Vega in the 1960s.

Kurlansky creates an intriguing, humorous, and quirky family with their love for food, religion, and one another, but also with the compromising situations they find themselves facing. Nathan, the ''financially insolvent claustrophobe who harbored adulterous lust and had not taught his daughter to swim," creates enough chaos for the whole family. While an affair with another woman is enough to create conflict for any married man with a young daughter, Kurlansky complicates Nathan's affair with Karoline even more when his uncle Nusan, a Holocaust survivor, suspects Karoline's father of being a Nazi officer during WWII.

While the Seltzers are respected and relied on within the neighborhood, Kurlansky subtly reveals hidden tensions within the family. Nusan resents Nathan's parents for reasons tied to his past in the Holocaust, while Nathan's mother, Ruth, harbors her own resentment in her marriage to Harry, creating unresolved issues that beg for confrontation.

Along with the family's deep ties comes their overzealous love for food, a characteristic described with such vivacity that it's not hard to envy the characters as they indulge themselves. Kurlansky even shares recipes by the characters at the end of the novel.

Kurlansky, known for his terse nonfiction works such as ''1968," ''Salt," and ''Cod," has the ability to captivate with his fiction but unfortunately fails to follow through, leaving his trails of conflicts to meet dead ends. There is a level of anticipation as the Seltzers, especially Nathan, constantly encounter complicated and humorous scenarios, but these are often followed with sighs of disappointment as too many of these promising situations abruptly come to a halt.