Lamont Williams, the street sweeper of the title, is fresh out of prison and working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He’s “the new guy, still on probation in Building Services, kind of quiet, a nervous guy’’ who wants only to find his young daughter, lost to him during his time in jail. When Lamont befriends a patient named Henryk Mandelbrot, and hears Henryk’s ruinously sad stories about surviving the Holocaust, Lamont’s path ultimately intersects Adam’s, and the web of “The Street Sweeper’’ is woven.
This is a big fat novel filled with empathy and indignation. Every page of it dramatizes American race relations, 20th-century Jewish persecution, or class conflict - or all three. Its very existence poses interesting questions about the ongoing tension between entertainment and moral instruction in storytelling. Do we read fiction to disappear into other lives and other worlds, to be distracted, to be transported? Or do we read novels to explore our own inner worlds, and maybe even to find instructions about how to live better lives?
I’d say Perlman believes both. He wants you to step into Adam’s and Lamont’s fictional lives, but he’s absolutely not above a lecture either. “[A]s for Clarence Thomas . . .’’ Adam’s old friend William says at one point, “I don’t know where to start with that man. He was always a fool but now he’s an unbearably smug fool.’’ At the end of a two-page rant, Adam simply agrees with William, and the novel rolls on.
To suggest a novelist has written moral fiction is to step onto thin ice. Didacticism, in particular, is a bad word in modern storytelling. Here’s Garrison Keillor, from his introduction to the 1998 Best American Short Stories. “A story that carries its lesson under its arm is immediately distrusted.’’
Here’s Saul Bellow, from his published letters: “Writers can only try to demonstrate in close detail without opinion.’’
