William Boyle is a Mississippi-based writer whose novels tend to be set in one specific neighborhood of his borough of origin, Brooklyn. His most recent novel, Saint of the Narrows Street, is no exception: spanning several decades, the novel centers on the lives of small people in a big city, people who find their deeply-held beliefs continually upended as the march of time is punctuated by life-shattering moments of violence. I sat down with William Boyle to discuss the ever-irksome question of genre, the unique problems posed by a novel of such sweeping time span, and the ways that his “Catholic-haunted” stories deal with issues of faith and and religiosity. A transcription of our Zoom interview is below.
How do you describe the genre of Saint of the Narrows Street?
If I had to describe it, I’d say it was a “kitchen sink crime drama.” That’s the term I’d use. I like “crime drama” just because it kind of gets at the fact that it’s much more of a character study than a plot-driven thing. It’s certainly not a mystery or a thriller at all. Also, all those terms are just kind of marketing, labeling that I’m not really comfortable with. I don’t think about labels that much. I love what I love, and I try to work in that same territory. I grew up reading and loving a lot of mostly older crime fiction, and I’m always inspired by that stuff.
Like Raymond Chandler?
No. I mean, I do love Raymond Chandler but the writers that really changed things for me were Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, and that next generation of crime writers. Their books were often very depressing or had a different world view rooted in fear and paranoia.
Patricia Highsmith is an interesting example because that is very much literary crime fiction.
That’s always the way that people tend to talk about my books, if people are talking about my books at all. That’s a phrase they’ll use, “literary crime fiction,” which is a weird phrase because so much crime fiction already doesn’t get taken seriously enough, and then it’s like you have to find a way to talk about the genre that’s elevated.
Do you feel that “literature of the working classes” is an accurate description of your writing?
I’m thinking a lot about that stuff when I’m writing. Those are the people I’m writing about. That’s the world I’m interested in, the world I grew up in. And a lot of what I’m drawn to as a reader are the social novels of the early, mid-twentieth century, where that was really a part of it. So yes, I think so.
Do you feel that literature about the working classes is underrepresented in contemporary literature?
It definitely feels less represented now than in the past. It definitely feels generationally that early to mid-twentieth century stuff was so concerned with that question. Now, it feels like a lot of fiction is—obviously not all and I think crime fiction can be an exception for that—but a lot of mainstream literary fiction feels like it’s about upper or upper middle-class people. That’s obviously a broad generalization but largely I feel it’s true.
What informed your decision to begin the narrative in the 1980s?
I grew up in this part of Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s. My mom is still there, I still have other family there, and I’m back home all the time, but I haven’t lived there full-time in quite a while. My first couple of books were set in the 2000s and 2010s, but it became a practical thing for me. I was writing about my neighborhood, and I was seeing it in my imagination as it was in the ’80s and ’90s and not as it is now because it’s changed pretty drastically. I started to go back and set my books, first in the early 2000s and then in the 1990s. This book just kind of started that way, on this hot summer night in 1986. My original idea for this book was for it to take place all on one night in 1986. Obviously, that changed a lot because it’s set across eighteen years, but that was the initial thought, kind of Do The Right Thing style, have it be this one night, this one block.
A sort of panorama.
Yeah, or an ensemble sort of thing. I did write a draft of that book and it didn’t work at all. It was much more of a sprawling cast, and it was all this stuff happening on the block on one night. It went off the rails, but I kept some of my characters and I kept the fact that the book opens on that same night.
What kinds of unique challenges did skipping between different decades pose?
I really liked the idea of dropping into moments of crisis across eighteen years. And in my previous books, I’d only really ever told stories in a pretty compressed time period. I’ve always called myself a coward when it comes to time because I’m much more comfortable trying to write a novel that’s set over three or four days, than writing a novel that’s set over many years. And then I think, slowly, in some of my other more recent books I would do a prologue, or something that was set a few years before and the main action of the book would still be set across a few days. I’m not comparing the book to the film at all, but Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a film I was thinking a lot about, structurally dropping into these moments and doing a crime fiction version of that. But I think the biggest challenge, because I haven’t had these sorts of time jumps in my work, was not frontloading each of the subsequent parts with exposition, with what’s happened in the previous six years or nine years or however long it’s been since we’ve seen these characters and dropping us into this moment and threading that information in as we need to know it. But not just playing catch-up at the beginning of each part. That was something I had to figure out with the help of my editor over multiple drafts and revisions. That was probably the biggest challenge, getting into that headspace where it’s like, we don’t need this, we can just be in this scene and this moment and figure out the other stuff.
What is your relationship to the Italian American community?
Everybody thinks I’m Irish because of my last name, which I’m not. My dad was Scottish, off-the-boat Scottish actually, but he wasn’t really in my life much. He left when I was like one, and my mom is Italian American, so I grew up only with the Italian American side of my family, the Gianninis. That was the world I knew growing up, and it’s the only world I write about. I’ll throw in characters here and there that are like half-Irish or half-Scottish or something. Obviously, I’ve got that experience too. But that’s the world I know, and the neighborhood has changed a lot since I was growing up there. Even in the ’80s and ’90s, it was a dying Italian American neighborhood because a lot of people were leaving and moving to Jersey and Staten Island and Long Island. Now it’s a thriving Chinese American neighborhood. And you still kind of have pockets of the old Italian American folks that hung on, but it’s the place I always return to when I write. I don’t really see myself straying too far away from it. When I sit down to write, that’s where my mind goes first.
Is there something that you want people to understand about this community that you feel gets commonly misunderstood?
I don’t think it’s a well-documented place, and certainly not in literature and movies much beyond one-dimensional visions of it. There’s some mob stuff that I really love, but that’s kind of the portrait of it really. I think that people, if they know Bensonhurst, Gravesend, they think of mob stuff or they think of racism. Those things are definitely part of the story, and they show up in the world of my books. But there are also these quiet, small lives. There’s a small-town feel to a lot of those end-of-the-line neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. My great-grandparents came over from Italy, my grandparents were both born in Brooklyn, but they never or very rarely left a twelve-to-fifteen block radius in that neighborhood. I always talk about it as this kind of small world in a big city and I think that’s what I’m interested in writing about. Those lives, those people.
Who is the Saint of the Narrows Street?
Saint of the Narrows Street is a fictional block. The epigraph at the beginning of the book, which asks that same question, is fictional. I was just kind of having fun with that. The Narrows refers to the tidal strait between Brooklyn and Staten Island. In the earlier versions of the book, I used the real name of my block that I grew up on, Bay 35th. I wanted a more poetic, better name for the block. I just kind of out of nowhere came up with that, Saint of the Narrows Street. I loved imagining it kind of cramped on one of those green street signs. And there are occasionally those sorts of blocks in the neighborhood that have random names in a sea of numbered streets. There will be one that’s random and different for some reason. There’s not really an answer to that question. I was just thinking about it as a term that existed in the world of the story.
I thought it referred to Risa because we have this character who practices so much self-denial and is this saintly figure. It’s also miraculous that everyone who crosses her ends up dead.
I could see that. I’d be lying if I said I was thinking specifically of that. But I do think in a lot of ways, the book is about her and over a long period of time her loss of faith. So, I think that works.
For a secular novel, it does dialogue a lot with religion.
I grew up with twelve years of Catholic school, and I always call my books Catholic-haunted. And it’s something that’s always informing the characters and their backgrounds, even if it’s not totally explicit. And there’s some stuff with her that ended up on the cutting room floor of the book. But in my mind, this charts the arc of somebody who is deeply and profoundly faithful transforming into somebody who totally loses faith at the end.
Do you think that Sav’s body will ever be found?
I wrote an epilogue for the book that’s not included, obviously, where I was trying to tangle with some of this stuff and it just didn’t quite work. But I think there’s more story to return to there. I can’t say for sure, but it’s something that needs to be dealt with at some point. That’s kind of hinted at in the book, where Chooch is talking about the fact that they’re putting this gas line on his property in Upstate New York. At some point something’s gonna happen.
Do you think people’s personalities are pre-determined? I’m thinking specifically about Fab becoming Sav without having any exposure to him.
In this book with that character certainly, he’s somebody who’s marked by trouble and is doomed. I think for Fab, it feels like that, even though it probably becomes—at a certain point—manufactured. There’s a point in Part Three of the book where it could go either way for him, he could go down the Risa path or he could go down the Sav path and everything that happens in that part of the book kind of pushes him fully down the Sav path. So, I think he’s just kind of one of those people who is walking the edge and wills himself in the wrong direction.
What elements of pop culture were important to you to integrate?
I’m always reading, watching movies, listening to music. So, all that stuff is kind of swirling around, both the stuff that I’m taking in as I’m working on the book but I’m also thinking about what the characters would be engaging with. There’s a whole part about Sav and Chooch’s background as metalheads that’s important to the world of the story. That world of ’80s and early ’90s Brooklyn. There was a great metal club in the area called L’Amour (pronounced “La-Morz”) and that club does not appear in this book as it is, but in the earlier version of this book it was a significant setting. These two things should feel very distant from each other, an Italian American neighborhood in Brooklyn and an ’80s hair metal club, but they go together, and I was really wrapped up in thinking about that. And balanced with the music that Risa loves and takes solace in—Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. I love to think about and know what characters are thinking about, reading, watching, listening to. So that stuff all factors in a pretty significant way.
Well, all the characters have certainly watched Saturday Night Fever.
That’s a big one. When I was growing up, that was what made my neighborhood cool, that Saturday Night Fever had been shot there. And The French Connection.
What is your approach to writing dialogue?
Dialogue is something that I’ve always loved. When I was a kid, I used to tape my grandparents. I had a little handheld tape recorder, and I would transcribe their conversations and call it a play or something, even though nothing happened. It was just them talking or complaining or whatever. Early on, that gave me an ear for rhythm and speech patterns. So, I’m pretty focused on that. I like my characters to talk. I grew up in the era of ’90s indie cinema, a lot of it influenced by Tarantino, of just characters talking a lot. So that was something that I was always drawn to. Elmore Leonard’s novels are like that too—he, of course, was a major influence on Tarantino. I just kind of try to hear my characters and try to not have them say things that I find boring, and little turns of phrase and the rhythms of how they talk and really focus on that stuff. Dialogue is usually the way in for me. As a reader, I love when a story moves through dialogue and when you’re turning pages because there are long dialogue exchanges. I do try to write that way. Because I do have this other impulse of getting lost in interiority for long stretches. I feel like finding the balance there is important, but I always try to lean more towards dialogue-driven scenes before I let myself launch into some interior sequence.
Who are some influences for you in terms of literature or film?
While I’m working, very often, I’ll have a document open where I’m listing things that I’m thinking about or that have inspired something about the book. With this book there was a lot of classic film noir that I was thinking of. Scarlet Street, the Fritz Lang movie. Criss Cross, which obviously the name in the bar comes from that film. Blast of Silence was another one that I was thinking about. Music-wise, there was a ton of stuff. At some point I’ll sit down and compile a playlist or soundtrack for the book. I was listening a lot to this guy Loren Connors who plays instrumental guitar, some of it’s got vocals but mostly it’s instrumental guitar stuff. His album Hell’s Kitchen Park had a big influence on me, and there are two songs on that album, one called “Child” and one called “Mother and Son” that I listened to every day as I was working. Book-wise, the French writer François Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux was a book I was reading at the time that I was working on this that loomed large. There’s the poet Donna Masini who I love and who I just discovered in recent years. Her book of poems called That Kind of Danger was something I was thinking a lot about. I wound up reading her only novel this year, so I wish I could say that was inspiration, but I finished my book long before I read it. It’s called About Yvonne. She writes about Italian American Brooklyn, Catholic-haunted stuff in a way I really admire. I know there were other books. A lot of the authors I mentioned already: David Goodis and Patricia Highsmith. They’re perennial influences. Salvatore LaPuma, who wrote a book called The Boys of Bensonhurst, which could be the only other book I can think of off the top of my head that is fiction about the part of Brooklyn where I’m from. His inspiration is definitely in there.
It’s interesting because whenever I think about or write about crime and specifically true crime as a genre, so much of the subtext is violence against women. And here you have that subverted, where it’s the male spouse who is being murdered. That’s so interesting especially when you think about how patriarchal the Italian American community is, and where you would expect the violence to come from.
Yeah, and that’s something I’ve always thought about. In all of my books, all of the violence that occurs is against men. I’ve read enough crime fiction, and as much as I know the stuff that I like about crime fiction I know the stuff that I don’t like. I know the things that I want to avoid, and a lot of that comes from the way that certain men write about women, and the dead girl trope. So that’s always something in my mind to steer clear of, and I’m much more interested in the way John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands did things. That’s the way I want to tell stories. I don’t want to fall into those formulaic tropes.
The Saint of the Narrows Street is available from Soho Press.
William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent novel is Saint of the Narrows Street. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and they have been included on best-of lists in Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Find him online at https://williammichaelboyle.com.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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