The Last Angry Man

Plot

Like da Vinci pencil-sketching a future masterpiece, Gerald Green used "The Last Angry Man" as a sort of scratch pad for "To Brooklyn with Love," a small but wonderful novel he would write a decade later. This earlier work is a character study-and a fine one-rich with textured detail and the colorful language of first-generation Americans and the other survivors of hardscrabble life in the postwar ghetto. Dr. Sam Abelman, who will reappear in the later book with little changed but his name, is angry. He rants about disease, poverty, intolerance and the absence of ambition; he resents the specialists who steal his two-dollar patients, and the patients who are too cheap to pay. He is a frontier physician with a heart of gold, a lovable curmudgeon who might be an angel with a better attitude and fewer Yiddish curses.

The plot isn't uniformly gripping. There is a particularly arid stretch in the third quarter. But this portrait of the gritty Brownsville section of Brooklyn and its inhabitants is infectious and real, and Green's generous prose takes us to a faraway time and place and culture as effectively as any time machine ever might. The trip is worth it.