Paradise Salvage

November 5, 2001
From a veteran screenwriter whose most notable credits include Young Guns
and Thunderheart, this ambitious coming-of-age pseudothriller debut attempts to capture the intrigue of civil corruption in the Italian-American ghetto of a small upstate New England municipality in the year 1979. Though intermittently charming, the novel sinks under the weight of extended passages of trivial atmospherics and exposition. Suffering pre-Confirmation uncertainties during his 12th summer in his birthplace of Saukiwog Mills, Conn., Nunzio, the youngest son of Big Dan Paradisco, the city junkyard entrepreneur, finds a corpse in the trunk of an abandoned '73 Pontiac. By the time he is able to alert his father to his discovery, the car has already been compacted in the crusher. To make matters worse, neither his father nor his older brother believes him until his brother finally finds evidence that Nunzio is telling the truth. Armed with an odd collection of clues Nunzio found in the car—a brass token, a hatpin engraved Chicago 1973
and a cigarette pack emblazoned with a Chinese dragon—the brothers seek aid from their quadriplegic cousin, a former Pinkerton cop who is tended by a trained monkey named Ruby Lee. Despite his Hollywood credentials, Fusco fails to supply this offering with much punch. Plodding through one pedestrian passage after another, the novel lacks suspense, its narrative drive sabotaged by pages overstuffed with mundane description. Agent, William Morris Agency. 5-city author tour. (Jan. 21)Forecast:Fusco's current projects include
Spirit, a Robert Redford–voiced animated film, and
Rebels, which Barry Levinson is directing. Universal has bought the film rights to this novel, which should spark sales down the road.