GOD BLESS AMERICA by Mark SaFranko

Mark SaFranko is not a well-known writer. He's had a fair number of stories in literary journals and a couple of crime stories in Ellery Queen's. His first novel came out from a small press in the 1980s, his second a decade later via the POD vanity press XLibris. But his third...



Hating Olivia was released in 2005 by Murder Slim, a UK micropress and publisher of my favorite zine, The Savage Kick, of which I said last year It's a very unusual literary journal for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is published on a home laser printer. The second is that all the short stories in it are worth reading. (The recently released fifth issue ruined the record by being printed like a real book or journal.) As you may be able to tell from the picture, Hating Olivia is practically a glue-gun job; the barcode is even attached to the back cover via a sticker.

SaFranko himself more or less gave up on big publishing in US despite some European success, saying it’s impossible to break through. And then he did. Harper Perennial, which published four Dan Fante books recently, is bringing out Hating Olivia next year:



Seee? So, you know, his follow-up "prequel" of sorts, God Bless America (Murder Slim) might be worth getting in on now, while still on the ground floor.

SaFranko writes confessional fiction—a genre all but entirely eclipsed by the memoir these days. God Bless America looks at the early life of the author's stand-in Max Zajack. Things aren't easy for Max; his proletarian parents are beady-eyed jackassers too stupid to make it big and too married to the American Dream to stake out any sort of radical understanding of their situation—instead father Jake blames "the niggers", Communists, labor unions, Puerto Ricans, and his crazy wife and kids for the fact that he has to work two jobs and all his possessions amount to a pile of shit. But one day, boy..,

Then there's mother Bash, who is essentially mentally disturbed, and it appears to run in her side of the family. Depression and suicidal ideations haunt God Bless America. When the local cobbler hangs himself, schoolboy Max gets the strong sense that he might end up swinging one day himself.

Trenton after the Second World War was full of immigrants and first-generation Americans—there's plenty of kitchen Polish and Europpidgin in the dialogue—looking to hustle, but Max figures out early on that there's nothing worth hustling for. The priests are all confession-booth masturbators and the nuns twice as crazy as that; school is nothing but a fist in the face for a kid like Max, and for those lower on the totem pole, a faceful of piss from the school bullies is more like it. In one of the more frightening parts of the book, one frequently bullied kid who dares fight back is casually murdered by some Boy Scouts. At points, Max almost convinces himself the kid's tumble down a cliff really was an accident.

It's all done—the brushes with crime, the masturbation, the abuse and the trips to Canada and Florida to visit wealthier relatives, the mob fronts down the boulevard, the endless array of tin-plated authority figures—in a casual conversational style. Mostly reminiscence, punctuated by the impressions of screaming and yelling and flailing limbs, like a guy in an all-night diner sharing anecdotes over tepid cups of coffee. But the stripped-down sentences make the details work instead of obscuring them. At one point, Max goes fishing: "I'd landed a twelve-inch rainbow trout, my first ever. I stood and watched as the fish died helplessly on the bank. It seemed ridiculous to murder an animal for no good reason, but you couldn't throw a beautiful fish like that back."

I liked the novel quite a lot. Trenton in the 50s wasn't quite Bensonhurst in the 70s and 80s and my parents were nice people, but it feels right. "Charles LaBella" went the rhyme about the local real estate bigwig, "will send you to hell-a." I had a great-grandmother, actually, who was happy to tell me stories as a child of starving in Greece and coming across a midnight baker and begging for bread, but who was silent on the subject of her time in Trenton because it was just that awful. And the ethnic surnames and the giggling that almost always accompanies a schoolyard beatdown, and the whole lot of nothing to do but read and read and read in one's tiny bedroom, it all fits. I also got a charge out of Max landing a job at Korvette's, which I remembered from its final days as a chain.

God Bless America isn't perfect. Max supposedly has a little brother, but that character is forgotten immediately after its birth except for a sentence here and there (better to cut him out entirely!), and MurderSlim's copy-editing is a bit idiosyncratic, to say the least. I can channel Max's father for a moment and say, "Goddamn, if only I had a nickel for every stupid ellipsis you use, Maxie!" (But the copy edit is reasonably consistent; the book just reads like the transcript of that diner talk done on the spot.) And the book is certainly "boy stuff" in the Miller/Exley/Bukowski mode, which is these days an acquired taste. (Obviously one I've acquired.) Finally, if you're looking for middle-class redemption thanks to One Good Teacher, or The Escape to College, or even The Love of Literature, forget it. (The literature bit does happen in a later Zajack novel.)


Max does escape, eventually. His draft number has come up, and over at Korvett (RIP), all his friends in the security office have been busted for stealing goods. Hoods, Max tell us, naturally gravitate toward law enforcement and security gigs, and it's true. After jumping ship, we come back to Max years later—immediately before the events of Hating Olivia in fact, which begins with "The war was over"—with that familiar blue-collar experience of waking up not knowing where one is, but feeling that one is in a lot of trouble for crimes and other transgressions one never committed. (Well, maybe one or two of 'em...) And then Max remembers:

Who am I?

I lie there wondering. Then it comes to me.

I'm Max Zajack. 5 Amherst Place. My record is clean.

And what makes that last line is the address. I've moved around a lot in my time. And half the time I start awake after a twitch of the leg, I'm convinced I'm in Brooklyn, on the corner of Kings Highway and West 8th street, despite being twenty-three years gone from that old railroad apartment.

God Bless America a very funny, occasionally shocking, and extremely readable rabbit punch to the back of the head of the American Dream, and that's exactly what that little snotnose needs right about now! So go PayPal Murder Slim some dough. Then when you see someone reading that Harper edition of Hating Olivia on the bus next year, you can act all snooty and superior.