Reviewed by Dina

     If I could have a drink with anyone, it'd be John McNulty. Perhaps his contemporary, Joseph Mitchell, could join us, and the three of us could people-watch together. But McNulty died in 1956, the saloon he wrote about, Costello's on Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, was leveled in 1973 and I wasn’t born until two years after that anyway.

     If I did share a drink with McNulty, I'd tell him how I admire his style. The newspaperman had a gift of turning a mundane phrase into what appears to be a short vignette—but actually speaks volumes about life. In 2001, Counterpoint Press released a collection of McNulty's stories, This Place on Third Avenue, including a forward by his wife, Faith McNulty. Both wrote for The New Yorker, among other publications. While many reviewers, including Phillip Lopate, call McNulty a writer of "lowlife sketches," I find nothing "lowlife" about his characters. His characters are honest men--the down-and-out, the dreamers, the lonely, the everyday man who didn't have a chance or had a chance and blew it—the man who drinks his hours away because that’s all that’s left.

     There's the guy who gets drunk the night before he leaves for the army, and who, we later find out, has no one to say "goodbye" to. There's the "foreigner" who calls a man's son a "goddamned" kid because he's in his way. We later find out the foreigner has a son and a wife of his own back in the old country and hasn't seen them for a long while. There's the horseplayer Grogan who disappears to Mexico and returns with a story of the girl he fell in love with. He hopes to return someday and buy her family good seats at a bullfight. When he earns enough money to go back, he winds up giving it to his landlady so she can lower her mortgage.

     McNulty's characters are good people who got bum luck. What makes their all-too-familiar stories unique is how the author tells them. McNulty had a good ear. He eavesdropped carefully and took down stories in long paragraphs of dialogue. He let his characters tell their own stories and served as a vehicle for their voices to be heard. His language was simple—the language his characters used. His titles represent the point of the stories, the phrase that tells us what happened to the characters or what made them the way they are. "You can't tell how you'll get clobbered" is a story of a "Navy man" recounting his friend's roller-skating on a newly treated surface of a deck. The friend tries to make a turn while skating and teeters off the edge to his death.

     McNulty's work has been likened to Mitchell's. The two have somewhat similar styles—basically, letting the characters tell the story while the author sits by like an outside observer--but author Frank McCourt noted the major distinction between the two writers' work. He said Mitchell's characters are "eccentric; McNulty's are the ones you just chatted with in the street, the elevator, or God help us, the saloon."

     Whoever these people were, they are gone now, like Costello's saloon, and John McNulty himself. But because of him, their stories are alive and well and remembered in the hearts of readers of This Place on Third Avenue.

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