The jealous kind

Strife between fathers and sons propels this acrid portrait of 1950s Houston, the latest of Burke's Holland family novels. Aaron Holland Broussard, as he stiffly introduces himself, is a teenager ensnared by a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father. He takes solace in his pets, a Gibson guitar, the occasional bull ride. After he intervenes in a spat between Valerie Epstein ("known for her smile and singing voice and straight A's") and her rich, swaggering beau, the son of a local tycoon keen on eugenics and Ayn Rand, the seemingly negligible encounter precipitates a host of clashes - with a hot rod full of greasers; a mob mistress; a sadistic mob enforcer and his unhinged son; an ex-Communist and an ex-O.S.S. agent; a dogged detective; a cadre of heroin dealers; a corps of Sicilian assassins. Beware whiplash: Burke likes things fast and furious. The author, in fact, maintains command, even through Aaron's woefully convenient spells of amnesia. This thoroughgoing entertainment is garnished with descriptions both delightful (a car painted "a creamy pink that you could eat with a spoon") and less so (a "guy sitting behind the steering wheel like a tall drink of water") and a slowly accumulating poignancy. As the paternal relationships of Aaron's contemporaries implode, he uncovers quiet strength in his own principled father. Burke hammers the tension between his old-fashioned, charmingly naïve hero and the unfolding bedlam. Even after a Mafioso menaces Aaron ("I'll pull your insides out with a pair of pliers"), the boy clings to his optimism. Surely most folks, he tells himself, are "better than we think they are."