The Able-Bodied Seaman

From the author of BEIRUT, a ROMEO AND JULIET of the boroughs, the story of a white, working-class family that resonates to this day.

Home comes the sailor, home from the sea, which in Alan Bowne’s ABLE-BODIED SEAMAN means a hard-drinking lout of a swabby named Roy, showing up unannounced one summer morning at his walk-up in Corona, Queens, and shouting abuse at anyone within earshot. Roy is the kind of guy who may put on a dirty shirt for a visiting lawyer, but he won’t go so far as to button it. He starts his day drinking Scotch, and sees no reason to switch to anything else, like food. His idea of conversation is to yell at Rita, his neighbor and sometime lover, or Manfred, a pet-shop owner and his best friend on land. But it is Roy’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Fay, who gets the brunt of his rage. During Roy’s latest six-month trip to sea, Fay has started an affair with a local loser named Bogart, whose ambition in life is to become a car thief. But Roy has a plan to put everything right and regain his daughter’s alienated affection.

Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times