[Bloodbrothers] is a smart, professional example of the post-Selby genre of lower-depths chic. Perhaps the continuing bankruptcy of New York is behind the flowering of this school, in which your archetypal American family beat and cheat one another, drive each other bananas, and then ensure that the vicious cycle continues into the next generation…. As one of the more detached characters puts it, 'the whole fuckin' Bronx is like a combination open-air loony bin an' Red Cross disaster tent, right?' If right, one ought to thank Price for his report from the battle-zone; instead, one worries about why he makes such a shapely, saleable artefact out of it, why the book-club classes will read the novel as they might go to the zoo to watch panthers, and whether the whole genre isn't the Gothic of our time, designed to be read in suburban ranch-houses, by affluent readers...