Book Review - 'Whistling Past The Hottie Graveyard' And 'Triangle Love'

BOOK REVIEW

‘Whistling Past the Hottie Graveyard’ 189 pages  ‘Triangle Love’ 154 pages - Two CreateSpace novels by T.J. Clemente - Reviewed by Jeb Ladouceur 

For those who have wondered whatever happened to the esteemed T.J. Clemente, whose thousands of essays and news stories in Dan’s Papers were read weekly by throngs of visitors and year-rounders alike on Long Island’s East End … now you know. He’s become a novelist … and a pretty damn good one at that.

Those of us fortunate to know T.J. (full disclosure: he was good enough to read and critique my first three novels six or seven years ago … and must be considered largely responsible for the sales success of that trilogy) will be pleasantly surprised by the largely biographical tone of these relatively brief volumes.

‘Whistling Past the Hottie Graveyard,’ T.J.’s first novel, tells of a fortyish Manhattan life insurance salesman who strikes it rich in the dog-eat-dog business when a super-wealthy patron takes a liking to him and throws a major account his way. Our hero James ‘Bone’ Delano is clearly patterned on Clemente, who proves in this whirlwind story that “Life can indeed begin at forty.”

Abandoning a twenty-year marriage and a fashionable Westchester County address … the newly divorced ‘Bone’ takes his taste for expensive booze and chic women to New York’s Upper East Side, where he proves more than equal to the decade-younger competition. The trendy haunts portrayed by Clemente (no one ever described ‘Elaine’s’ better, for instance) are especially entertaining. They clearly are fashioned from information personally experienced.

Equally spot-on is T.J.’s take on the cut-throat nature of Manhattan’s seven-figure income sales gang … which he makes all the more compelling by comparing their lifestyle to the one they’ll inherit when the bubble inevitably bursts.

Ultimately, ‘Bone’ Delano winds up in The Hamptons working for a thinly disguised weekly called the Ratification. That the publication is run by one ‘Ratfield Otis Daniels’ comes as no surprise … nor does the array of gibes that ‘Bone’ flings at the magazine and its publisher like so many smelly East End fish-heads.

Long Islanders love this sort of insider exposé. It’s the reason, for instance, that Dan’s Papers became so successful in its heyday (not that there’s any connection, mind you!).

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T.J. Clemente’s follow-up novel, ‘Triangle Love,’ is also replete with people, places, and events with which the author is known to be associated. The book starts in a George Washington University dorm (T.J.’s a GWU alum) … and it winds up on Europe’s highest peak, Mount Blanc (whose summit I happen to know Clemente actually climbed).

This novel—at the outset ostensibly a story of incredible success in business—has the seed of self-destruction planted as early as page five … when George Washington University freshmen David (if it’s not T.J. I’ll eat this review) and his new roommate Todd … meet freshman Rebecca.

The three become inseparable … hmmm! … and upon graduation, decide to go into business together … oh-oh! Anyway, they make a fortune, but the more we battle the emotional undertow of Clemente’s skillfully fashioned story, the more we realize how it inevitably must end. 

We think!

To give away the twist that remarkably wraps up this well-written tale would be to deprive the reader of a splendid few hours we find all-too-seldom among new authors … especially writers whose genres have heretofore been entirely removed from the romance-suspense novel category.

Though ‘…Graveyard’ probably has more titillating episodes sprinkled throughout … and definitely more humor … ‘Triangle Love’ is a better-structured novel. Indeed it contains all the elements of self-destruction that one finds in Greek tragedy, and it plainly demonstrates T.J. Clemente’s intuitive command of his craft.

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Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of eleven novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. Ladouceur’s newest spellbinder THE GHOSTWRITERS explores the odd relationship between the late Harper Lee and her childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote. The Website is www.Jebsbooks.com.