The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

Another reason to write these STRAIGHT AFTER READING THEM. Or at least make notes. I read this quite some time ago, and remember very much enjoying it, but in keeping with the title, will need to make some sweeping statements about my enjoyment of it. Elilot Perlman has been described as one of the great ‘humanist’ writers of our generation, able to conjure up characters across the spectrum of age, race, gender to explore big themes of loss, memory, grief and redemption. Previous novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was certainly epic in scale but didn’t quite deliver the emotional pay off it promised (and after 800 or so pages, that was quite annoying), and perhaps experience and maturity have helped make this, his third novel, a more complete story. Three men with chequered pasts are our protagonists; an Australian academic based in New York who has recently been dumped and rejected for tenure; an African-American janitor fresh out of jail and searching for his six-year-old estranged daughter; and a Jewish Holocaust survivor whose last wish in life is share what happened in the camps. Like a literary carnival fairy floss spinner, wispy threads of stories are spun and spun until their three stories become one. It feels like a lot of research and a lot of love went into this book, and while there may be some parts that feel a touch laboured, I thought as a whole it was quite moving.