Books Review

The Basketball Diaries

Book | Jim Carroll
By Tracy O’Neill

It takes a city of sex, drugs, and basketball to raise a child in The Basketball Diaries.

When Jim Carroll died in 2009, the world lost one of the great voices of punk poetics. His first book, The Basketball Diaries, follows the teenage Carroll through 1960s New York City, goofing through Trinity High School, filching purses, getting bombed on beer and codeine, and hustling for drug money. Tough city slang and hard-edged wit share a rich coexistence with sensitivity in the young Carroll, and even in the midst of madcap antics, it's clear that he's a young man with an extraordinary ear for rhythm and a fascination with beauty. On masturbating off his roof, he writes that there is "an incredible power being naked under a dome of stars while a giant city is dressed and dodging cars all around you five flights down." This is classic Carroll: thrill-seeking and rule-breaking, yet blooming with wonderful aesthetic detail. As strong as Carroll's voice is, however, his other characters in the book remain undeveloped. Yet the joy of reading The Basketball Diaries is not in coming to know a cast of characters so much as it's in knowing one boy as thrilling and surprising as the city he called home.

TAGS: Bildungsroman, Diary, Drugs, Memoir, New York City,

FACTS: Released: January 01, 1978 (Tombouctou Books); Pages: 210