It starts as an unpretentious tale of a group of people in the sixties in New York. It becomes a notable piece of writing, a reference of a life style. Growing from a simple plot, ordinary context and normal people, this book turns into a sensible and meaningful experience. A bunch of sixteen year old kids wondering around Brooklyn in the 60´s, raising mayhem, growing up, standing up, getting beat down.The painting of characters and their relations shows very clearly their raw defensive systems and humanity, allowing their subtle evolution materialize during the story. Their personality being formed between their breeding and the string of events, where the union and group codes make them sort through situations, in a real and non romantic way, and take, mostly, the right path.Their set of tools to deal with what´s thrown at them, before the age when money takes over everything, when the game was still natural, or naive. Looks, attitude, wit, respect, strength, loyalty, violence. The kids rely on these tools to survive and get laid. Sexual doubt and insecurity is somewhat faced in a natural way. They are conformed, things are the way they are, and that simplifies life. An important aspect of the characters is the reality of their mindsets and dialogs. Not dreamy, lucid. It fits the style, the simpler time, the neighborhood.It is an important book, describing the joys and pains of leaving childhood and becoming adults. It shows its quality in the toned down style of paragraphs and pages, slowly building a strong story. The language and scenes are often hilarious, the reader connects with the characters, quite deeply.It leaves a memory of how important those years were in everyone´s history. When nothing much was done, or planned, but it was all heightened by change, by life coming together, and the world coming strong into one´s life.
The Wanderers is a fine piece of literature. Richard Price is a writer obsessed with the truth, daring the phony-ass, academics to read this honest, passionate portrayal of the life he knows and weep just like his characters. Every Section is beautiful in its own way - The Roof had nothing to do with the rest of the story and its better that way. The Ducky Boys came and went without any payoff. The Chinese Wongs came and went so quickly, that, in the hands of a bogus hack writing from research as opposed to experience, they would have been forgotten. The reader cannot forget the Wongs or the Ducky Boys, or the Chubby gang, or The Roof. And the party...the most affecting scenen in the entire novel is a group of foul, ignorant friends getting fucked up, throwing the needle in their anthem - Dion's "The Wanderer", raising their glasses and dancing in a moment ecstasy that only the verdant can seize. It's that moment of full-blown flourish, the pinnacle of life, only to be overtaken by adulthood and responsibility much too quickly. The Wanderers will never get that moment back. Even if they were told so, they probably wouldn't care. The Wanderes is good for anyone who wants reality. Not because it's stark and violent and tough and brutal, cruel. Because the novel has balls. It has life and passion and insight that is rare in any art form. Give Richard Price's first novel a gander and revel in the filth and beauty of the world of The Wanderers
Do You like book The Wanderers (2015)?
hmmm... i dont really know what to say about this book, it is hands down theeee most vulgar and what most will say disgusting! it was a very entertaining book about a young teenage gang growing up in the bronx. these kids deal with everything from trying to get laid to miget fights to getting a girl pregnat and a mother dieing. they go through these hardships together and i would say that they are true friends. they stick by eachother no matter what! i would have to say my favorite part was the duckyboys(a miget gang) fighting the wanderers and the delbombers(two football teams from the bronx). this was halarious at one point joeys dad picked up a midget and swong him around as a weapon. i recomend this book to those who enjoy sex drugs and rock n' roll even though there isnt one referance to rock n' roll in the whole book!
—Alex
West Side Story? Well, its cock crazed boys being rude and raunchy, boys who are sixteen going on sixty, man-wannabes in gangs that are part mickey mouse part scary bloody and dangerous. Boys who act tough, who fight with knives and chains, but who play football (in stolen uniforms), and play stupid tricks on little kids and fat ladies, and cry in secret, and lie a lot as they trip out of their teens. People do get hurt, beat up, and left for lost. Adults muddle through life too, which seems to have happened to them, almost by accident, getting through their days, and holding on for what no one is sure. After a lot of stories of teenage boys in the projects shenanaigans, and mad sad home situations, the gang falls apart: one gets married ( he had to) and right after the sentimental gang reception, another falls in love, and two others run away to join the Navy and see the world, and its looking skimpy on the corner. Two of the remaining gangstah boys, feeling a bit lost, seeing their crew picked off by time and love and life, look at each other and say the best lines in the book: "We gotta get outa here. We gettin' old." PS: The name of the gang comes from the song "The Wanderer" who goes round and round and round and round. Fantastic.
—Gina Rheault
Oddly enough, this coming of age novel set in the Bronx of the early 60s is pretty true to my own experience in the suburbs of North Florida. Boys will be boys--alas--and the miasmal, hormonal, hard-on-centric atmosphere must be nearly universal. If you can get past what one reviewer calls its "vulgarity," the novel has many things to recommend it (not least its epigraph from Van Morrison: "I will search my very soul, for the lion"). Fans of Richard Price--and he deserves an army of 'em--will see his cinematic realism in embryo. And there is not a better mythopoetic creation of the emotional subsoil that nurtured the birth of early American 60s pop music. PS The movie is awful.
—Bucky McMahon
