STARRED Book Review: South Brooklyn Exterminating

Reviewed by Nick Gardner

Through struggles with mental health, addiction, and poverty, a father and son battle the bug and rodent infestations of 1980s Brooklyn in Ian S. Maloney’s South Brooklyn Exterminating.

From a young age, Jonah Fennel has donned his South Brooklyn Exterminating polo to rumble off with his father, the infamous Jimmy “Bugs” Fennel, and clear the city of pests. Whether it’s a house crawling with roaches or stables run wild with rats, Jonah and his father explore the darker, dirtier sides of the city with sprays and traps and poisons.

While Jonah’s sister and mother try to hold down a traditional working class home, Jimmy and Jonah rage against normalcy, with Jimmy falling into anger and addiction and Jonah turning toward the arts, delinquency, and painting tags on buildings.

The mood of the home oscillates between function and dysfunction, but Jonah’s respect and care for his father prevail in a story about family, poverty, art, and the critters that threaten just beneath the surface.

While the ups and downs of the deeper family drama string together the bigger picture storyline, each chapter of Maloney’s novel brings intrigue all on its own. Sections revolve around excursions across the bridge into Brooklyn’s depths to rid a certain building or basement or even airplane of creepy crawly things.

In one chapter, Jonah helps Jimmy bat down a hornet nest while another chapter focuses on a raccoon removal gone awry. Each bar, basement, and apartment that Jimmy and Jonah clear opens up an oft-unseen world to the reader, a world that Maloney shares in specific detail. You must drill into the foundation to rid a house of termites. You must wear long pants or the rats could attach to your legs. The details make the book a learning experience and prove to the reader why Jonah and Jimmy’s dirty jobs are essential and deeply interesting. 

South Brooklyn Exterminating would be fascinating enough as a series of essays about extermination jobs, but the relationship between Jonah and his father adds a unique and meaningful depth to the novel. Jimmy struggles with addiction and his own mental and physical health, at times putting Jonah, his sister Merry, and his mother at risk of physical and emotional harm. In this way, Maloney explores the darkness and violence rooted beneath Jimmy’s affable surface and plumbs the depths of forgiveness and understanding required to redeem Jimmy, especially in Jonah’s eyes. 

While it is easy to condemn an addict, especially a careless and violent one, and while it is common in our culture to write off such a man as beyond salvation, Maloney opens up the door for Jimmy Fennel to change and even redeem himself.

Though at times Jimmy acts as the anti-hero to Jonah’s hero, Jimmy is also given depth and understanding. He encourages Jonah to write poetry and to study at college. And while some of Jimmy’s actions seem beyond forgiveness, Jimmy shows how a man like himself can make up for his wrongs and become a loving and supportive father.

Redemption arcs in novels may be fairly common, but Maloney’s is unique in that it shows a man breaking through societal masculine expectations and plumbing the soft spots with tear-jerking sadness and a desire to make up for his wrongs. The depth of this complicated father-son relationship sets Maloney’s characters apart. 

South Brooklyn Exterminating takes the reader through the full range of emotions. There are jokes, fumbles, and idiosyncrasies that will make the reader smile. And there are moments of terror, scenes where the description of a bug infestation makes the reader’s skin crawl.

A reader can expect anger, frustration, success, and failure, but at the heart of Ian S. Maloney’s novel is the story of the enduring love between a father and a son. Who would have guessed that a novel about killing off creepy crawlies would also make a reader laugh and cry?  

---

Thank you for reading Nick Gardner’s book review of South Brooklyn Exterminating by Ian S. Maloney! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.