Praise for Criminals
"A mature and formidable talent." —Wilmington Star News
"Lies large and small held the family together. This essential dishonesty set Robert Anthony Siegel on his mission to find some semblance of truth in his memories of them. He can’t deliver them moral redemption in the end; that would be too dishonest. But this collection of loosely connected yet inseparable essays is strangely successful as a criminal defense." —The Weekly Standard
"Moody, often funny, evocative of a New York in the late '70s and '80s, Criminals is a book for readers who appreciate a great sentence. The writing is excellent.” —Marion Winik, WYPR
"On the outside was a picture of a middle–class, urban attorney's family. On the inside was a complicated web of intrigue, dubious associations, and unwavering love. Robert Siegel's story of growing up in New York City in the 1970s captures all of the grit and electricity and infamy of that era through the rise and fall of his idiosyncratic father. The Siegels are a family you won't soon forget." —Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters
"Robert Siegel’s unforgettable memoir seems at first like a rogue’s gallery of brilliant con–artists and ex–cons revolving around the author’s father, who was both. Before long, however, these often–hilarious essays and exquisite, Basho–like vignettes settle into a wondrous machine held together by Siegel’s spare yet immensely powerful sentences—each hammered into place, one at a time, by love." —Michael White, author of Travels in Vermeer
"Clear–eyed, open–hearted, and possessed of a stunning moral and emotional intelligence, Criminals takes its place alongside Geoffrey Wolf’s The Duke of Deception as an essential American family chronicle." —Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine
"Robert Anthony Siegel has written a poignant and hilarious memoir about growing up in the crosshairs of culture and crime, with parents who believe the humiliation of a stint in jail can be assuaged with a serving of escargot. It is a unique and beautiful life story, the sort of highbrow literary memoir Robert’s art–aficionado mother would swoon over." —Elizabeth Cohen, author of The Family on Beartown Road
"Okay, all unhappy families are different, but few are as gloriously different as Robert Anthony Siegel's, whose unhappiness was mitigated—and sometimes aggravated—by an inordinate intensity of love. Siegel renders them, and the lowlifes, outlaws, and dirtbags who orbited around them, with a Dickensian gusto for the grotesque, the compassion of a hip Malamud, and language as double–jointed as Bellow's. How astonishing that a book that contains so much sorrow can be so pleasurable. I couldn't stop reading it." —Peter Trachtenberg, author of 7 Tattoos and Another Insane Devotion
"Robert Anthony Siegel writes with grace, candor, and compassion about his unusual relationship with a set of complex parents—particularly his larger–than–life father, who rockets off the page, authentic in every detail. Criminals is a brave and mesmerizing family memoir." —Linda Gray Sexton, author of Searching For Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, Anne Sexton and Half In Love: Surviving The Legacy Of Suicide
"In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. Siegel’s writing is breathtaking—I had to take a walk around the block after reading the crushing, beautiful title essay." —BookPage
"Siegel, author of the novels All the Money in the World (1997) and All Will Be Revealed (2007), has written an engrossing, highly readable memoir in essays about growing up in New York in the 1970s . . . Many of Siegel’s essays about his loving, if unusual, family focus on childhood insecurities . . . [T]his is a tender portrait of family dysfunction."—Booklist
"Siegel displays his strengths in this memoir: lean, acute prose and sharply recalled environmental details of New York City in the 1970s and '80s. He examines the familial ties that bind with love and exasperation, and his portrait of his family's self–destructive contradictions is probing and memorable . . . Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban "bad old days."" —Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-15
The barbed tale of a writer's beginnings, embarrassed yet fascinated by melodramatic, bohemian attorney parents.Novelist Siegel (All Will Be Revealed, 2007, etc.) dramatizes a surreal upbringing fraught with deception. His mother pushed him toward art and culture, while his father sank into malfeasance. "We were the kind of family that ate out a lot, because home was too rancorous and depressing, and we tended to be a little nicer to each other in public," he writes. The author's obese, grandiose father was jailed for too-close involvement with his clients, including counterculture radicals, drug dealers, and the Hells Angels. "In this atmosphere," he writes, "we could be the normal ones, the representatives of middle-class decency." After prison, his father rebuilt his practice, but with reduced reputation and income. When one client gave him illicit cash with which to flee the country, he squandered it on junk food and fancy clothes. "I'm not sure why he decided to stay; it's very possible that he was simply too broken to leave," writes Siegel. The family's chaotic domestic life took strange turns, including the adoption of an abused boy to whom, against the author's expectations, his parents were devoted: "We liked seeing ourselves as the family in charge of the orphanage, full of beautiful waifs." Still, Siegel's father continued to neglect his health and responsibilities, and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's long after his behavior became erratic. Breaking away, the author became consumed with Asian culture, living in Japan while laboring over a novel about his father's crimes, unable to find an authentic voice. Siegel displays his strengths in this memoir: lean, acute prose and sharply recalled environmental details of New York City in the 1970s and '80s. He examines the familial ties that bind with love and exasperation, and his portrait of his family's self-destructive contradictions is probing and memorable. The sections focused on his own intellectual growth can seem comparatively meandering and repetitive.Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban "bad old days."
