Puddingstone: Franklin Park

Mark Mirsky is a miracle worker. He has the tears of comedy, the laughter of tragedy, and the speaking voice of life—all in a stylization that lets us know instantly we are in the presence of a great teller of tales. I hope never to miss a word he writes. John Ciardi Mark Jay Mirsky’s first novel Thou Worm Jacob was a best seller in Boston. His second novel about the streets of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, Blue Hill Avenue, was “New and Recommended” in The New York Times. Boston.com listed it together with the work of Melville, Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as one of the “100 Essential Books” about New England. In Puddingstone, Mark Jay Mirsky has concocted a hot “pudding” out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city of Boston throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, where the retreat of glacial ice left fused puddingstone as the characteristic rock, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians join in a general assault on the civic peace; Boston’s cardinal and mayor are dunked in the pudding. Puddingstone’s events are filtered through the story of a Hebrew-school dropout, Maishe Ostropol, who returns to Boston’s suburbs as a popular Reform rabbi advocating new religious practices. The rabbi throws his congregation into turmoil then disappears on a tour of Jewish sites in Europe with its Sisterhood. When Maishe mysteriously finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood on Blue Hill Avenue and disappears into Franklin Park, the city of Boston begins to shake with the birth pangs of utopia.