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Growing up above a tavern in Jersey City, New Jersey, surrounded by unruly, insane, and even criminal family members, Helene Stapinski quickly learned how to avert trouble and look the other way. Eventually escaping across the Hudson River to New York University, Stapinski went on to become a writer for The New York Times and New York magazine, and she now shares her remarkable family history in this brutally honest memoir. Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, Five-Finger Discount is both an emotional family portrait and a scathing look at the oft-forgotten culture of the urban working class.
John Farmer
What [Betty] Smith did for Brooklyn and [Frank] McCourt for Limerick, Ireland, Helene Stapinski does for Jersey City in Five Finger Discount.... Anyone seeking a succinct history of Jersey City's polluted politics will find it's all there in Five Finger Discount.... She tells a good story, like so many in Jersey City.
—Newark Star-Ledger
In her touching memoir, Stapinski chronicles her Polish family history and provides, by extension, an insider's guide to her version of Jersey City's past. Stapinski claims that growing up on "swag," (a little theft here and there) was the norm in Jersey City; that the typical resident was either a "quick-witted crook" or someone who "sat back and blended into the ugly scenery." The book is structured around the author's colorful stories: most notably, the time her grandfather, Beansie, tried to kill the family. Beansie was eventually locked up, but his image repeatedly haunts the author's story. Stapinski oscillates between disdain for Jersey City, with its tough and crooked ways, and her passion for her family heritage. In spite of her riveting stories of crime and scandal, the book's most tender moments unfold when Stapinski explores the naive perceptions of youth, including the charming observation that the Statue of Liberty was mad at her because she had her back to the entire state of New Jersey.
—Ann B. Stephenson
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
"The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends." This chatty and often engaging memoir of growing up among a rogue's gallery of tough characters may leave readers thinking Stapinski might have been better off with an imaginary family. Reminiscent of Michael Patrick McDonald's highly praised All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, but without that book's overwhelming moral force, this is the sad, often funny story of Stapinski's extended family of grifters, con men and women and petty crooks. At its best, it's a vivid portrait of working-class life in Jersey City, N.J. But too often it veers uneasily between disarming anecdotes (Stapinski's grandfather steals books from the public library where he works as a security guard) and terrifying details of lives out of control (her father almost loses his legs because of untreated but obvious diabetes), and doesn't sustain dramatic intensity. Stapinski, who has written for the New York Times and New York magazine, can be funny--as in her descriptions of attending New York University, where she meets Jews, punks and lesbians, and reads the Village Voice--and even illuminating, as when she describes the Machiavellian, if mundane, workings of the multitude of patronage systems that have corrupted Jersey City politics. Though she has a good eye for the details of family and community life, too often the emotions in this memoir feel imagined, not real. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
The author weaves a fascinating tale of growing up amid the decay and corruption of 1970s-80s Jersey City, NJ. Using her family's story as a mirror for the best and the worst the place has to offer, this journalist goes beyond the family to frame a distinct history and sociological description. She begins with the family legend of the night her grandfather threatened to kill her entire family, then goes on to tell stories of corrupt mayors and bookie uncles, embezzling DMV officials and embezzling cousins, sadistic nuns, and "swag" that fell off the truck and found its way home from work each night. Although Stapinski uncovers family skeleton after family skeleton, her writing never turns maudlin. Just as she couldn't reject her family, she is still connected to her hometown. Her imperfect family comes across as a loving, tight-knit clan, and Jersey City, while built on toxic wastes, comes across as a compelling place where marvels hide in decay. Of interest especially to sociology/ urban studies collections, this well-written, heavily researched, thoroughly enjoyable read is highly recommended. --Karen Sandlin Silverman, Ctr. for Applied Research, Philadelphia Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A humorous yet unsettling look back at a minor-league grifter family in a major-league crooked town—pre-reform Jersey City. Stapinski's debut invokes sensitive questions about class, domesticity, and the tolerance of corruption essential to machine politics. She artfully reconstructs her hardscrabble 1970s childhood above a tavern, and her close-knit, rambunctious family, entangled by the graft-ridden Hudson County government (her mother worked for the DMV, and an aunt was a longtime "fixer"). But to a large degree she portrays her family, like her native city, as cursed—and she explores veins of darkness behind the hearty façade: the community's reliance on stolen goods (and the endorsement of criminality that implied), her taciturn father's dependence on alcohol, and the violence embodied by a hate-filled grandfather (whose madness was tolerated in the community until he tried to murder members of his own family). Throughout, Stapinski uses her family-based narrative to portray an urban political culture that encouraged theft, election fraud, industrial pollution, and a looting of the tax base, while pacifying underclass residents with city-payroll jobs and mob-mentality hedonism. Along the way, she constructs a vivid picture of pre-gentrification Jersey City: a "scary" place where teenagers attended decaying movie palaces, the streets were full of deformed pencil-sellers and midget news-dealers, stolen goods were sold in the municipal buildings, and loose joints and "the numbers" were available on any street corner. Although evoking the crowded, colloquial feel of "outsider" writing, the author has a fine sense of narrative line and of relevant observation; as a result, her work simultaneously captures the street-level conviviality of the urban working class, and the desperation and violence lurking beneath. Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller's filmed melodramas, Springsteen's My Hometown, and Patrick MacDonald's All Souls (1999), this is an unusual and relevant urban family history.
From the Publisher
By turns hilarious and alarming, [Helene Stapinski’s] book reads on the surface like something by Damon Runyon and Elmore Leonard, with a dark undertow of real-life pain and disillusion.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“It’s a brilliant book, a darling book. It is the blessedly modest chronicle of a magical consciousness that seems to have been born pulling diamonds out of the muck, hearing angels’ voices in the fiercest thunder. . . . I adored every word of this wondrous book. Get it. Read it.”—Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
“In the tradition of . . . Rita Mae Brown and Amy Tan, Ms. Stapinski is an exciting writer, unabashedly candid, and at the same time unashamedly self-contained. Five-Finger Discount is a must-read.”—Victoria Gotti, The New York Observer
“What [Frank] McCourt did for Limerick, Ireland, Helene Stapinski does for Jersey City.”—The Star-Ledger
“Hugely entertaining.”—The Sunday Times (London)
