Sleepers - by Lorenzo Carcaterra By the year 2004, a vast and shockingly graphic volume of demonstrable data has been publicized as to the sexually deviant behaviors of Roman Catholic Priests - men supposedly messengers of God, and certainly trustworthy - over the past thirty to forty years. And so, looking back to the 1960s, it should come as no surprise that if "men of God" harmed young boys, then prison guards in a reformatory - also believed to be trustworthy - could also have abused youthful offenders incarcerated in those grim institutions.

Still, deviance aside, a story such as this one is greatly enhanced by the irony - an irony resulting from twisted, sadistic anti-social behavior - in which boys imprisoned for violating society's laws then themselves become victims of the far greater crime of physical torture and sexual assaults. To be busted for stealing a hot dog cart which gets away and nearly kills a man, and then be thrown into a veritable Hell on earth for punishment, is certainly breeding grounds for mixed messages on how laws and justice really work in a society.

For this story to have value beyond the grim fascination projected through the descriptive narrative and skillful character development, one must be able to imagine being a "sleeper" - e.g., an underage kid thrown into a reformatory for at least nine months. When that fictional transformation is completed by the reader, one can then begin imagine the hideously brutal scenes that have created a lifetime of nightmares for author Lorenzo Carcaterra. Why Carcaterra? Because...

What leads to suspicions about Carcaterra's veracity are lines like: "We followed every pro-sport with religious fervor and adolescent passion..." juxtaposed with a line on the next page... "We cared little for Knicks basketball and barely tolerated Giants' football."
That is a contradiction of seismic proportions; and there are others, too. Another example is the statement that Carcaterra and his friends "Never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room [the hot dog vender] lived in...its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress of his bed."

Well, it begs the question, if the boys never saw it, how does Carcaterra know what it looked like? Perhaps that is nit-picking, but it does do some damage to the story. Another tiny error in his presentation is the fact that Carcaterra says he listened to Bob Seger's "Against the Wind" in 1979 - but it wasn't released until 1980.

Looking at the big social picture during those years, and the book's tales of violence against youth: were the terrifying scenes of sexual mayhem at the Wilkinson Home for Boys just fictionalized to fit into Carcaterra's plot? One wonders, for example, would the guards at Wilkinson truly put on a massacre of the prisoners, disguised as a football game - in front…