All the Lost Voices is a first-person narrative that vacillates between the narrator s present condition in a Mexico City brothel and his past experiences growing up fast and frightened in the unforgiving landscape of his hometown, Paterson, New Jersey. The parallel story lines are artfully interwoven creating a sometimes furious, sometimes apologetic exposition that encompasses not only a glimpse into the current psychosis of the protagonist, Tony De Felice, but a rearward view of the process that has brought this madness to surface. Alcoholism, violence, thieving, murder, exile, the imprisonment of his father, the loss of a fragile youth all are addressed in drunken rants and gentle, often philosophical appeals to the reader, a tempestuous marriage of form and content offset by unexpectedly funny bits of wisdom and hilarious scenes of youthful indiscretion. The novel advances in several directions at once, from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City to Tuxpan in the present tense, and from Paterson to Florida to Oregon to any and all points of the American map in the past tense, via car, train, plane, and bus. Yet in spite of this motion, the narrator remains emotionally frozen, bound to his past and locked within the parameters of his mind, feverishly writing his way towards an elusive understanding of himself.
