Slacking with Jersey’s oddballs

THE TROUBLE WITH MENTAL WELLNESS

By Joseph Colicchio

Bridge Works Publishing, $23.95, 272 pages

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

You read Joseph Colicchio’s “The Trouble With Mental Wellness” and you get the feeling that he’s following the old dictum to write about what you know — he’s been where the novel takes place, he knows the neighborhood and the people who live there intimately. If he’s not their friend, he is at least a sympathetic observer.

The neighborhood is Nicky Finucche’s. He’s lived there for all of his 40 years, and during that time it hasn’t changed much, except maybe to slide a little downhill, becoming a bit more ramshackle and rundown. It’s a lower-middle-class but still immigrant-white section of Jersey City, and Mr. Colicchio’s characters fit it like a glove. There is not a winner in the batch. And there’s no sign that things are going to change anytime soon, either for them or for the neighborhood.

This in spite of the fact that the book’s protagonist (you can’t call him a hero because, really, he’s kind of a slob) has a master’s degree in counseling psychology from New Jersey City University, and for that reason alone ought to be upgrading the area. But not if you know Nicky Finucche.

The degree allows Finucche — called Finooch by those who know him, including himself — to set up a mental wellness clinic in a storefront that had once been his father’s butcher shop and meat market. He seems to have acquired his master’s degree rather late because he is 40 when the story opens; we eventually learn that during the period he’s been in business he’s had a total of 35 clients.

He calls them clients, not patients, and almost all of the early ones were civil servants using their health insurance to fake enough mental problems so they wouldn’t have to work. But insurance plans changed, the clients departed, and by the time we meet Nicky his gravy boat is no longer afloat. He is down to three (at that very moment becoming two) clients.

Even worse, within a couple of days he’ll be down to one because the other — a sweet old lady named Claire Hellman, who is rapidly losing her marbles — overdoses on sleeping pills.

The question then becomes (and the plot revolves around this question): Is Nicky Finucche guilty of malpractice? Or, is he at least guilty enough that the dead woman’s son can collect on Nicky’s malpractice insurance?

The plot is thin, but the novel is better than the plot. Mr. Colicchio has a warm style, draws his characters well, and plumps the reader down nicely in the Central Avenue neighborhood that is Nicky Finucche’s world.

Story Continues →