The Petting Zoo
Jim Carroll, the poet and memoirist of The Basketball Diaries, finished this novel just before his death in 2009, and it reads like a final accounting. Billy Wolfram, a downtown painter who has ridden the eighties art boom into wealth and isolation, collapses while looking at a Velazquez. The breakdown sends him back through Manhattan and back through himself: old lovers, dead friends, the heroin years, the church basements, the dealers, the priests. Carroll's prose carries the cadence of his poetry, restless and lyrical, with a talking raven serving as guide and gadfly. It is not a tidy book. It is a New York book, and a Catholic one, full of grace notes about art, mortality, and the cost of survival. A fitting last word from a singular voice.
What you might want to know about The Petting Zoo
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A celebrated painter suffers a breakdown at the Met and retreats into a New York haunted by the ghosts of his earlier life.
The Petting Zoo was written by Jim Carroll, published in 2010 by Viking.
The Petting Zoo is 327 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Petting Zoo takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Petting Zoo is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.