This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I first finished Mo 12/19/94,
Refinished Su 8/28/22 and I listened to an archived interview with George Benet from the late 1980's on Fresh Air.
It's the story of two brothers. One is an alcoholic dock worker in San Francisco and the other is a union boss in the Bay Area. The alcoholic brother has a shot at redemption with an ex-prostitute, but the relationship is doomed.
"It is a world of broken-down docks, old-time bars, and a doomed love affair between an alcoholic longshoreman and a self-destructive woman comes to an end.
From the book's page at Amazon:
"In a narrative that is, at its best, compellingly realistic, Benet ( A Place in Colusa , etc.) traces the lives of two very different brothers. An official in the San Francisco longshoremen's union, Monte takes nothing too seriously except the advancement of his career. He is posited as a foil to the deeply sensitive Joe, who is tormented by memories of the wife and daughter who left him years before. Benet's writing is as stark and engrossing as a noir film in his descriptions of Joe's work as a longshoreman, with its camaraderie and hard physical labor, debilitating alcoholic binges and experiences in a detoxification hospital. In the treatment center, Joe meets and eventually falls in love with Sandy, another patient, and together they build a stable life. Their "dance in the sun" is tragically truncated by a series of unexpected events. And it is here that the novel is weakest. The denouement is abrupt and implausible, leading to an unsatisfying ending for an otherwise vigorous novel."
Unfortunately, the author didn't write too much more and this was his best. The subject of Labor and Unions are not very popular in America and almost everything from the workers' fight for Labor during the 1930's is largely forgotten.
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