Colicchio, Joseph 1952-

views updated

COLICCHIO, Joseph 1952-

PERSONAL: Born 1952, in Jersey City, NJ; married Pat Vogler; children: Roy, Jack.

ADDRESSES: Home—Cranford, NJ. Offıce—c/o Author Mail, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706.

CAREER: Hudson County Community College, Jersey City, NJ, professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS: New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist award, 1992; Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grant, 2004.

WRITINGS:

High Gate Health and Beauty (novel), Creative Arts Book Company (Los Angeles, CA), 2000.

The Trouble with Mental Illness (novel), Bridge Works Publishing Company (Bridgehampton, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: A native of Jersey City, New Jersey, Joseph Colicchio has drawn upon his experiences in the gritty, industrial city near New York City for his first two books. High Gate Health and Beauty, his first novel, takes place in the white, working-class section of the city known as High Gate. The story revolves around fifteen-year-old protagonist Joey Scadutto, a member of the tight-knit community whose effort to crack a murder mystery involving a dead dog and its owner plays out against his conflicted loyalty to the dead-end neighborhood and his longing to escape it.

Colicchio's second novel, The Trouble with Mental Illness, revolves around Nicky Finnuche, a forty-year-old quack psychological counselor who runs a mental health clinic out of his parents' old butcher shop in Jersey City. An inept and unprofessional therapist who keeps scant—and inappropriate—patient notes, Nicky is left with just two clients, childhood friend Mo Lester and Claire Hellman, the elderly mother-in-law of Nicky's sister. When Claire spirals into depression and commits suicide, her son, Terry, hires an attorney to sue Nicky for malpractice.

Booklist reviewer Michele Leber praised The Trouble with Mental Illness for its "strong sense of place" and "appealing," if exasperatingly foolish, characters. Referring to the novel as "punchy," a Publishers Weekly reviewer commended the "economical virtuosity" of Colicchio's character descriptions but found the novel's "erratic" shifts between comedy and melodrama problematic. In a similar vein, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded that Colicchio's failure to realize moments of comic relief or romantic interest was "a disappointment." However, Library Journal reviewer Karen T. Bilton called the novel "an endearing story" and an "absorbing narrative" that captures the blue-collar New Jersey milieu that Colicchio knows so well.