The Petting Zoo
The twenty-years-in-the-making posthumous first novel of downtown poet, musician, and Basketball Diarist Jim Carroll tells the story of Billy Wolfram, a thirty-eight-year-old “’80s artist” who suffers a spiritual crisis after viewing Velázquez paintings at the Met. He stumbles from the museum to the Central Park Zoo and into a series of coincidences that help him reevaluate his life and his work. The coincidences also serve as transitions between episodic stories that frequently feel kitchen-sink inclusive and random. After smashing his head exiting the zoo’s miniature Noah’s Ark, he hears from