Tight

Maldonaldo’s novel Tight, whose title is slang that can mean either “cool and good” or “angry and frustrated,” dramatizes the various ways in which young boys try to exhibit “cool” behavior and thereby create situations in which anger or stress causes them to explode into physical violence: a release that may feel satisfying in the short term but is ultimately harmful and self-destructive. Through the actions of its father-and-son characters, Joe and Bryan, Tight explores the futility of violence both as a pattern of behavior and as an isolated impulse. Joe, the protagonist’s father, has been incarcerated several times for assault and battery, yet he shows little awareness of how his own behavior patterns have harmed his life and his family relationships; indeed, one of the few pieces of advice he offers his son is the Machiavellian maxim that being feared is better than being liked. Throughout the novel, he commits at least two assaults, neither of which can be justified as self-defense, and lands in jail again, an occurrence that devastates his family and sends his son into a self-destructive spiral in which he actively embraces Mike’s harmful influences. After Bryan’s ongoing conflicts with