"Off the Rim: Jim Carroll's 'The Petting Zoo'" by Thomas Mallon

Mallon reviews Jim Carroll's The Petting Zoo.  He believes that Carroll's last book, put together posthumously, was an unnecessary, somewhat lackluster addendum to a set of much more interesting earlier works.  Carroll, through The Basketball Diaries, gave a gritty window into his life as a teenager in New York City in the 60s and gathered many followers in the process.  A heroin addict from a young age, Carroll struggled with the drug, while believing that it originally got him into poetry and writing.  Mallon thinks The Petting Zoo lacks much of the honest realism and pizazz--"sex, drugs and rock 'n roll"--that Carroll's earlier works successfully employed.  The main character is somewhat of a bore, though there are some moments of beauty in Carroll's writing.  Mallon almost seems to imply that by the artist's last years, his creativity had been spent, helped in no part by an obsession with drugs all those years.