On a summer afternoon in 1985, while sitting on his porch steps in Tremont, Mike DeCapite opened a notebook to a blank page and wrote the words A Year on the Southside, and under that heading he took a few notes about the neighborhood where he’d been living for four years and where he’d spent nearly every Saturday visiting his grandmother, growing up. DeCapite was 23, with time to kill, having recently lost his job as a cab driver. To that time, he’d written journals and a few prose poems, and now he wanted to write a novel using both those forms. He was primarily concerned with creating a world where a reader would want to spend time, capturing its atmosphere, and conveying something of what time feels like, the actuality of passing time. He envisioned a novel that was open to chance and that combined the formal inclusiveness of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the lively intimacy of Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night. In his next-door neighbor Ed, he knew he’d found an outrageous voice of experience as a foil for his romantic narrator. He wanted to write what he thought of…