Slacking with Jersey's oddballs.(BOOKS)

Byline: Lyn Nofziger, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

You read Joseph Colicchio's "The Trouble With Mental Wellness" and you get the feeling that he's following the old dictum to write about what you know - he's been where the novel takes place, he knows the neighborhood and the people who live there intimately. If he's not their friend, he is at least a sympathetic observer.

The neighborhood is Nicky Finucche's. He's lived there for all of his 40 years, and during that time it hasn't changed much, except maybe to slide a little downhill, becoming a bit more ramshackle and rundown. It's a lower-middle-class but still immigrant-white section of Jersey City, and Mr. Colicchio's characters fit it like a glove. There is not a winner in the batch. And there's no sign that things are going to change anytime soon, either for them or for the neighborhood.

This in spite of the fact that the book's protagonist (you can't call him a hero because, really, he's kind of a slob) has a master's degree in counseling psychology from New Jersey City University, and for that reason alone ought to be upgrading …