February 14, 2012 At Work Anthony Giardina on ‘Norumbega Park’ By Andrew Martin In five novels and a collection of short stories, Anthony Giardina has written about the conflicts at the intersection of social class, family, and sexuality. Recent History explores the anxieties of a young man whose parents get divorced when his father announces he’s gay; in White Guys, a horrific murder in Boston forces old friends to consider their assumptions about where they belong in the social hierarchy. His new novel, Norumbega Park, traces the lives of the four members of an Italian-American family in Massachusetts over forty years. Richie, the patriarch, is seized by an urge to purchase a traditional house in the titular town, setting in motion a new life for his family. His son Jack breezes through high school on his charm, then runs into trouble when he moves to New York instead of going to college. Joannie, Jack’s sister, joins a convent, and her mother, Stella, struggles with that choice, as well as with her own encroaching mortality. I spoke with Giardina by e-mail about the work and experience that went into creating the new book. Your fiction has been credited with “charting the move from the working class to the gilded suburbs.” What draws you to this story? I was a witness, as a young boy, to my father’s desire to move us up, in our case from a working-class neighborhood to a brand-new neighborhood of houses that men built for themselves—my father and his cronies, Italian-American working-class guys who had made some money. They literally blasted into this hill in Waltham, Massachusetts, this area that had just been woods, and they built these houses that I can see now were just basic split-level structures but that seemed to me kind of magical. It wasn’t just houses these guys were building, it was a whole neighborhood they considered “exclusive.” It made them all act differently. They gave parties for themselves—they dressed up, the women wore gowns. And it was maybe the first complex social observation I was able to make, to watch a group of men and women consciously attempt to reinvent themselves. Later, of course, I was able to see that this was a huge theme in American fiction, but before I knew it as literature, I had seen it in its raw form, and it left me with a vivid sense that this is how class works in America—that assumption of a new identity based on where you live, and how well you’ve done. I’ve never wanted to do that for myself. I live in a modest house, and I like to assume a suburban identity where I’m just one of the neighborhood guys. Read More
February 13, 2012 First Person The Guardians By Sarah Manguso The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street. The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes. *** When college was over, we all moved to New York. Harris’s mother cosigned a lease for a loft apartment in Manhattan, on Chambers Street, and for the next decade, a lot of people we knew lived there for a week or a month or a few years. The third-floor loft, a photographer’s former studio, was fourteen hundred square feet and had a small bathroom with a door, a tiled area with a refrigerator and a stove, and a smaller area in the opposite corner, about four by six feet, raised eight inches with some plywood. I bought some cheap red velvet and hand-sewed a curtain to surround those twenty-four square feet and mounted a bar on the two open edges. I hung my clothing on wire hangers begged from the dry cleaner around the corner, borrowed a narrow futon and a plastic crate from Harris, and lived there for two and a half months. My ten-foot-high window looked south onto the World Trade Center. It was so close I didn’t need to think about it. When I woke up, it was there, filling the window with its mirrors. My roommates paid more rent than I did and lived in office cubicles separated by drywall. It was more than a year before anyone figured out how to put up a ceiling. As we fell asleep at night, we spoke to each other in the dark like brothers and sisters. Sometimes someone played music in his cubicle so we all could hear it. After a while we instituted a rule against that, trying to force the illusion of privacy. Read More
February 10, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Banal Sentimentality; Tackling Tolstoy By Lorin Stein Hi, I’m planning a trip to Southeast Asia later in the year, and I’m looking for fiction set in the countries I’ll be visiting. For the most part I’ve managed to find books that fit the bill—Graham Greene’s The Quiet American for Vietnam, André Malraux’s The Way of Kings for Cambodia, and Christopher Kremmer’s Bamboo Palace for Laos. But I’m really stuck on Thailand. There’s The Beach by Alex Garland, which I’ve read and wasn’t a huge fan of. Aside from that all I can seem to find are some fairly nasty-looking crime novels. I’d prefer something slightly more on the literary side of things if possible, whether fiction or nonfiction. Thanks (and kap koon kah). John Burdett’s not your speed, eh? In that case, I recommend Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork. Set in Chiang Mae and in the jungles of northern Thailand, it tells the story of an anthropologist and a family of American missionaries battling over the hearts and minds of an animist village. No less an authority than Stephen King raved about it in Entertainment Weekly: This is a great story. It has an exotic locale, mystery, and a narrative voice full of humor and sadness. Reading Fieldwork is like discovering an unpublished Robertson Davies novel; as with Davies, you can’t stop reading until midnight (good), and you don’t hate yourself in the morning (better). King didn’t like the title (“Berlinski tells us the editor hung that says-nothing title on the book. The guy should have stuck to editing”). As the editor in question, I may be biased—but I promise it’s the book you want. Bon voyage! Dear Lorin, Perhaps you can assist me with a delicate matter. Having lately fallen in love, I find I have been inspired to address to my particular Phoebus Apollo a string of flamboyant sonnets, which, although they genuinely come from the heart, are, I suspect, really terrible. True, they scan quite well and, of course rhyme, but in their slightly banal sentimentality they make John Betjeman seem highbrow. So, mindful of the possibility that such a dubious body of work might someday come to light, is it better, do you think, to run the risk of being labeled as an awful poetaster who’s heart is in the right place, or disconcerting Phoebus Apollo by engaging in ruthless self-censorship? Daphne Dear Daphne, Why not take a page (a very famous page) from Sir Philip Sidney? Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain: Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay, Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows, And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite— “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.” As Sidney writes, a love sonnet needn’t be good—just induce a modicum of pity. Your limitations can only be a strength. Read More
February 10, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘At Last,’ Ambivalence By The Paris Review “I couldn’t make her amusing,” says David Melrose after asking his girlfriend to eat off the floor like a dog, “but I did at least keep her quiet. I was dreading having another talk about the agonies of being rich. I know so little about them, and she knows so little about anything else.” From the first pages of Edward St. Aubyn’s Never Mind, it’s clear that his cycle of Patrick Melrose novels will be delightfully packed with gross privilege, dysfunction, and savage humor. The first four novels have just been released as a single paperback alongside the fifth and final book, At Last. I look forward to devouring them all. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn If you’re a Thomas Mann fan—or, anyway, someone who’s fascinated by his work (fan doesn’t seem the right word)—it’s worth seeking out Gilbert Adair’s The Real Tadzio, the story of the ten-year-old Polish nobleman who inspired Mann’s Death in Venice. The object of the thirty-six-year-old author’s fixation was unaware of the connection for years. The book deals with his reaction to the odd sort of celebrity he acquired and, of course, with the summer in Venice that inspired the novella. It’s a slim volume, but it packs a punch and is ultimately as much about the end of an era in Europe as it is about the creative process or Mann’s disquieting obsession (about which his wife was oddly blasé). —Sadie Stein Ambivalence may be the moral failing of the twenty-first century. Or perhaps not. It depends. I’m as guilty of it as anyone (maybe more), and I don’t feel good about my role in what Kenneth Weisbrode describes as a collective pathology. But in reading his engaging minihistory, I do feel encouraged to just make a decision already. —Nicole Rudick The Library of Congress has made available, via Flickr, all sixteen hundred jazz photos by William P. Gottlieb. From 1938 to 1948, Gottlieb documented the New York and D.C. jazz scenes with the obsession of an avid collector. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, and even Doris Day—all are represented. —Josh Anderson Weighing in at ten pounds, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, the nine-hundred-page volume of photographer Taryn Simon’s latest body of work, is not the easiest book to curl up with. Compiled over four years, Simon’s project records the bloodlines of eighteen different families across the world, charting the forgotten details of their family histories. It is an unforgettable exploration of survival, inheritance, and the forces of fate. —Elizabeth Nelson “Anyone who takes pleasure in modesty will get on well here,” writes Robert Walser of a bar in his Berlin Stories. The same could be said of his work, as the excerpts now running at The New York Review blog prove. —D.F.M. I really liked this piece on Jewish designers’ appropriation of WASP style—and how often is a title this perfectly suited to its subject? —S.S.
February 9, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head James Shea’s “Haiku” By Sarah Braunstein What poem would I write today, if I had it in me? So many titles come to mind. For instance: On Eating an Orange that is Too Wet. Or: On Drinking Coffee Slowly and Finding it Cold. The poem about Failing to Own a Microwave. Poem After Weird Moon. The poem called Patience. Of course, the name of a poem isn’t a poem. Or is it? This is what James Shea’s brilliant, funny poem “Haiku” makes me wonder. It is a breathless, cluttered, charming, and heartbreaking list of titles. The poems that follow the titles—were they to exist—would be spare and measured. But Shea refuses to measure himself. These unwritten poems speak of ambition and youth, and suggest a flood of feeling that won’t be contained by form. It’s a series of ghost haiku. Yet these traces of other poems, taken together, make a whole no less sufficient, no less moving, for its cobbled parts. Read More