{"id":26704,"date":"2012-02-14T08:00:11","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=26704"},"modified":"2012-02-14T07:34:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T12:34:57","slug":"anthony-giardina-on-%e2%80%98norumbega-park%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/14\/anthony-giardina-on-%e2%80%98norumbega-park%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Giardina on \u2018Norumbega Park\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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. <\/em>Recent History<\/a> explores the anxieties of a young man whose parents get divorced when his father announces he\u2019s gay; in <\/em>White Guys<\/a>, a horrific murder in Boston forces old friends to consider their assumptions about where they belong in the social hierarchy. His new novel, <\/em>Norumbega Park<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Your fiction has been credited with \u201ccharting the move from the working class to the gilded suburbs.\u201d What draws you to this story? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I was a witness, as a young boy, to my father\u2019s 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\u2014my 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\u2019t just houses these guys were building, it was a whole neighborhood they considered \u201cexclusive.\u201d It made them all act differently. They gave parties for themselves\u2014they 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014that assumption of a new identity based on where you live, and how well you\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never wanted to do that for myself. I live in a modest house, and I like to assume a suburban identity where I\u2019m just one of the neighborhood guys. <\/p>\n

Reading your book, I was reminded of James Salter\u2019s Light Years<\/em>. I wondered if that book, or Salter\u2019s work more generally, influenced your writing. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Probably nobody has influenced me more than Salter. Cheever, maybe, and later Richard Yates, but I started reading Salter in college, in 1968. We read A Sport and a Pastime <\/em>for the sex scenes. It was only later that I began to notice the prose. Light Years <\/em>captures a way of life in a manner that I admire because it\u2019s actually difficult to find the specific coordinates\u2014when does each scene take place exactly? In the sixties? The seventies? And how rich are<\/em> these people? Salter\u2019s prose is the literary equivalent of fly fishing\u2014the fly has to land so delicately on the water that the surface is barely disturbed. His style is perfect.<\/p>\n

I think I like to meld the delicacy of Salter with a little of the expansiveness, the letting-in-of-the-world of John O\u2019Hara. I remember reading an O\u2019Hara story once where he described a woman as loving to see Herbert Marshall onstage. I went nuts over that detail. Nobody remembers Herbert Marshall, but if you do, that way of showing how a character reacts to the culture she\u2019s living in speaks, as they say, volumes.<\/p>\n

Do you tend to read authors who are stylistically similar to your own writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Martin Scorsese was once asked to talk about his style, and he said, \u201cWhat style?\u201d It all becomes very unconscious after a while. I only know that I like to read prose where I have to pay attention to every word, and where sometimes I have to go back to figure out how a particular sentence was constructed. The minute I find myself skimming a paragraph purely for the information contained in it, I know the writer has lost me. When I\u2019m reading my own work, that\u2019s what becomes important\u2014what are the essential words, and how can you get it down to the point where everything you leave on the page is pretty much essential and needing to be paid attention to? Certainly Cheever has been an influence in this regard, whether or not we\u2019re really similar. Though I have to say Bullet Park <\/em>is the only book of his I consistently reread. And I always go back to Richard Yates\u2019s A Special Providence<\/em>, a novel he considered a failure.<\/p>\n

Lately poetry has become important to me, the way people like Glyn Maxwell and James McMichael construct their sentences, where you have to unbend them a little to find the meaning.<\/p>\n

How did you conceive of this novel? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike any other novel I\u2019ve written, I had no idea where these characters were going to go.<\/p>\n

It really did begin with a house. I was driving through the center of Acton, Massachusetts, one night, doing the last bit of research for my previous novel, White Guys<\/em>\u2014I needed to see what kinds of cars people drove in a town like Acton\u2014and I saw this house. It was dusk, and it was near Thanksgiving, and I had this moment, just looking at this house. The image wouldn\u2019t go away, and then, over the next few months, the people in the novel started to appear. All I knew at the beginning were the outlines of who they were. But there\u2019s this interesting thing that happens when you dive in that way. When I was beginning the novel, I read a poem by Michael Ryan about sitting behind a girl in high school and pulling her hair\u2014that kind of jerky high school behavior\u2014and I knew that was Jack. And part of what drew me on was the sheer selfish pleasure of inhabiting a high school boy\u2019s body and sensations.<\/p>\n

As for the others, Stella, the mother, was the big surprise. Obviously, my characters\u2019 sex lives are a huge determinant for me. Once I know who they are sexually, there\u2019s a line for me to follow, and the line always has to be a little bit surprising. Where is sex going to take these people?<\/p>\n

The book contains a major section about life in a convent, and your acknowledgments page anonymously thanks those who helped you understand the lives of nuns. Was this a world you had any experience with before writing the book? <\/strong><\/p>\n

In my forties, I became interested in Catholicism. I started attending mass, but after a while, that wasn\u2019t quite enough, and a friend brought me to a monastery. It was just an hour or so from my house, but I felt I was stepping into another world\u2014protected, secluded, deeply strange, fascinating. There were monks and nuns living there, and I stayed in the guest house. I would go there for a few days once a year for five or six years in a row. I\u2019d been commissioned to write a play about the Catholic Church, and that was part of my early interest in the place, but after a while I became interested in it just for itself, and for what happened to me while I was there.<\/p>\n

There really is\u2014at least I believe there is\u2014a depth to the air of a place where there is an atmosphere of prayer. I found myself able to sit in a chair in my room and do nothing\u2014absolutely nothing\u2014for long periods and remain perfectly at peace. Pascal\u2019s dictum began to make sense to me\u2014\u201cOur inability to sit alone in a room is the cause of all human misery.\u201d But there were people at this monastery who were willing to talk to me, and I came to see that alongside this atmosphere of perfect peace was a religious society with a lot of conflict and difficulty, and sometimes even crazy behavior. It\u2019s a perfectly closed society.<\/p>\n

New York City in the novel, presented through the restless life of Jack, is a particularly evocative, though very dark and temptation-filled place. What is your own experience of New York? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I went to Fordham and after I graduated I lived in New York for ten years. I was not so drawn to the power structure, to figuring out how things worked in publishing or in the theater\u2014I started out as an actor\u2014but, oddly, to the powerlessness I kept noticing, what Jack calls \u201cthe human blocks of concrete against which genius flared.\u201d I found myself hanging out a lot in coffee shops down in the twenties, with all the working guys, trying to figure out how they fit in.<\/p>\n

I worked at the sort of place where Jack works\u2014the marketing research firm. It seemed to me even then a potentially tragic place. All these young actors and actresses, most of whom were never going to make it, becoming sucked up into the underpaid work force. I knew I would transcend that, just as Jack knows he\u2019ll transcend it, but there\u2019s this strange romance in the city, of allowing yourself to become a part of certain worlds that are never going to claim you. That goes for the gay world, too, which Jack has an encounter with. I couldn\u2019t leave that out\u2014it was an unavoidable part of my world as an actor, and later as a playwright. When AIDS<\/small> hit, that was a defining moment in the theater, and in New York as a whole. The great thing about Jack is that he\u2019s never willing to shuck his gay experience off, to call it \u201cexperiment.\u201d It was an experience he treasures and wants to keep, in part because it brought him close to death, but also, because that\u2019s who he is\u2014someone who\u2019s unafraid of being undefined.<\/p>\n

To what extent is your work autobiographical, if at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack is who I wish <\/em>I was. At this point in my writing life, autobiography is no longer a compulsion. You use things in your life because they\u2019re useful, that\u2019s all. It\u2019s more like acting, in a way\u2014the way actors, playing characters who are not themselves, use sense memories from their own lives to give them a feeling of authenticity within the performance.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve written a number of plays, in addition to fiction, in your career. How do you approach the two different mediums? <\/strong><\/p>\n

They\u2019re so separate. There\u2019s almost no place where the two impulses\u2014to write a play and to write fiction\u2014meet. When I begin writing a play, I think a lot more about structure and plot beforehand. My last three plays have been about academia, the Catholic Church, and Washington politics, and each of them has been highly structured and carefully plotted and\u2014I guess I have to admit this\u2014not terribly deep. Depth, that scratching after something elusive, arising out of character, seems to me now more suited to the novel. I\u2019ve come to the place where I\u2019d rather entertain a live audience with something smart and hopefully funny, and save my humorless groping after some kind of truth for a form where people can take their time, can put a book down and pick it up and get annoyed and get transported in beautiful privacy.<\/p>\n

Norumbega Park<\/em> is your fifth novel. What have you learned about the process of writing a novel over the course of your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a point, after my first two novels, where I just didn\u2019t think I knew how to do it. Sometimes I tell my students, \u201cThe time when you know you\u2019re doing really good work is when you hear a voice in your head saying, Stop now before you destroy your career. Put this down right away.\u201d I still think that that voice is the one that accompanies risk, and that doubt is really your friend when you\u2019re writing a novel. The only way writing novels has become \u201ceasier\u201d for me is that I\u2019m now pretty comfortable with the struggle that goes on in my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s gay; in White Guys, a horrific murder in Boston forces old friends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[6212,6220,6215,6217,6218,6209,6207,433,6210,369,1810,6206,2093,6208,6213,6204,125,6221,6216,165,1179,6219,515,179,6214,6205,6203,6211],"class_list":["post-26704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-acton","tag-anthony-giardina","tag-catholicism","tag-convent","tag-fordham","tag-glyn-maxwell","tag-herbet-marshall","tag-italian","tag-james-mcmichael","tag-james-salter","tag-john-cheever","tag-john-ohara","tag-light-years","tag-martin-scorcese","tag-michael-ryan","tag-neighborhood","tag-new-york-city","tag-norumbega-park","tag-pascal","tag-poetry","tag-real-estate","tag-recent-history","tag-richard-yates","tag-sex","tag-stella","tag-suburbs","tag-waltham","tag-white-guys"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnthony Giardina 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