"Existential Illegitimacy"

We recently returned from a week cruise in the Caribbean, something I'll write about once I have some photos assembled, but on our way home from the cruise terminal parking lot, between Ft. Lauderdale and our home, a message was flashing on I95 about a traffic alert.  I checked Google Maps, and there didn't seem to be any delays but a few minutes later, on an overpass, there was a terribly disorganized "protest" with few protesters in attendance (I guess the authorities thought this would tie up traffic), holding signs for the motorists passing underneath, reading "Obama is a Muslim").  How sad, I thought, wasn't this yesterday's "news" or are these zombies conditioned by the Tea Party media, condemned to be the walking dead for their propaganda?

But it is something deeper, sadder than that, and especially on this Martin Luther King Day it is propitious to be reminded of the racially charged roots of such "protests" (and the "existential illegitimacy" of Obama's presidency).  In this regard, Sunday's New York Times carried an especially insightful article by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, Obama, Melville and the Tea Party.  Melville, you ask?  Ironically, one of the books on my "reread" pile is Benito Cereno, a short novella that I had mostly forgotten (as I had read it in college ages ago) and Grandin makes the association between Melville's classic and Obama's ongoing problem as a black in a Christian white man's world: "Benito Cereno" is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals..... Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

Indeed.  One of my blog articles, written in May 2008 as the presidential elections were gearing up, was an "Open Letter" to the then Senator Obama, in which I said Today is not too far removed from then. [The "then" I was referring to was the 1970s] Our economic difficulties of mounting national debt and a declining dollar, a decaying infrastructure, and the lack of better healthcare for our sick and better education for our young can be traced to a needless war, and to being hostage, once again, to oil producing nations. Racial and religious divisiveness still erodes the fabric of our society. The view of America abroad has undermined our ability to effectively deal with terrorism and to address global environmental issues. Politics again slithers along a slippery Machiavellian slope.

Since then, I've had my problems with Obama's presidential style, his academic standoffishness (perhaps Governor Christie could have given him a few pointers in good old fashioned strong-arm politics). But, looking back, even with the brinksmanship of Tea Party politics he's had to contend with, there has been progress. The economy is one, unemployment still too high, but slowly declining.  And soon after Obama was elected, the Dow dropped a few hundred points and the conservative press was immediately crying, SEE! For months, it was all Obama's fault (although he had nothing to do with it) and now, years later, with everyone's 401Ks flush with gains from a rising market, and real estate making a recovery, not a peep about his being responsible (which I would only attribute indirectly anyhow).  And even now that Osama bin Laden has been killed and al Qaeda in disarray (although, admittedly, not entirely eliminated -- almost an impossibility due to its decentralized organizational structure), little credit is given to Obama, but only just imagine that if bin Laden was still at large, you'd never hear the end of it from the Tea Party.  And Obama supporting the efforts of NSA surveillance to minimize terrorist threats -- how many conservatives would have jumped on board that train until they discovered Obama was at the wheel?  Meanwhile, hydraulic fracturing has made us more energy independent, something Obama has supported in spite of certain aspects being under assault from environmental organizations. 

Obama's signature piece of legislation has been the Affordable Care Act, and the conservative press was delighted at the very poorly planned launch via the government web site.  But as a cynic about many aspects of government, I can only attribute that to the "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" syndrome, not to mention the inherent complexity of the entire program.  But it is a start.  For a wonderful tongue-in-cheek "news report" on the program, read The Onion's Nation Recalls Simpler Time When Health Care System Was Broken Beyond Repair

Are things perfect, or as far along as we would like?  No.  In the absence of sound fiscal policy from a dysfunctional Congress, the Federal Reserve has had to use monetary policy to stabilize the economy -- even to bring us from the brink of a depression (although deflationary clouds still gather).  We've substituted soaring public debt for private debt and a banking system gone wild (remember the days of unregulated CMOs?). And another Sword of Damocles hanging over the nation is its inability to balance the legitimate spirit of the Second Amendment -- the right to bear arms -- and the demands of the NRA. (I say "legitimate spirit" as the weaponry when the Second Amendment was drafted was nothing like today's.)

There have been twenty mass shootings since Obama became president and he is helpless to do anything about it without the complete cooperation of Congress.  After the shooting in Newton, Connecticut, only a few miles from where we lived for twenty plus years, there was a ground swell (verbal only) in Congress to do something to control the sale of certain automatic weapons, but by the time the NRA got finished with their lobbying campaign, that effort was AK47ed to death.  Explain that failure to the parents of the children slaughtered.

So if Obama's presidency is finally judged as mediocre at best, read Benito Cereno to understand the historic etiology of his predicament.  As Grandin says, it represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another's absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.

Russo's Elsewhere

Richard Russo's Elsewhere is a painfully honest memoir.  It is lovingly detailed.  It appears that we have some shared family history, his novels focusing on many similar issues particularly his relationship with his mother, the theme of Elsewhere.  He is among the many contemporary American writers I admire most, such as John Updike, Pat Conroy, Anne Tyler, Anita Shrive, John Irving, Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver (among others, I'm sure I've left someone out). They speak directly to me.  And somewhere in this blog, I've connected these writers to many of my own family issues.

But of all of them, Russo's writings seem to come closest to my own family angst (see my entry on his novel, That Old Cape Magic), and Elsewhere hits my funny bone as well and reveals the roots of his fictional world. Russo had almost a symbiotic relationship with his mother, but it was an approach-avoidance issue, a mother who on the one hand he tried to keep at whatever distance he could (without much success), for the sake of his individuality and for the sake of his family, but, on the other, obligingly (and lovingly), took responsibility for, particularly as she aged. 

When Russo was a young child, his mother worked for GE in Schenectady, living with Russo's grandparents in Gloversville and commuting (after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband - the kind portrayed in Russo's Nobody's Fool and The Risk Pool), asserting her independence by paying her parents rent.  During WW II, when my father was away at the front, my own mother worked for Atlantic Burners (a local heating oil distribution company) in Queens, NY as a secretary/administrative assistant and for years I would hear about how much she missed being a professional woman.  We too lived with her parents at the time, with my primary care being passed onto my grandmother and great-grandmother, who lived with us as well.

 

Russo details the decline of the leather business, it's impact on his home town, Gloversville, and his family, a story eerily close to Philip Roth's family's leather business, and the decline of Newark, as told in his novel American Pastoral, perhaps one of the best novels of the late 20th century.  These were generations of families in the same business, as mine was in the photography business for more than 100 years, and, that kind of business too changed to such an extent that it eventually just faded away.

I was amused by Russo's statement My mother did love mirrors, often practicing in front of them.  My mother liked to pose and preen in front of mirrors, painstakingly putting on her make-up. In fact, she was very caught up in her appearance and good looks.  She knew she attracted men, something that infuriated my father at times. 

 

But from there, Russo's relationship with his mother, and me with mine, diverge greatly, mostly because, unlike Russo's parents, my parents stayed married (when they should have been divorced) and I was not an only child.  There was my sister in the mix, and that changed the dynamics.  During my troubled teenage years, I made it a point of being out of the house as much as possible as my parents waged war.  And after college I moved further away and by the time of my second marriage, I was hardly speaking to my mother (or vise versa), not that I'm particularly proud of that period, but I had to protect my wife and kids.  She was a rageaholic, perpetually assigning blame for her unhappiness to others. She also was a borderline alcoholic which only fed the flames. Nonetheless, we had some kind of reconciliation before her death, for which I am grateful. 

In later years, my mother turned to art and she was an accomplished painter of still life, portraits, mostly working in oils.  I'll give her credit for seeking a creative outlet, and she was a good artist but sadly, except for this pencil sketch she did of me (a very idealized version of what I looked like at about 12), I have only one of her oil paintings.

But getting back to Elsewhere, Russo had the devotion of a saint toward his mother, who had declared, basically that it was he and she against the world, making him promise (as a child) to always look out for one another, almost as if he were her spouse, not her son.  Even in later years, after Russo had married (his wife, Barbara, another saint as well) and had daughters of his own, she reminded him of their "pledge" to one another:

One of my mother's most cherished convictions was that back on Helwig Street - she and I had pledged an oath, each to the other. She and I would stand together against whatever configuration the world's opposition took-her parents, my father, Gloversville, monetary setbacks. Now, forty-some years later, I was a grown man with a wife and kids, but this original bond, she believed, was still in force. However fond she was of Barbara, however much she loved her granddaughters, none of that altered our original contract, which to her way of thinking made us indivisible. She'd never really considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny.

His dissection of her motives, self defense mechanisms, lack of friendships, dependency on him demonstrates that great writers are great psychologists.  Later he learns that his father's offhand foreboding that "she's crazy" had some grounding in that she was OCD

Still, his mother taught him to persevere (although never understanding why he would want to be a writer with his fine academic credentials that would assuredly lead to a tenured, secure position).  He even chose lower paying positions. teaching less, to pursue his writing objectives, not succeeding at first, sort of like when I decided to go into publishing rather than into a more lucrative insurance underwriting position (at the time), as well as choosing not to go into my father's business...

Long after she returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic nomadship during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer than we'd been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit about tenure and promotion, thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs about what I needed to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other jobs that paid less but offered more time out of the classroom, In the summer, when many of my colleagues taught extra classes, I wrote stories and spent money we didn't have on postage to submit them to magazines. I wrote manically, obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote about crime and cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a language very different from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors weren't much interested.

Later in life Russo finds that voice, and a discipline, and has an epiphany one day as he is looking at the books and periodical articles he had published -- that his writing was the result of an obsessive personality, like his mother's ...

The biggest difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal rail of human destiny. My next obsession might well have been a woman, or a narcotic, a bottle of tequila. Instead I'd stumbled on storytelling and become infected. Halfway through my doctoral dissertation, I'd nearly quit so I could write full-time. Not because I imagined I was particularly gifted or that one day I'd be able to earn a living. I simply had to. It was the game room and the dog track all over again. An unreasoning fit of must. That, no doubt, was what my mother had recognized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about my responsibilities as a husband and father.

It didn't take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Feeling your way around in the dark, trying to anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences. Living with and welcoming uncertainty. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter. Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five, or maybe never, without caring much. Putting one foot in front of the other. Taking small bites, chewing thoroughly. Grinding it out Knowing that when you've finally settled everything that can be, you'll immediately seek out more chaos. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, without ever intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness - character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty - to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want - except virtue.

It's a writer's astute introspective view of what writing is all about.  And how one's upbringing and genes ebb and flow in his fiction.

His mother passed on a love of reading, and as Russo says, you can't be a writer without first being a reader.  My own childhood was spent bereft of books and I can't remember my parents reading other than the occasional potboiler, Time and Life magazines, and my father's subscription to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  Essentially, I grew up without books, except, of course, at school, and I think that did damage to me as a writer, in spite of writing this blog, and making half assed attempts at short stories and poetry. I rarely read anything on my own other than Jules Verne.

On the other hand, my father instilled a work ethic in me and my mother taught me typing and encouraged my attempts at music (except for the guitar which she condemned).  I still consider typing 70 WPM (unusual for a young man in the 1960s) to be the basis for a successful career, as silly as that might seem.  That is how I got my job in publishing.  And the piano has blossomed into something central in my retirement, a place where I can go to express myself and be at peace with the world. 

Russo was looking at his mother's book collection during one of her many, many moves, all of which Russo was left the responsibility for engineering, commenting...

She claimed to love anything about Ireland or England or Spain, but in fact she needed books in those settings to be warm and comfy, more like Maeve Binchy than William Trevor. Not surprisingly, given that she'd felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was  interested in. She had exactly no interest in the future or in any past that didn't involve romantic adventure.

Still, illuminating though literary taste can be, the more I thought about it, neither my mother's library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to. If my books were more serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature.  If I didn't read much escapist fiction, it was because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to escape.  I wasn't a superior person, just an educated one, and for that in a large measure I had my mother to thank. Maybe she'd tried to talk me out of becoming a writer, but she was more responsible than

anyone for my being one. Back when we lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at GE, after making her scant supper and cleaning up, after doing the laundry (without benefit of a washing machine) and ironing, after making sure I was set for school the next day, she might've collapsed in front of the television, but she didn't. She read. Every night. Her taste, unformed as mine would later be by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced. It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me

I can't help but think of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life which is also a memoir, and in which his mother plays a central role in Conroy's love of reading and then writing.  There are so many similarities, including their mothers' shared love of the same novel, Gone With the Wind.

I had a dream after I had read Elsewhere, during the early morning hours when I can at least remember a snippet of what I dream.  I was sitting with Richard Russo's son (he has only daughters), and I mentioned to him that I would like to meet his father, something I didn't feel daunted about (as I felt the one time I might have had the opportunity to meet John Updike at a PEN conference, but did not have the courage or the opportunity, I can no longer remember).  That little boy I was talking to in the dream was obviously me, and as I talked to him, I gradually woke up with a sense of sadness overcoming me, for the lost opportunity, wanting to ask my mother one last question: Why, Mom?    

But Russo's childhood was far from "ideal" as well (is there such a childhood?), such a burden -- the "pledge" his mother made him take as a child.  And yet, he is one of our finest storytellers today.  Richard Russo, thank you for sharing your story with us, for your honesty, and for being the writer you've become.  You were a good son.

 

Another New Year. Another Day....

....Another Hour. Another Minute.  Who's counting?

I guess I am, grateful to have made it to 2014, in spite of health impediments which modern medicine has helped me to hurdle thus far.

The best summation of the year we've just left was written by Dave Barry in the Washington Post.  Humor is the idyllic tonic living in an insanely changing world (of course, it's always been changing -- but speed and its almost freakish nature seem to define change nowadays). So here is the link to Barry’s Review of 2013, the Year of the Zombies. 

Between Christmas and New Years some of Ann's family visited, her brother Stan who lives in California, his daughter with her husband and their two children, plus Ann's cousins who live in Florida brought their two daughters and their kids.  In all there were 16 of us for a family get-together brunch, including five children ranging in age from three to 15.  I had prepared for the preteen and teenage kids by cleaning our pool deck, arranging lounge chairs, and our outdoor table.  I even put my hands on my Nerf football thinking, hey, it might be fun for them to toss that around.  I'll even partake -- I can still throw a spiral, although not very far anymore.

But they all arrived with their iPods/iPhones/iPads/tablets/laptops and most of the day they were "plugged" into Wifi, and that was it for them.  No play. Not having grandkids, I guess I've lost touch in what interests that generation.  It certainly is something I did not expect. 

The one child I could relate to was 3 year old Zack as he is too young for an iPhone (are you listening Apple, a lost opportunity?).  I forgot how active a toddler could be so I had fun leading him around by the hand, even getting him up on my boat so he could sit in the captain's chair while I explained some of the instruments (his carefully steering the vessel while it sat on its lift).  Here's a very brief (22 seconds) video of us:

We celebrated the New Year with friends, a festive dinner first, and then we watched PBS' Great Performances concert of Sondheim's brilliant Company with the New York Philharmonic and an all-star cast, including such luminaries as Neil Patrick Harris (as Bobby), Patti LuPone (as Joanne), Stephen Colbert (as Harry), and Jon Cryer (as David).  Luckily I had recorded the performance so we can enjoy it frequently.  While Sondheim went on to more sophisticated musicals latter in his life, this was groundbreaking work in 1970, his conversational music soaring.  And the message of "Being Alive" and having "Company" was perfect for the New Year.

I've been trying to "catch up" with my reading before the New Year and I recently finished two books, both unlikely reads for me, the first recommended by my son, Jonathan, and the second by my friend Emily.  These novels, in an odd way, invite comparison, although they are as different as night and day.

Unfortunately, I read The Fault in Our Stars on an old version of the Kindle, one that used to be Jonathan's and so he lent me the "book" on that device.  It was the first book I have ever read in a manner and it proved to be the frustrating experience I once imagined  -- as I was not able to easily make notes for later review (although I understand that this is now a cinch in later versions of the Kindle) and if I accidentally pushed the wrong button, the screen reverted to the beginning and I had to find my place over again (luckily, the book isn't very long). 

It's classified as a Young Adult novel so I wondered what business I had reading it, but it had a profound effect on me -- as the protagonist is a cancer victim and has trouble breathing, dragging around one of those oxygen canisters, something she simply accepts.  It covers the subject of living one's life and dealing with one's death, not to mention the suffering cancer victims must endure.  I'm probably the last person on earth to hear of its author, John Green, but he is one hell of a writer.  He sort of reminds me of Jonathan Tropper, but with something more profound to say.

Hazel and Augustus (Gus) are two teenage cancer victims, who meet in a cancer support group and fall in love.  It (surprisingly) is not maudlin, and the level of the writing and the philosophical themes examined about the nature of life and death, make this a novel suitable for adult consumption and contemplation.  And it is the kind of novel that just breezes along, almost impossible to put down, the reader forming a real emotional attachment to the main characters. 

Hazel longs to know more about a novel she has read and is mystified by "An Imperial Affliction" written by an author, Peter van Houten, who lives in Amsterdam and has set his story there.  Houten's novel is about a girl dying of cancer and so the implications for Hazel are clear; however the novel has a sudden ending, rather like life itself, without ever revealing what happens to the characters.  This naturally leaves Hazel in a bind, but thanks to the equivalent of a "last wish" foundation, Hazel and Gus are cleared to travel to Amsterdam to actually meet Houten himself and try to discover the true outcome. And as often happens in real life, they are disappointed to learn that Houten is a hopeless alcoholic recluse but it is there where Hazel and Gus consummate their love. 

The writing is exquisite at times, Gus writing about Hazel in a letter: "She walks lightly upon the earth.  Hazel knows the truth:  We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either."

The ending is, as you might imagine, heart-wrenching, but it is surprising, and to go any further here would be to reveal spoilers.  I loved reading this book (which not surprisingly is now being made into a movie).  So, John Green goes onto my never ending radar list of contemporary American writers to watch.

Contrast that to the novel I just finished, Emma Who Saved my Life by Wilton Barnhardt, a coming of age story narrated by the protagonist, Gil Freeman, who leaves his home town in Illinois to become an actor in NYC in the 1970's, moving in with two women who have artistic aspirations themselves.  As he says in retrospect, I can't quite retrieve the young man with all that faith -- where did he get that energy?  Didn't he know the odds against being an actor -- or Emma being a poet, or Lisa being a painter?  How did he have so much faith in the world?  No, it wasn't all stupidity and it wasn't all innocence and youth.  I think New York was there too, egging us on.

Indeed, New York City, is the other major "character" in the novel, and Barnhardt covers all of the city, boroughs included, so for me, it was a nostalgic tour, having lived in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.  The novel is as much a love song to NYC as it is a story about the characters, and of the times, each chapter representing a year in the life of the characters, starting with 1974 and ending with 1983.  As such it spans the political spectrum from Nixon, to Ford, to Carter, to Reagan, not to mention the changing mores of the times, drugs, sexual liberation, etc.  Reading the novel was like reliving the times and it's hard to believe that this was Barnhardt's first novel.  I think of influences such as Joseph Heller and J. D. Salinger for some of its humor -- and in parts it is a very funny novel.

But while Hazel and Gus consummate their love, Gil's love for Emma (and it is that love which "saves" his life) essentially goes unrequited (you'll have to read the novel to the very end to understand why I qualify the issue).  And while we root for Hazel and Gus, Barnhardt's characters are totally self indulgent and if they ever had to deal with Hazel and Gus' issues, they'd have a hard time.

Although Gil does become an actor and finally makes it to Broadway, he learns that like so many actors he is really mediocre, and he learns it the hard way, first by playing opposite an actress who was once a film star and has come to Broadway, a Rosemary Campbell, to the delight of her adoring fans, Gil knowing that she is a facade of an actress, commenting,

I always wondered if Rosemary knew who the president was, or what year it was, or if World War II was over. Her world had no connection to fact or modern life or normalness or strife and conflict of any kind. One could fantasize about her limo getting hijacked to the South Bronx and her getting turned out somewhere along Southern Boulevard to walk back to the East Side (although with her charmed life she might well have walked back without incident). Scary thing, this kind of insularity that happens with American presidents so they don't even know what's happening and what everyone is thinking, and American pop stars in their own little fantasy worlds-god, the cossetings, the emoluments, the unsparing and unceasing effort not to contradict the SUCCESS, these crazy Howard Hughes worlds of yes men and twenty personal bodyguard-staff -people scurrying about to make sure you never have to soil your hand with opening a door or taking a cap off a pen. I guess you live in that nonsense long enough and you too can be Rosemary Campbell with all the dimension and scope of a touched-up airbrush '30s movie still

And the real truth about his acting is revealed to Gil with another big role, a leading one, but off Broadway, opposite a Reisa Goldbaum:

But, I'm telling you, it's truly difficult to leave the stage. For so long people ask, friends call up: What are you up to? And you tell them I'm mad this week because I'm Hamlet, or I'm drunk and homosexual this week because I'm Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and next month I'll be nobody at all in an evening of Beckett pieces. Then one day you put all those people away, all the masks, all the gestures and reserves of carefully processed emotion, and people ask you what role are you working on this month ... and for once it's your own life, the hardest role of the bunch. You gotta say the lines with a straight face. I was not a great actor. For me acting was pretending I was someone; learn the accent, develop a little shtick, put on the makeup, use every trick I knew and half the time you'd believe I was who I said I was. But you look at a Reisa Goldbaum, someone with a natural gift, and you see that she can reach down into a deep and rich humanity and draw up a true-to-life Williams heroine, a Greek tragic figure, an Ophelia, a Neil Simon one-liner queen. I put on the trappings, she had it in her heart. There was only one role in my heart, only one in my repertoire that could draw upon everything I had, only one I could pull off, in New York or goddam Peoria: myself.

But ultimately, it's the city itself that overpowers Gil:

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting-what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York-who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in-there are the real stories, incredible, heart-breaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware.

Finally, Gil's exits from NY with the realization: Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be said for the American Dream.  But you wake up from Dreams.  Emma goes her way and so does Lisa (who sells out to marriage much earlier in the novel and is yuppiefied).

As a first novel, it is an admirable piece of work, another "can't be put down" page turner, and in the case of this edition, a real hardcover book (not a Kindle -- one of the reasons I can quote extensively from it with ease to demonstrate Barnhardt's writing).  Plus, as it was originally published in 1989, there are some nice bookmaking features, the deckled edges, headbands and footbands, the three piece binding, but, best of all, endpapers photographed by Jerry Speier and hand-colored by Doris Borowsky.  You can't get this on a Kindle!

A Happy New Year to all.