Cultural Sponge - The Joe Pagetta Blog

Summer reading is a ritual for me, especially for that week in June or July every year that my wife and I vacation on the beach. I always have a “to-read” pile going, but in the weeks leading up to the vacation, a separate “to-read on the beach” pile emerges. These books are rarely what you’d call “beach reads,” but serious literary fiction I look forward to spending quality time with. I have a special relationship to these books, because the way they are read, intently and without the distraction of the day-to-day, burns them more deeply into my conscious. In previous years, those “beach reads” have included The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway and Keith Katchik’s work of Buddhist fiction, The Hungry Ghost. All had a profound affect on me when I read them.

This year, of the half dozen books I brought with me to the beach, I chose two to spend the week with: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Arthur Phillips’ The Song is You. Let me say first that reading books that take place in New York City (even in the past, as Pete Hammill’s North River, which I also read last year, does) is bittersweet for me. I still love New York, where I spent so much of my life before moving to Nashville in 1998. Being taken back there in fiction, to walk the streets and see the sights and hear the sounds, is both sad and wonderful. But my life is in Nashville now, and I’ve accepted that.

Both Netherland and The Song is You take place in New York. September 11, 2001 looms heavily in Netherland (it’s been called a post-9/11 novel), but it’s there too in Phillips’ novel, just not as overtly. That they both take place in a post-9/11 New York is no big deal. Plenty of books do. Besides, as one critic pointed out, isn’t all fiction published after September 11, 2001 post 9/11? What’s weird is that I inadvertently chose to read two books with protagonists who are estranged from wives named Rachel. Coincidence?

The obvious similarities end there. To draw more parallels would be pushing it, but if pressed, I would say that they both have protagonists trying to recapture something they once had before they can ever reconcile with their respective Rachels. For Netherland’s Hans van de Brock, it’s his youthful days as a cricket player. For The Song is You’s Julian Donahue, it’s a hipper, younger, passionate version of himself. Both of them find their muse in people with big dreams.  For Hans, it’s Chuck Ramkissoon, a hustler whose lust for life is so engaging and insatiable, and whose dream of building a world class cricket stadium in New York City so inspiring, that our protagonist is blinded — as are we — to that fact that Chuck may only be a hustler and gangster.  Their relationship most closely resembles that of Nick Carraway’s enamoring of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and O’Neill means for us to see it that way. In one poignant scene, Chuck carelessly stands in a cemetery on a gravestone engraved with the word “DAISY.” If you hadn’t figured out by then what the book was aspiring to,  it couldn’t have been made clearer.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it though. Was it merely an homage to Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, like playing a Sinatra song if you’re gigging in Hoboken? If you dare to tread into that territory, must you give a nod to the greats that came before you? Or did it have some more prescient meaning regarding the American dream?

I love The Great Gatsby. It’s one of my favorite novels and one I reread every couple of years. It takes guts to tackle the Great American Novel, and even more guts to model it after Gatsby. Fitzgerald knew what he was doing, and so does O’Neill. The result is a beautifully written and exhilarating novel that paints New York in an entirely new, and very likely, more honest way. It’s New York through its new immigrants eyes; the price of the American Dream reconsidered. Post-9/11 or not, if Netherland is not The Great American Novel, it’s definitely a Great Novel about a new America.

For The Song is You’s Julian, his muse is a young Irish singer-songwriter named Cait O’Dwyer. An emerging artist who has just signed a major record deal, Julian catches Cait on the way up, at local club shows growing increasing crowded as her fame spreads. He’s immediately taken with her, both physically and spiritually. What ensues is a kind of cat-and-mouse love affair, where one moment you’re rooting for them, the next you’re worried that your own emotions have blinded you to the fact that Julian may be a crazed stalker. This is especially true when some signs Julian believes come from Cait — and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here — actually come from his wife Rachel.

Where The Song is You truly shines is in its depiction of how we age in a modern world. What happens when we get older, and are no longer the hip, cool, with-it people we once were. What does the iPod library full of music that came out twenty years ago say about us? Do we, and should we, reinvent ourselves? Does music still matter? Or rather, does what matters to us about music, matter to anyone else?

Even though I’ve been in rock bands, and have played music for a good part of my life, I don’t like rock and roll fiction. Except for maybe Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones, most of it tries too hard to be authentic. But Phillips has the ear for it, and never falls into the bad rock and roll fiction trap, delivering a heartfelt narrative on the power and pleasures of writing and playing rock and roll. In the process, he makes a pretty good case for listening to it as well, especially on an iPod.

So how to appreciate music, in a passionate way, and still age gracefully? That’s up to you, but putting some music from bands and artists younger than you on your iPod is a good start. Just don’t fall in love with them.

While leaving us guessing and often breathless chasing a love affair not meant to be, Phillips also gives us a lovely meditation on family, whether it’s his relationship with his father, his brother, or his estranged wife.  Clearly, it was Julian’s father’s love of Billie Holiday that instilled in his son a love for music.  And it’s a book such as Phillips’ that reminds me why I love reading and why it’s so rewarding. It’s a fantastic and very contemporary novel.

Special kudos also to Phillips, a real life former Jeopardy champion, for giving us in his brother the most shockingly hilarious scenario for a disgraced fictional Jeopardy champion. That part I’m definitely not spoiling. You just have to read it and come upon it yourself.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 3:41 pm and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.