Anthony Giardina

Giardina does an interesting job of getting inside the heads of men who can't effectively communicate what they feel or need to the significant others in their lives, but their interior thoughts over their frustrations with life are beautifully written in passages that border on poetry. Not all the characters are likeable. Many of the characters - such as the narrators of "I Live in Yonville" and "Love, Your Parents" - are self-satisfied to the point of being obnoxious but the stories ultimately lead you to feel compassion for them because Giardina so effectively portrays how deluded all that self-satisfaction has led them to be. Common themes across all the stories are the stifling impact of life in the suburbs, and the compromise it represents from the dream that boys (and in one story, a woman) had for their lives.

The 9 stories in the collection are:

1. I Live In Yonville - 14 pp - A man ruminates, smugly at first but then rather desperately, about the routine-ness of his life as a suburban middle-class husband and father. (The title comes from the fact that the man is proud of himself for having read Flaubert, and he knows his life bears a similarity to Emma Bovary's and Emma lived in Yonville.)

2. Days with Cecilia - 25 pp - An exploration of what can happen to a marriage after the birth of a child, and how a spouse can become totally absorbed in the child and lose interest in sex. But there is an interesting twist on this common predicament. Here it's the husband who lives solely for the baby. He is the primary caregiver, and his wife, the primary breadwinner, is the one who started an affair to get some physical attention.

3. The Lake - 25 pp - A young firefighter is living the life he dreamed about as a kid until his wife experiences a post-partum depression. He begins an affair with the wife of a good friend he has known since high school when the friend and his wife (then girlfriend) were the "star" couple of the school. The affair makes the firefighter envision a new life (represented by swimming up through the surface of a lake in a dream). But all goes wrong when the cuckolded friend learns of his wife's adultery and explodes in a violent range - a scene the firefighter is there to witness.

4. Love, Your Parents - 22 pp-- Another smug, unlikeable narrator, this time a 36-year-old man who brags about not paying child support after he loses his job and his marriage and has to move back in with his parents. An interesting, well-told portrait of a cad.

5. The Cut of His Jib - 23 pp - A dashing young lawyer moves with his family into a suburban neighborhood. The 15-year-old boy who mows his lawn keeps watching him, thinking he stands above the typical men in the neighborhood. But the lawyer gets his comeuppance when he tries to demonstrate he's a different cut of man. His attempt backfires. In the end, the other men can smugly prove he's not only not better, he may even be beneath them.

6. The Secret Life - 40 pp - A man enjoys having an affair not because he doesn't love his wife, but only because he enjoys having a secret life. But the wife has surprises in store of him that may change the whole dynamic of his life.

7. The Challenge of the Poet - 21 pp - A women is living the quintessential "quiet life of desperation" with children and an attentive, but now boring husband. The only spark she has is the poet who travels in their circles for half the year when he's not off at writing conferences or teaching at colleges. But one night the poet will put a challenge to her by forcing her to consider whether she has the courage to make any changes in her comfortable life.

8. The Second Act - 19 pp - A re-imagining of what F. Scott Fitzgerald's life would have been like if he hadn't died at 44 and instead finished the Last Tycoon and brought the now thoroughly immersed in depression Zelda back to live with him. In this future that never happened, Fitzgerald is interestingly trying to create the past he once had, discovering along the way that it's nearly impossible to do so.

9. The Films of Richard Egan - 14 pp - Charts the career of the real-life actor, from the late 1950s to early 1960s who was just on the verge of attaining lead actor status, but who always had events (costarring in a film with Elvis) and circumstances (the youthful audience in the early 60s starting to drive all moviemaking decisions) conspire against him. His career is played against the life of a boy who watches his movies, and ends up wondering if his life will deliver on his dreams or end up being a series of compromises.
… (mais)

Norumbega Park tells a terrific story about the four members of the Palumbo family - father, Richie; wife, Stella; son, Jack; and daughter, Joan. At the start of the novel, Richie, an Italian American, stumbles upon a gorgeous old house in the center of a Waspy New England town and decides, striver that he is, that the house is what he needs to capture the American dream. The problem is that the house isn't up for sale. So he befriends the elderly couple who own it and waits for when it will become too much for them. He does get his opportunity when the husband dies, and he manages to convince the couple's adult son that the wife can longer handle the big house on her own. Moving in, Richie is full of hope, believing the house will catapult his family into the kind of success he imagines the previous residents enjoyed. The only problem is that he has two very mixed-up kids. His son, Jack, has no desire to be anything but a high school Lothario. Later, Jack dreams, as his father did, of becoming something more, but it's a great love - the beautiful, remote young Christina - whom he hopes can bring meaning to his life. Richie and Stella's daughter, Joan, is a shy loner who hides out in her room, afraid of the world, and whose only goal is to become a nun. She follows her dream at a tender age before she's done any living. That decision is a great heartbreak to her mother. The novel runs the course of several decades, from when Jack and Joan are children all the way to their midlife crises, when Stella is gone and Richie is borderline senile. Stella becomes most prominent in the middle of the book when we get inside her head as she battles cancer and lets her daughter know she wishes she had been more daring with her life and not retreated to a cloistered abbey. The descriptions of what plays through the mind of someone going through chemo as they assess their lives and their relationships are incredibly powerful. Still, while I really admire Giardina and was very fond of his story collection, Country of Marriage, I almost gave up on this novel in the early sections. There are some creepy scenes - as a boy Jack shows his sister his penis to "educate" her, Richie acts like a stalker as he waits for the elderly couple to turn over the house of his dreams, and one night when Jack is a teenager Stella lingers outside a room and studies her naked son who has fallen asleep on a family room couch after a tryst with his high school girlfriend. But I stayed with it, and was glad I did because the novel really takes off when Jack begins pursuing his great love - the aloof Christina, who works with his father in the pizza parlor Richie had to open as a second occupation to afford the house he overspent on. Joanie's retreat into the abbey is riveting as well. Giardina does a great job portraying what a religious life must feel like. Even though Joan is, at least initially, thoroughly dedicated to her vocation, she tests the boundaries, and on a walk along the borders of the abbey, she meets a young man she's immediately attracted to, and whom she develops a years-long friendship with as she tries to bring him back to the church. Even for a literary novel, there's often very little action and an awful lot of ruminating from the five characters whose point of view the novels shifts between - the four members of the Palumbo family and Jack's girlfriend, then wife, Christina. Sometimes Giardina's prose, especially early on, gets so lyrical I sometimes got lost trying to figure out what the characters were feeling. But these are minor quibbles. The book overall packs a powerful punch about what happens when the great dramas we expect from our lives don't play out and how we cope when the mundane realities of everyday life take over.… (mais)

The book opens in the 1970s in Winship, Massachusetts, a middle-class suburb of Boston. The narrarator is Timmy O'Kane. The book follows Timmy and his friends through the last year of high school, college, and then work and family life. The friend who is the center of the book and Tim's life is Billy Mogavero, who deviates drastically from the life path that his friends have chosen. The character development was excellent with lots of nuances, and the story has some shocking twists. Midway through the book, though, the story begins to deteriorate, and Timmy turns into a whiner with no backbone, and the reader is questioning what Tim is getting out of his relationship with Billy. But this reader kept on going, hoping for a big payoff at the end, which never comes. So overall, a disappointing read.… (mais)