That's sustained by illusion: The Retro Report, vol. 38

WELCOME NEW TRR READERS! For those of you just tuning in: The Retro Report is your weekly source for super-specific, mood-based recommendations for what to read, watch, listen to, meditate on, and obsess over. I’m a culture reporter—lately: “Are Movies Really Getting Darker? Let’s Shine a Light on the Issue” for the NYT (there’s a video, too!) and “Cigarettes Are Back in Vogue. How Did That Happen?” for the Washington Post—and a television recapper (I’ll be following Emily in Paris until the end of her days/my sanity), humorist (find me on McSweeney’s!), AND, as of June 23 of this year, a NOVELIST! My debut novel Retro, about a struggling, out-of-work actress who gets a job as a Time Travel Agent at a start-up that takes wealthy tourists on vacations to the past, is available at your local library and wherever books are sold!

It is a GREAT week for going to the movies (in the middle of the day if you can swing it) or reading a book inside an air-conditioned venue. It is a disgusting week for doing virtually anything else. My fellow Washingtonians know this is one of those sweltering stretches when Capital Weather Gang describes the temperature as “oppressive” and struggles to give us a daily digit above a 5/10. The air is a wall and you can feel your bones banging against your skin begging to get out.

Plus we’re in that August dip where you can feel September coming on, and where summer once stretched out ahead like it would just go on and on and on it is now starting to feel like it’s already almost over.1 It is of course NOT too late to do certain sacred summer activities2 but if you were hoping to (for instance) have some life-changing summer fling in the Dirty Dancing tradition, it can feel like your anticipation for what might come is already curdling into wistfulness for what could have been. And THAT my friends is the theme of this week’s Retro Recs!!

Your friendly neighborhood debut novelist was just in Marie Claire preaching the gospel of some of the books that inspired Retro!

I wrote a bit about each of the books pictured below—longtime TRR readers already know how I feel about some of these must-reads; The Phantom Tollbooth is required reading for us all—and shared a philosophy with the magazine that could very well be a TRR mantra: “It really affirmed my belief in reading as widely and deeply as you can and not being rigid about only using your reading time ‘productively.’ …You just have to trust that your curiosity is taking you someplace worth going.”3

Is this making you wish you could catch the Retro Metro in real life? Well you are IN LUCK: In addition to my previously-announced tour stop at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth, DE on Monday, August 24 from 1:30 - 3:30 pm I will be making that beach trip a double-header by spending Sunday, August 23 at Bethany Beach Books starting at 6:00 p.m.!

Both of these are setups where I am going to be out on the boardwalk at a table selling my books like a Girl Scout with her cookies. Come through and treat yourself to a novel that will take you on a vacation of the mind and spirit long after your body must return to your regularly scheduled programming!

PHILADELPHIA: I am very excited and honestly quite emotional about my upcoming Retro event at the Kelly Writers House! It’ll be an honor to be at my beloved alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, which of course was not involved in the college admissions bribery scandal in any way, on Thursday, October 8 at 5:30 p.m., in conversation with the great author and music critic (and my former professor!) Anthony DeCurtis. You can register to attend here.

PLEASE, I’M A STAR!!!! (OR FIVE 🙂): Once you’ve read Retro, how COOL would it be if you left a review on Goodreads, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble? And then everyone would see how brilliant you are: Defying the supposed trend by reading when reading is (allegedly) so over.

And: Extend your stay in the Retro-verse by playing around on the Retro agency site! There is good old internet everywhere for those with eyes to see…

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I picked this up on my recent trip to New York, when I swung by the Center for Fiction to sign Retro for the place where I am longlisted for the first novel prize :) :) :) :)

Much to my delight, the CFF bookshop had a whole spinning cart for the New York Review of Books. I love to do the trust fall into the arms of the NYRB and not just because I think their cover designs are so pleasing—although they are!!—but because, with extremely limited exception4, they have not let me down. (See also: Cassandra at the Wedding, The Dud Avocado.) So that is how I discovered Fat City.

In the introduction, Denis Johnson writes that the year this book came out was the year in which “I was discovering that it wasn’t a joke anymore, I was actually going to have to become a writer, I was too emotionally crippled for real work, there wasn’t anything else I could do.” The rest of the intro is just brazen, unvarnished jealousy, but in the best way—just every paragraph ending with “I wanted to write a book like that,” the fire-in-the-belly feeling that I know too well, and that was enough for me!

In Stockton, California, an ex-boxer named Billy Tully meets a young comer, 18-year-old Ernie Munger. Tully is only 29 but feels much older, not just because of his beat-down boxer body. A more traditional story would have these two intersecting in the ring at increasingly-competitive matches until the Big Finale or whatever. Instead, after their initial meet-bout—Munger defeats his elder so definitively that Tully is convinced he has discovered the next great fighter, and tells him so—they rarely cross paths again, and it becomes clear to us, if not to them, that there is no big championship in the offing for either of them. They are both too young to feel that their best days are behind them, and yet.

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Tully, spiraling since his wife left him, tries to get back into training but keeps sidelining himself with drink and distraction. Some days he gets work as a day laborer topping onions or thinning tomatoes, and the way Gardener describes those days will stick in my head forever:

Shuffling sideways, his legs crossing and uncrossing, the short hoe rising and falling, he labored on in the despondency of one condemned, the instrument of his torture held in his own hand. Of all the hated work he had ever done, this was a torment beyond any, almost beyond belief, and so it began to seem this was his future, that this was Work, which he had always tried to evade and would never escape now that his wife was gone and his career was over. And it was as if it were just, as if he deserved no better for the mess he had made of his life. Yet he also felt he could not go on even another hour. He felt his existence had come to a final halt, with no way to open to him anywhere.

Meanwhile Ernie, sent by Tully to Tully’s old manager, Ruben Luna, can’t seem to decide what to do with his potential: double down, squander it. He’s dating a woman, Faye5, whom he only pursued because she’d previously gone out with a guy “whose success with a previous girl Ernie had read about on the wall of a high school lavatory,” so perhaps that explains why, after their first night together, Ernie asks himself, “Was that all there was to it? Perhaps it had been celebrated out of proportion because there was nothing else to live for.”

Per footnote no. 3, this is a book about the boys, and ordinarily I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing—I am reminded of/inspired by this great Monica Bellucci line: “My universe is utterly feminine… when there’s no women on screen, I get bored.” However I will make exceptions on a case-by-case basis and I simply cannot NOT recommend a book that contains this sentence:

In the midst of phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted, pocked, crushed and bloated noses, missing teeth, brown snags, empty gums, stubble beards, pitcher lips, flop ears, sores, scabs, dribbled tobacco juice, stooped shoulders, split brows, weary, desperate, stupefied eyes under the lights of Center Street, Tully saw a familiar young man with a broken nose.

After I finished this, I looked up Gardner and found this excellent Paris Review interview, published 50 years after Fat City. From there I learned that Stockton is the second-largest U.S. city to have ever filed for bankruptcy, and that Gardner wrote for NYPD Blue in the 1990s. At the time of this interview, he under contract for a second novel:

“That’s sustained by illusion.” Isn’t that the TRUTH!!!

Like the book above, here’s another tight slender novel you can slip in your bag or even fold in half and stick in a back pocket. See, I’m a reasonable woman. I’m not telling you to lug your Caro6 around with you all summer long. Keep your Caro by your couch!

The narrator of this story is remembering a murder that took place fifty years prior, in the 1920s, when he was a teenager growing up in rural Illinois. The murderer, Clarence Smith, was the father of Cletus, the narrator’s best friend. Clarence killed the man with whom his wife was having an affair. After the killing, the narrator’s friendship with Cletus never recovered.

The boys used to end their days with the call and response of the book’s title—“so long,” “see you tomorrow”—but their easy intimacy is an unintended casualty of Clarence’s actions. The last time they see each other, they pass in the school hallways without speaking: “We just kept on walking until we had passed each other.” When Cletus vanishes from the narrator’s life altogether:

I knew it was a most terrible thing that had happened to Cletus and that he would forever be singled out by it, but I didn’t try to put myself in his place or even think that maybe I ought to find out where he lived and get on my bicycle and go see him. It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.

This novel also contains a line that is so right for the mood of this letter, the ache of wondering if things could have been otherwise, fearing that it’s all irrevocable:

What I didn’t say, across the few feet that separated our two beds, was that I couldn’t understand how it had happened to us. It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

Strange to describe a novel that has a murder in the first sentence of the second paragraph as “understated” but So Long, See You Tomorrow is a quiet and meditative book. The narrator doesn’t pretend to remember what he can’t recall quite right, and some of my favorite parts are when he just riffs on the not-knowing. The origin of his friendship with Cletus is a mystery to him:

Did I know him because he was in my room at school? I try to picture him standing at the blackboard and can’t. It is so long ago… I only know that I knew him. From somewhere.

I haven’t read this in ages and I’m so curious how I would feel about it now. If you read it, let me know what you think and feel and if I need to reread to discuss it with you!