Writing exercise: the fluidity of time
Whether choosing a scene from something you are currently writing or something you observed or experience in you actual life from the past week, leap forward and backward in time as follows in order to stretch your imagination and challenge yourself with new hurdles.
Using that material you have chosen write a scene that pursues some its actions and/or ideas but now set it fifty years before your current time period.
Now do exactly the same as above but advance the time setting by fifty years.
Book Review: American Arcadia
In full disclosure, Laura Scalzo, the author of American Arcadia, and I share the same publisher, Regal House Publishing, an award-winning publisher from Raleigh, North Carolina specializing in literary fiction. Beyond seeing her name among the publisher’s recent titles, I had never known Laura until a few weeks ago when we were both present at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Kansas City where we chatted for hours while working at the Regal House booth and at dinners shared with a couple of our co-conspirators. That she proved brilliant, funny, energetic, gregarious, and kind only made my enthusiasm to read her novel greater.
Disclosure aside, the fact that we share the same publisher really is beside the point, or perhaps, because her novel is so extraordinary, it should be precisely the point, for the sad reality is that if all books face an uphill battle to reach individual readers inundated by somewhere north of two million (yes, you read that right) new titles every year, those that are published by small presses have a much steeper climb, and for those titles that rightfully belong, as this one does, in the shelving category of literary fiction, the ascent is something on the order of scaling the Dawn Wall of El Capitan. It's simply hard to get noticed, and truthfully even when an author has written a book that deserves a readership, that doesn’t necessarily change the equation of finding a way for readers to know that the book exists at all. American Arcadia most certainly is a book that deserves readers. If your tastes include fiction that asks you to be an intellectually engaged participant and if the subject matter of Laura’s fine novel interests you (see the review), you will be remiss if you don’t read it.
[A paragraph you might regard as an aside and skip if so desired, one that teases out the meaning of those two words “literary fiction;” the book review follows.] I fully recognize that we all have different tastes in books, just as we do in food, and that many readers desire only escapism. Some people like spice. Some like to explore new flavors. Some have a small and rotating series of favorite dishes. And some will kill for a box of Kraft mac n’ cheese (I’ll not deny that in certain moods, I’m among them, although when that metaphor extends back to books, I’ll pass). I’m a realist. So I also understand that it is also easier when faced with such avalanches of choices to read those books by authors whose names we can all recognize and that the publishing industry has carefully banked on selling well. How likely are we to go scanning shelves in the general stacks when there are overladen tables just inside the front door filled with books by authors who routinely make the morning talk shows? But for this reader, literary fiction has always been my love affair category with books—even if I or others struggle to define it. I’ve heard some readers dismiss literary fiction as the books they hated being taught in high school (which suggests to me poor teaching more than poor reading). Still, I get it. Sometimes we want entertainment and the chance for our brains to shut down rather than ramp up. It is absolutely true that the interests of literary fiction are more serious, and yes, because literary fiction focuses on characters, it is often introspective just as it offers hard questions about human nature and human culture. For me, these are all reasons I love books. As a writer, my interests follow suit, for it is people that consume me, people and concepts and all the complicated stuff that is an inevitable part of being an awake human on the planet. And, in an extension of another common aspect of literary fiction, in my writing I am guilty of developing purposeful, sometimes experimental structures rather than following formulaic ones. If anything, to me the best literary fiction accomplishes two things consistently: it operates in acknowledgement that the universe and those creatures that inhabit exist in shades of grey rather than black and white, and it employs language in such interesting ways that you read it with your ear and your eyes simultaneously.
THE REVIEW
It can be one of those interesting points of connection to realize as you read a book set in an earlier era that you were the exact age of its characters at the time of the book’s setting. In the case of American Arcadia, the year is 1985, and the four characters that make up this novel are taking their first steps as recent college graduates and, presumably, as adults, just as I was. I grew up and attended college in the Rocky Mountain West, light years from the New York City setting of American Arcadia. Indeed, there would probably have been few places more alien to my twenty-three-year-old self than NYC. But of course, as someone who, even as a young person was fascinated with history and politics and culture NYC was/is constantly on my radar, and given my youth and the nature of the times, few places were more important in 1985. Like most engaged people who follow news and trends and finance, let alone those of us who are avid readers, New York has likely felt real to us or certainly on the fringes of our vision of reality for all of our lives. This is even more true for those of us who spend a good deal of our time reading books. How often had I tried to imagine its textures, its smells, its energy. In 1985, Manhattan was where the world was happening. In Scalzo’s hands, the place becomes like another character, vibrant, complicated, a thousand villages amassed in one metropolis, a place at moments sleek and fashionable, in others gritty and desperate. She takes readers onto commodities trading floors, into terrace parties, onto its ferries and into its fish markets. The Hudson emerges as another living being, one that both divides and connects, as do its bridges, and the characters literally immerse themselves in it, define their lives by it, and infuse their imaginations by stories told of ancestors who gave themselves over to it. Overseeing the city and the lives of the four friends at the center of the story is the ever-present Statue of Liberty, wrapped in scaffolding as it undergoes restoration and missing its torch. There is a message in the reminders of the landmark at the periphery of the character’s vision, and Scalzo is so accomplished a writer that the message here, like others, is nuanced and sophisticated, insightful and never judgmental.
Contained entirely in the year 1985, and structured by seasons, the New York setting is never merely backdrop, including its center stage placement in the beginning of the worst years of the AIDS crisis, a time when AIDS was still little understood and caused widespread fear, there was no treatment, and extracted a horrific toll (a year that brought 3,799 deaths in NYC alone). It is an age when women were first making inroads on Wall Street. Many of the power brokers wrangling NYC politics of the era became the power brokers at the national stage in the decades since.
The novel is presented through a first-person narrator, Mina Berg, who, I must say, was the perfect narrator for this reader, as she is not from the city and is an outsider among her friends for growing up in humble environs up-river, the adopted daughter of a nurse who is a single parent. Abandoned in a church baptismal font as an infant, Nina examines the world around her and those who populate it with a scrutiny fitting for someone looking always for her own origin story. Meanwhile her three friends, who include her wealthy college roommate, a co-intern in her introductory immersion on a commodities trading floor, and his roommate, are each apparently trying to rewrite their own origin stories. Over the course of the novel, all four face difficult, often terrifying lessons about adult life, including the unwanted advances of men in positions of power and exposure to the death and disease. If college life, particularly on the campuses of elite institutions is a kind of incubator, the inaugural year as working adults and struggling artists instantly removes nearly all support devices. Scalzo allows readers to know these four characters outside and in, forming realistic and psychologically complex character portraits with a rare depth of insight, grace, and sympathy. There are magical moments in this novel when we see characters defy their natural instincts in order to be better versions of themselves, caring for friends even when doing so risks harm to themselves or becoming the true adults while their parents toy with others lives with no concern for the cost. Scalzo consistently creates characters who reveal the nuances of psychological complexity that, in the best fiction, can be accomplished with greater clarity than in life.
There are remarkable surprises within these pages, carefully constructed connections and explanations that are presented with such subtlety the reader feels like a partner in their revelation. Much of the novel allows us to peer within rarified worlds of old money families and the power they wield while aware that the twenty-somethings in whose lives we are immersed will either be the first generation not to inherit that wealth or its history or its obligation, or they will be so broken that the money may be all that is left to them.
Throughout, Scalzo writes with such stunningly beautiful prose that I wanted to linger on nearly every page. It is the kind of prose that is so rhythmical and so in control that it entered my ear with a direct vein to my heart, prose that made me feel its beat and its breath. Her precise language and pitch perfect syntax will have readers imagining that its flow is the wake of a sea ghost plying the entrance of the Hudson, passing under the spans we can all name even if we have never crossed them, charting a course equidistant between the torchless Lady Liberty and doomed towers. It is a novel that left me breathless. It is a story that was entirely fulfilling yet left me thinking about the lives I encountered in its pages for weeks.
My desire to revisit the characters, ideas, and language of this outstanding novel has been undermined only by the recognition that too few readers will ever be alerted to its existence.
Here’s a link if you are interested in purchasing American Arcadia.
Thank you, Mark, for these kind words.