Customer Reviews

My Cold War: A Novel

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Tom Piazza's long-awaited first novel does not disappoint. A New Yorker, MFA grad of Iowa's Writers Workshop, a jazz scholar and critic, a student of Frank Conner, and a writer with a keen sense of socio-anthrpology, Piazza has written a sensitive and substantive piece of fiction that reveals a sense of intimacy with all the above. He weaves strips of his own experience into a sad patchwork tale of a man seeking his place in the present and his relationship to the past. As a troubled professor of history, John Delano begins an odessy to find his own place only to discover that history and our perceptions of it are not static, but rather fluid like a blues riff that can set the band on an entire new course. Piazza challenges us to read slowly and contemplate while his descriptions permeate and lift the soul like the muted sound of Gordon Brown's trumpet. Read this book on a rainy afternoon when time has no meaning.

I just finished reading "My Cold War" this morning. Piazza came to my attention because his novel about Hurricane Katrina, "City of Refuge", nearly won the annual Tournament of Books fiction contest this year.

"Refuge" took second place in a field of sixteen, losing out to Toni Morrison's "A Mercy." The Tournament of Books is an online annual event, it's a total hoot, if you love reading fiction. It's sponsored by the blog/online magazine "The Morning News" and also affiliated with Powell's Books. [I have no affiliation with either; I'm just a fan.]

I'd hoped to find "City of Refuge" -- but, while browsing a local used bookstore, I came across "My Cold War" by Piazza instead. I'm a child of the 50's and 60's myself, so in that sense, I lived through a lot of the events, the political and social turmoil of the Cold War -- but then it's been almost 20 years since it ended.

I'd hoped to be reading about more recent history -- the Katrina catastrophe. But I read the first several pages of "My Cold War" there in the bookstore and got hooked. Hey, this guy writes pretty well -- why not give this one a try? If it's not half-bad, then I'll know that "City of Refuge" stands a chance to be a great read, too -- that's the decision I made.

And "My Cold War" turns out to be surprisingly lively -- although it's not exactly a thriller. It's an engaging fictional memoir. I'll confess that things happen pretty fast in the final two or three chapters. It becomes much more personal -- and suspenseful -- when the protagonist, Delano, decides to find and reconnect with his long lost younger brother.

That might have been a good place to begin the book -- and then flesh out the difficult road ahead as the two brothers struggle with the vast distance which now separates their views of the world and of each other. Granted, once the brothers meet, the older brother, Delano, a history professor, brings his own inner Cold War to an end. So, in that way, it fits as an ending, but it also feels like at last the seeds of this struggle are sprouting -- only to have the author clip these green shoots before they have a chance to mature.

In his lectures, in all aspects of his life, he presented the Cold War as spectacle, a crazy mural of images or an engagement with music of the period. Delano, for instance, focuses on the moment when Bob Dylan chose to play with an electric guitar in the mid 1960's -- thereby betraying, in the eyes of many of his followers, the humanitarian idealism of folk music.

He intuits the surrender to commercialism, the yielding to the marketplace which Dylan's act signals -- yet cannot see how his own approach to history amounts to the same thing. He's making a living, his income from books and teaching, and both of these come from the way he sells the frenzy and the flash of the Cold War. He does so without getting wet -- he's sailing over the surface -- his teaching, his vision of the times -- it's a cruise, not a crusade.

The grit and brutality of the battle for Civil Rights, the carnage and hubris of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the terror and tragedy of the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, the killing of students at Kent State and in Mississippi -- he doesn't probe these topics. In his own blood and bones, he feels none of it.

This detachment arose from the dynamic, yet painful events of his upbringing with his father and mother. And throughout it's the frequent recalling of Delano's youth -- old family spats, outings, and rare happy moments -- which keep the novel breathing. It never succumbs to the shallowness Delano's Cold War history lectures, however bright and breezy, suffer from. These are the faults of the character, not those of our author, Piazza.

Ultimately, it's well worth reading -- especially if you came into this world during the Cold War, as I did.

My Cold War follows John Delano, a college professor of Cold War Studies whose focus is "surface and image" rather than what lies beneath--the "boring history stuff". We come across Delano shortly after his father's death, which has precipitated a crisis of career and family for Delano. He is on sabbatical for a book he cannot write, its cold war history meshing too muddily with his own more personal recollections of growing up in Long Island, his father's slide into mental illness, his eight-year estrangement from his younger brother Chris. Finally, Delano decides to drop the book and head out to Iowa to see his brother, whom he last spoke to when he told him to basically "get a life" after Chris called desperate for a place to stay.
The book has its uneven moments but they are outweighed by the long stretches of good moments. Piazza's post-war descriptions of Long Island suburbia are vividly sharp: the cookie-cutter houses, Johnny Carson on the TV, smoking pot, a long digression on Bob Dylan's shift to electric guitar. Delano's crisis of faith in his philosophy that image is all-important is handled well internally if brought out a bit obviously through a conversation with another faculty member. Several of the side characters, in fact, seem a bit weak as characters: his colleague, his wife, an old college friend, his brothers' friends in Iowa. They often seem as if they were created to fill a role--say a few lines, spark a plot action or a memory--then made to disappear. We see so little of them though that despite this being a pretty consistent weakness it ends up relatively minor in the novel as a whole.
The heart of the book belongs to Delano's memories of his family and his new-found desire to make contact with his brother, the former handled better than the later. The memory scenes and Delano's present-time responses to the memories are the strength of the book both in terms of evoking an emotional response from the reader and in the language which seems to sparkle in those scenes. The scene with the brother is handled a bit too quickly and too much through internal monologue-there was so much potential there that I would have liked to have seen more. The awkwardness, the pain, the mixture of anger and nostalgia are captured perfectly, just too glancingly. All of that, however, is made up for by the closing scene where Delano visits his hometown. The images and the language jump up to another level and lead to a beautifully written and heartachingly poignant close. The book is worth it I'd say just for the last few pages alone, though there is much to recommend it before one gets there. This is a quiet book, quietly moving, quietly captivating. It won't grab you with flashy writing or big action or larger-than-life or quirkier-than-real-life characters. And as mentioned, it has its weaknesses of character and plot. But what it does is hold your attention through voice and some beautifully precise images. A strong recommendation.

Readers of Tom Piazza's book of short stories, "Blues and
Trouble" will recognize specific currents in his first
novel, "My Cold War": a wounded and wise narrator, broad
American landscapes, observatories of the recent,
irretrievable past, a spectrum of rural and (sub)urban
characters, the ongoing American trial of race, the
transcendence offered by music. On display as well is
Piazza's keen ear for how people speak and a gift for
narration that reveals in subtle equal parts inner and outer
landscapes.

"My Cold War" is that rarest of beasts, a story of the self
that is a novel of ideas, a social barometer. It is to
Piazza's great credit that he is able to move among currents
of post war American history, and elements of postmodern
thought, to tell the story of a man attempting to reconnect
with a long-lost brother, the only family he has left. The
arc of the story, while modest - most of the book has the
feel of a novella, is exceptionally skillful. And one comes
away with the agreeable sensation of experiencing something
thoughtful and well-wrought.

A minor theme of Piazza's story is the sometimes paralyzing
inscrutability of second-generation Sicilian-American
families (something this writer knows all too well). To help
escape his family's grip, the narrator has changed his
surname from a never-mentioned ethnicity to the brilliant
Romanesque-Yankee moniker, Delano. If the novel has a flaw
it is that, while marking the territory of that devouring
love, the profound quiets and abrupt, frightening eruptions
of the 20th century Sicilian American father, it does not
venture too far in. The legacy of terror and silence from the
land our grandparents eagerly left and attempted to forget, the
emotional climate of di Lampedusa and Sciascia, is the territory of a
far more ambitious novel which, one hopes, Piazza will write
one day.

If you enjoyed "My Cold War", I recommend "The Memory of Running" by Ron McClarty, "White Noise" by Don Delillo, and most anything by Richard Ford.

John Delano, hip professor at an effete New England college, is skilled in creating the "History McNuggets" that he is about to purvey via public broadcasting in JOHN DELANO'S COLD WAR --- once he's written the actual book. Which he hasn't. And may not, ever. Because the longer he ponders the Cold War's larger implications, the closer he comes to realizing that it never belonged to him.

What does belong to Delano is the midlife crisis he's experiencing --- 'suffering from' might be more accurate. After his old-school Italian-American father dies, Delano (whose Anglicization of his surname was an early attempt to disconnect from that father) finds himself unable to productively sort through the material for his Big Book. Part of the problem is that subject and self have become hopelessly entangled. Where does the Cold War leave off and Delano's Cold War begin? He can't decide, and won't let us do so, either.

MY COLD WAR opens with a scene both unsettling and totemic: young John's parents receive a visit from an old friend of his mother's who wants them to join the fervently anti-Communist John Birch Society. Piazza's memory and eye for details pin down his parents like half-dead butterfly specimens: "The house was decorated, like most of the houses I remember from that time, in a mix of styles in which the elements had been stirred up but not dissolved . . ." He writes, "The whole postwar Levittown middle-class home-decorating Esperanto that everyone seemed, somehow, to have learned."

As John Delano's youth dissolves into adulthood, the world as his parents understood it devolves into chaos, with a long literary riff on Dylan at Newport symbolizing the shift. Meanwhile, his father's descent into mental illness leaves John and his brother Chris rudderless, despite their mother's attempts to introduce her male friends into their lives. Now, in middle age, John believes that an attempt to reunite with his brother may be the spark that will ignite his comatose muse and bring him literary kudos.

When John arrives in Iowa, carrying his father's violin as a sort of peace offering, he learns that, like him, his brother has created a life for himself. Unfortunately, that life involves the white supremacist movement. In another unsettling and totemic scene, three of his brother's comrades try to intimidate John. Very quickly, the rest of John's life moves out of his control --- and leads him back to where it all began.

Several reviews of Tom Piazza's MY COLD WAR have noted that its conclusion is much deeper than its beginning. I wonder if this wasn't precisely Piazza's intent. Like a New Historicist critic who starts with a scrap of paper and interpolates an entire cultural milieu, Piazza has given us a protagonist whose fragmented life gets its own Kodachrome moment. That moment may not be perfect, but unlike the photographs of icons that Delano has lived with, it belongs to him alone.

--- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick

This is a story about the author and his life which focuses towards the end about an encouunter he has with his younger brother whom he hasnt seen in a long time. The result of the encounter is what he, as the older brother could have done differently had he been around some more to offer guidance and support. An emotional read.