My Cold War

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.

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 reco

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

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.

Readers of Tom Piazza's book of short stories, "Blues andTrouble" will recognize specific currents in his firstnovel, "My Cold War": a wounded and wise narrator, broadAmerican landscapes, observatories of the recent,irretrievable past, a spectrum of rural and (sub)urbancharacters, the ongoing American trial of race, thetranscendence offered by music. On display as well isPiazza's keen ear for how people speak and a gift fornarration that reveals in subtle equal parts inner and outerlandscapes."My Cold War" is that rarest of beasts, a story of the selfthat is a novel of ideas, a social barometer. It is toPiazza's great credit that he is able to move among currentsof post war American history, and elements of postmodernthought, to tell the story of a man attempting to reconnectwith a long-lost brother, the only family he has left. Thearc of the story, while modest - most of the book has thefeel 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 paralyzinginscrutability of second-generation Sicilian-Americanfamilies (something this writer knows all too well). To helpescape his family's grip, the narrator has changed hissurname from a never-mentioned ethnicity to the brilliantRomanesque-Yankee moniker, Delano. If the novel has a flawit is that, while marking the territory of that devouringlove, the profound quiets and abrupt, frightening eruptionsof the 20th century Sicilian American father, it does notventure too far in. The legacy of terror and silence from theland our grandparents eagerly left and attempted to forget, theemotional climate of di Lampedusa and Sciascia, is the territory of afar more ambitious novel which, one hopes, Piazza will writeone day.