My Cold War [Paperback]

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.