Book of the week
A Long Island Story by Rick Gekoski (Canongate) $37 Sometimes a novel will move into the real world, so much so that its aspect as fiction is promptly forgotten.
Rick Gekoski’s A Long Island
Story enters into the life of an American family during a heatwave in the summer of 1951. It is filled with personalities, sensations, worries, and fears.
Gekoski admits frankly that the novel is based on his own childhood. He cannot vouch for the literal accuracy, but ‘‘in the end, we
make up facts almost as comprehensively as our fictions’’.
A Long Island Story is set around the time of the notorious McCarthy hearings, when America was preoccupied with the ‘‘Red Scare’’ and communists were hunted and lost their jobs. Ben Grossman resigns from the Department of Justice and takes his family to Huntingdon, Long Island, before his history and former membership of the Communist Party is revealed.
Ben is married to Addie, a marriage that now teeters on the rocks. While Ben drinks his martinis (a bare lining of vermouth around the shaker), Addie likes her Miltown tranquillisers. Their two young children, 10-year-old Jake and the younger and more fearful Becca, are equally at the mercy of changing circumstances.
Gekoski brings in a range of characters in easy moves. Addie’s parents, the philandering clothesmanufacturer Maurice and the anxious home-body Perla, are Jewish to their roots. Each of them is fleshed out in quick detail. Their cultural history is their worldview, along with their favourite foods, preserved at home or obtained from the nearest deli.
When Ben returns to Washington to finalise their departure, Addie is left with her family in Huntingdon. But while Ben returns to his mistress, Rhoda, another young lawyer, Addie must face her life without him amid the shapes and fears of a small summer community: the claustrophobic tract housing, the polluted swimming water, a polio epidemic, and her own more tentative sexual desires for a young doctor.
The novel appears to be without guile. Incidents and characters segue smoothly together. The big performances of plot are absent. Instead, Gekoski focuses on the human detail. A simple car journey from Washington to Long Island with the children in the back seat becomes a portrait of a troubled family, with roadside America as the setting. The rituals of the beach – sun, towels and shade – are equally expressive.
A Long Island Story is a quiet novel, but one that deals with large issues of loyalty and relationships. Usually a writer associated with fact, Gekoski employs the devices of fiction to his advantage. It is an evocative book, a recreation of a gone time, achingly familiar, but lost beyond recovery. – David Herkt
A Long Island Story is a quiet novel that deals with large issues of loyalty and relationships.