‘Poet’s House’ has a joyful, hopeful spirit
It might well be a writer’s dream that a bright young woman with a learning disability (a learning difference, as her mother insists) would possess the soul of a poet — that, upon hearing the music of poetry, the largely unlettered innocent would naturally know its song. That’s the premise underlying Jean Thompson’s novel “The Poet’s House,” which partakes of the charm, if not the sting, of the fairy tales the author updated in her 2014 book of stories, “The Witch: And Other Tales Re-Told.”
Carla, who narrates the novel, has just turned 21, lives with her boyfriend Aaron, an IT guy (and “total sweetie”) in the San Francisco Bay area, and is working for a landscaping service, delivering nursery stock, when she first enters the magical realm of the titular poet’s house. She even accepts a drink from the poet — an older woman called Viridian with long silver-and-gray hair that stands out like a lion’s mane, bare feet and an outfit “equal parts yoga practice and Star Wars costuming” — and falls asleep, waking to find the day waning, her work unfinished.
Before she met Viridian, Carla tells us, she didn’t know any real poets. But through her yardwork at Viridian’s ramshackle house in the wooded hills, and then serendipitous encounters with the characters who cluster there, she soon finds herself in a world of poets. This world is a Wonderland where Carla is Alice and, as Viridian suggests, after Lewis Carroll is cited and playfully debated, “Well, the White Queen has untidy hair, so I guess that’s me.”
The others in her magical circle concur. “Viridian’s the one they’ll be talking about a hundred years from now . ... She’s the queen.” Which is amusing, because it’s hard to imagine that there’s a practicing poet who’ll be much talked about a hundred years hence. Sadly enough, Aaron probably speaks for the world at large when he says of Carla’s new friends, “I don’t understand why you want to hang around with some of these characters who crack jokes nobody else gets and look like they belong in the hippie museum.”
“I think I might have a calling for it,” Carla tells him. “Not writing poems but getting inside them. Understanding how they’re put together and how somebody’s mind works and how once in a while they make you feel like you grabbed onto a live electric wire.”
Carla is, you might say, a quick study. In her youth, spirited interest and inclination, she proves as irresistible to Viridian and her people as they are to her. And within weeks, along with tending the garden around the poet’s house, she is attending their parties, interning at a premiere literary magazine and drafted to work at a storied writing conference at a rustic outpost in the California hills, which unfolds with all the lofty aspirations, literary jockeying and juvenile intrigue that will be entertainingly familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a writing workshop.
Meanwhile Viridian’s semi-estranged son begins pressing Carla to use her influence on his mother, who’s supposedly holding a missing, mythical batch of poems by her former lover, who burned what was believed to be the only copy at a reading shortly before his suicide.
That long-ago lover, Mathias, was “only the most famous, brilliant poet of his era,” as someone has to explain to Carla, who, having been in the real world till recently, “hadn’t heard of him.” And those missing poems of his, we’re meant to believe, would be a literary and financial coup for anyone who might get his hands on them.
What happened between Viridian and Mathias is a mystery at the heart of “The Poet’s House,” which is as much about women’s power in the world, poetic or otherwise, as it is about the power of poetry.
“The body is a house. Who lives within?” as one poem has it, echoing 2 Corinthians 5: “Our body is the house in which our spirit lives here on earth.” There’s no doubting and no escaping the joyful, hopeful spirit that inhabits “The Poet’s House” — the spirit of poetry that by the end of this charming novel Carla so clearly embodies — and the irrepressible Jean Thompson so smartly imparts.
Rain began to fall as I carried my infant daughter up Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1988. I ducked into the nearest shelter, which happened to be the lobby of Trump Tower.
“Hey, it’s the Irish kid,” somebody called out.
I looked over and there was John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family. He was unshaven for the first and only time I had seen him, and I figured he must have been up in one of the apartments. I had contributed to him becoming a celebrity gangster with a New York Magazine cover story two years before. I knew that Mafiosi sometimes used “kid” to describe an associate of whatever age. I was 36, and I suddenly felt like a kind of accomplice.
“What’s the baby’s name?” Gotti asked.
Reflexively, I turned away with little Sinead Daly in my arms. New fatherhood had made me hyper conscious of the dirt and fumes I otherwise would not have noticed as I carried her up the street outside. I now had the sudden and alarming sense that she was in the presence of absolute evil. I answered him nonetheless.
Several days later, a box from Tiffany’s arrived at my Brooklyn home. I opened it to discover a small silver cup with a kitty — in Italian a gatto — engraved on the side.
“To Sinead from J.G.,” the inscription read.
I did not want Sinead anywhere near this gatto from Gotti, and I threw the gift in a bottom drawer. Gotti strutted about for another five years until he was finally brought down by a team of prosecutors and agents headed by another J.G., only one you would be glad for your kid to meet: Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gleeson.
Gleeson has now written “The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster,” a meticulous chronicle of good triumphing over evil.
The book comes to us 30 years after the guilty verdict that is the saga’s climax and two decades after Gotti’s death in prison from throat cancer. The American Mafia itself is all but gone.
But Gleeson manages to make the oft-told tale of Gotti’s downfall fresh with new perspective, insight, wisdom and humor. Gleeson brings readers along on a kind of coming of sage journey that began in the spring of 1985, when this son of the Westchester suburbs was a 31-year-old fledgling prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn.
A senior prosecutor named Diane Giacalone enlisted him to assist in a case against Gambino crime family underboss Aniello Dellacroce and then lesser members such as John Gotti. The Gambinos had long been a target of law enforcement, and there was a trove of electronic surveillance for Gleeson to review that accorded him an education in mob language. He listened to hours of recorded gangster chatter captured on wiretaps.
“For some reason,” he writes, “I’d thought ‘youse’ was a plural pronoun, but I quickly learned otherwise.”
As this exchange made clear:
“Anybody else there?” “No. I’m alone.”
“Good. I’ll come by youse in ten minutes.”
The case seemed to lose much of its importance on Dec. 2 of that year, when the lead defendant, underboss Dellacroce, died of cancer. Then, 14 days later, Gotti and his crew staged a gangland coup, gunning down Gambino boss Paul Castellano and his driver, Tommy Bilotti, outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. The news broke when Gleeson was home asleep. He writes that his wife woke him and told him “to come out to the living room to watch what was happening because Paul Castellano was dead and John Gotti was going to be the new Gambino boss.”
Gleeson recalls, “Literally overnight-before the completion of a single news cycle-our case was transformed.”
Suddenly, Giacalone and Gleeson’s case became the biggest mob prosecution in the country. I confess to having joined in the breathless reporting on Gotti as a new Al Capone, without the scar and with a better coif, thanks to a daily haircut.
But Gotti beat the rap, and the big case became a huge defeat. Gleeson did not learn until long afterward that one of the jurors had been bribed. Gleeson writes that he figured at the time the acquittal came partly because the judge allowed the defense lawyers to verbally savage and humiliate Giacalone in the courtroom.
Giacalone left the Eastern District soon after. Gleeson finally got a second chance to prosecute Gotti in 1992. Gotti had since also been acquitted in a state case and had become known as the Teflon Don. Gleeson introduces readers to George Hanna, an FBI agent, and Kenny McCabe, an investigator with Brooklyn’s District Attorney Office, and other greats of New York law enforcement who quietly did their jobs, undermining Gotti even as we in the press made him a celebrity gangster.
When he took over as boss, Gotti had moved his headquarters from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens, which had nothing to do with hunting or fishing, and everything to do with truck hijacking and loan sharking. He settled into Dellacroce’s former social club in downtown Manhattan, the Ravenite, which had everything to do with crime of all kinds. He apparently thought he was secure from eavesdropping in an upstairs apartment an elderly woman of the neighborhood let him use for covert meetings. He was wrong, and the resulting recordings alone would almost certainly have been enough for a conviction.
His fate was sealed, however, when his underboss, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano became what was then the highest-ranking mobster ever to cooperate with investigators.