Last week I skipped Red Beans on Monday, or posting at all, as I was busy visiting with family in Myrtle Beach where my sister cashed in her timeshare. I did bring a copy Tom Piazza‘s first novel, though, which followed his publication of a collection of stories and several non-fiction books on jazz. Piazza has agreed to sit down for an interview for next Monday’s post so I can delve deeper into my reviews of City of Refuge and Why New Orleans Matters. I enjoyed these two books so much, though, that I picked up My Cold War for the plane (the reason I got caught in the library on the way to Mardi Gras World, if you read my last post) so, though I didn’t plan on making this Tom Piazza month on Read Beans on Monday, that’s how it’s worked out. This novel has nothing to do with New Orleans but Piazza, I believe, was already living in the city when it was published. Either way, he’s a born again New Orleanian, and it was nice to take a thematic break from local matters as much as I love reading about New Orleans. So, here’s one to grow one.
ONE MAN’S METAPHOR FOR ONE NATION UNDER (A) CLOUD
My Cold War
by Tom Piazza
My Cold War is a first-person fictional memoir about a college professor struggling to write a history of the Cold War in the superficial, sensationalistic manner for which he’s become renowned. Cold War Studies is a niche he has carved for himself at his university, yet when a former admiring student now successful in the publishing world gives him a huge advance to collect his pithy vignettes into a book, he finds himself frozen with writer’s block in the midst of a mid-life crisis for a life that has always been in crisis—a personal Cold War struggle with his childhood and the beliefs of his father.
As he grew up in the fifties, the narrator’s father was a rigid engineer who preached self-sufficiency, eschewed compassion, and was obsessed with the communist threat. His emotional distance and sudden harshness scarred the narrator who has grown to be incapable of making true intimate connections. He is lingering in a marriage that, although civil, is more like two professionals sharing an office than an intimate system of mutual support and when he finally attempts to reach out to his wife, she is too practical and preoccupied to shepherd him through his hour of need. Furthermore, he is estranged from his last surviving family, younger brother who once admired him, and part of the novel deals with his painfully misguided trip to try and mend fences after eight years of silence.
This novel is a slower-moving and more introspective than his other reviewed work, fostering a purposeful sense of personal malaise as metaphor for the nation’s post Cold War flounderomg search for purpose and morality. City of Refuge was nearly twice as long but felt like a quicker read being a book about action and survival versus a book of inaction and ennui.
The narrator’s paralysis emerges as he slowly loses faith in his self-styled superficial brand of faux-history. His study of the Cold War dismisses right vs. wrong and deeper meaning to focus on pop-culture themes and iconic images. His academic work is as shallow as his relationships and, though he is ridiculed by colleagues, he has made a popular name for himself with the public; however, he doesn’t know how to react as it slowly dawns on him that his entire life and career has been about trivializing and running away from the paranoia his father, a member of the anti-communist John Birch Society that was famous for ‘exposing’ supposed communist sympathizers, took so seriously.
Once again Piazza’s influences as a music writer shine through. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel, at least for a Bob Dylan nut like me, is the way he describes Dylan’s sway on Cold War pop culture, shocking the world when he morphed from social conscious acoustic protest singer to defiant electric guitar wielding leather clad individualist. Even the mention of the John Birch society is likely a reference to the hilariously satirical Dylan bootleg, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” where the narrator begins to see ‘red’ hiding everywhere, including in the U.S. flag, leading him to conclude: [Read more…]