How have I not read Anthony Giardina before? That’s what I have been asking myself over the last several months: first, after I read Remember This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $29, 384 pp.), maybe the best new novel I’ve read this year, and then, after I went back and read several of Giardina’s earlier books. “Could it be called a form of grace?” a character asks about a disappointment towards the end of Remember This. Disappointments can be a form of grace, yes. Joyful experiences can be, too, and reading and loving a book, only to realize that the author has a deep back catalog to explore, can feel like grace in the life of a reader.
In Giardina’s previous novel, Norumbega Park (2012), Joan, a young Catholic nun who is chafing against the limits of obedience, wonders, “What was one to do with desire—not for a person, but for the simplest things?” That is the essential issue at the heart of Giardina’s fiction. As Joan’s question makes clear, the varieties of desire are almost infinite. There’s the “social desire” to move up the class ladder: in Norumbega Park and Recent History (2001), characters try to flee the midcentury Italian American enclaves surrounding Boston for tonier, and more Anglo, towns farther from the city. There’s the desire to make art: Remember This centers on Miranda Rando, the would-be biographer of an Alice Neel–like painter; her father, Henry, an okay playwright whose self-helpy memoir about old age becomes a hit; and her mother, Lily, a legitimately great actress. Giardina’s characters want to live a life of absolute normalcy—“I knew then that I did not merely want the Life—the wife and kids and dog and boat—I wanted it fiercely,” the protagonist of White Guys (2006) thinks; “I wanted to cling to forms”—except when they want to refuse such a life of conformity. They want to know and to experience, to gain an identity and to lose one. They desire to be desired.
Above all, though, Giardina is interested in the messiness of erotic desire. This desire is messy, his novels suggest, because it can’t be reasoned or bargained with. It can be acted upon or refused, embraced or denied. But it can’t be known, not fully. In Recent History, a man leaves his wife and son to live with another man. In Norumbega Park, a mother finds herself unable to look away from the image of her high-school-aged son and his girlfriend lying naked on the couch. In Remember This, Miranda is at Wellfleet, working on a biography of the painter Anna Soloff, when she meets an oysterman. First, they sleep together. Then, she starts entertaining the possibility of having a child with him. “If you want something to happen,” she thinks, “here is the messy, unacceptable way it must happen. Here is the chaos you must embrace.” Meanwhile, Miranda’s father, Henry, sees a beautiful boy in Haiti while on a mission visit and, Death in Venice–style, becomes obsessed. (Forty years earlier, he had slept with a male actor while living, quite happily, with his future wife, Lily. That “had been the last such indulgence he’d allowed himself.”) The Haitian boy, Jean, is “gorgeousness personified.” “You stopped and looked and marveled, and knew how much you were outside of what you were beholding,” Henry says. “To not take in such beauty would be not to be alive.” It’s a beautiful, and potentially self-deluding, thought.
To be clear, not all of these erotic desires are the same. The father in Recent History wants to have sex with men while Henry in Remember This just wants to…well, he doesn’t quite know what he wants to do. Look and look and look at Jean? Give him a better chance at life by bringing him to study in the United States? Become a savior to him? Miranda recognizes that the desire of a forty-year-old Brooklyn woman for a Cape Cod oysterman is a cliché, a D. H. Lawrence rip-off updated for our American moment. And yet she can’t help herself. After marrying a mean, abusive man, the painter Anna Soloff wrote in her diary, “No one understands, I need a man like that.” “Like that was open to interpretation,” Miranda thinks. “But in another sense it was entirely clear.” We want what we shouldn’t, what is bad for us. We don’t know how or why. For Giardina, that’s simply, and not simply at all, what it means to desire.
If Giardina’s fiction thinks through desire in its many varieties, it also thinks through religion in its many forms: as a serious devotion (Joan becoming a nun in Norumbega Park) and as a marker of communal identity (Henry in Remember This goes back to Newton Highlands to attend a funeral and finds himself nostalgic for “the wonderful loud texture” of the life he has left behind). Catholicism is part of the air his characters breathe and the water in which they swim. In that sense, it’s often just background, unconsidered and unarticulated. But there are also passages of great theological sophistication, as in a reflection by Henry midway through Remember This. It’s worth quoting in full:
Someone had once described the act of prayer as “interrogating silence.” He couldn’t remember who had said that, but the words were apposite. That was what you did, all you could do. Close your eyes and allow what was going to happen to happen. Often nothing did. Still, you waited. Close your eyes and allow the silence to talk back to you, to loosen its secrets. Sometimes if you waited long enough, there would come some brief internal plummet, like an elevator sinking, too fast, two or three floors. Then you would find yourself considering something you had not thought you were ready to consider. The vastness of your own selfishness and self-importance. The fact that the world was this enormous arcing structure, and you such a small helpless thing within it. You pulled away, you resisted that awareness. But there were times when, instead of doing that, you gave in. Became, briefly, nothing. Saw yourself, for a moment, as one might imagine God saw you: here is this individual, unimportant in the grand scheme, with his conflicts that he considers so large, so daunting. In God’s views, of course, they were nothing at all, but they were what one carried, one’s personal load. Cast them away. See them in their infinite smallness. At the moment of death, I will be able to see what a little thing they were, my demons, my difficulties.
Joan thinks something similar in Norumbega Park when she marvels over “the gift of becoming the impersonal object of God’s love. The gift of not mattering.” If you are a believing Catholic, that’s not quite right: you precisely do matter. God’s love might seem impersonal but it’s not. God takes on the form of a human person so as to redeem not some abstraction like “humanity” but to redeem individual sinners: you and you and you. What Giardina gets at in these passages, and in his novels more generally, is why we long for such unimportance and emptiness (being a desiring being is tiring) and why such longings ultimately fail. Joan ends up leaving her convent; Henry matters, if for no other reason than that his decision with regards to Jean will matter to that boy and his family.
All of Giardina’s novels, but particularly Remember This, are densely populated, featuring many different characters who occupy many different class positions and want many different things. This description can make them sound loud: busy, ambitious, aiming to capture all of social existence. But there’s also a quietness, even a silence, at the center of Giardina’s work. If the restlessness of desire in Giardina echoes Augustine (“our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee”), so too does his sense that there is something that lies beyond knowledge, that refuses articulation and might best be approached through silence. “If you understand, it is not God,” Augustine says. Toward the end of White Guys, Timmy O’Kane, the novel’s narrator, sees his friend, Billy Mogavero, as if for the first time. The two grew up as boys together. As adults, their fates have been linked in complicated and potentially dangerous ways. But now, Timmy finally sees who Billy is—which is to say, he sees what Billy wants from him, what Billy wants him to want. “It was like seeing God after all the talk of God,” Timmy thinks, “an amazing density to the presence, a size beyond what you’d ever imagined. This was what he had always been, this being onto whom I had painted another, more thoughtful, more reasonable face. This before me was the actual size of desire.” In all of his work, Giardina gives us the actual size of desire: exhausting, exhilarating, unknown and unknowable.
