Eastman was Here
It’s 1973 and Alan Eastman—a washed-up writer,
public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, husband, and philander—finds
himself alone on the floor of his study, mired in an existential crisis. His
wife has left him and taken the kids, and it feels like his best years are
behind him. In the depths of his despair, he receives a phone call from an old
rival offering him a chance at reclaiming his literary glory reporting on the
end of the Vietnam War. Ready for his triumphant comeback, Eastman is met upon
arrival in Saigon by a motley cast, including Anne Channing, an indefatigable
young American journalist who immediately bruises his ego and steals his heart.
Apprehensive of Saigon’s ever-present dangers (and sweltering heat), Eastman
often finds himself cowering at the hotel bar, contemplating if the quest to
pick up the pieces was a fool’s errand. With his second act off to a rocky
start, will Eastman unearth the courage within himself and reestablish himself
as the preeminent author of his time?
With novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls and
Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire, we’ve seen a movement in
contemporary fiction towards revisiting and reconsidering the 60s and 70s. EASTMAN
WAS HERE brings this critical eye to one of the era’s lasting legacies: its
brilliant, yet damaging hypermasculine and insular literary royalty. In
Eastman’s story, Gilvarry both celebrates and dismantles the romance attached
to the 1970s New York and its literary lions—Mailer, Roth, Bellow, and their
kin. Bringing to life the political and artistic turmoil of this era, he
punctures its romantic illusions with razor-sharp humor.
EASTMAN WAS HERE
By Alex Gilvarry
Viking / On-Sale: August
22nd, 2017
ISBN: 9781101981504 / Price: $27.00
ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN
E-BOOK
My Review
To be honest, in the beginning, I was not such a fan of this book. The main character, Eastman was crass towards women. I could see why this may have been part of this reason his wife left him. He was not in love anymore. So, I almost put the book down. Yet, this was all before Eastman left. Which I wanted to see him in Saigon and in his element again as a writer.
I do have to say that Eastman grew on me. I won't say that we have become best friends. While, Eastman may not have had the highest respect for women, he won me over with his love for his children. Everytime I would start to hate on him, he would do something to make one of his children happy and to show his love for them that I would forgive him.
Than there is Anne Channing, reporter. She was a bit of a bulldog. Yet, I liked this about her. She made sure she could stand on her own two feet. The sparring that she and Eastman had was great. Eastman is Here is like a diamond..rough around the edges but worth it.
To be honest, in the beginning, I was not such a fan of this book. The main character, Eastman was crass towards women. I could see why this may have been part of this reason his wife left him. He was not in love anymore. So, I almost put the book down. Yet, this was all before Eastman left. Which I wanted to see him in Saigon and in his element again as a writer.
I do have to say that Eastman grew on me. I won't say that we have become best friends. While, Eastman may not have had the highest respect for women, he won me over with his love for his children. Everytime I would start to hate on him, he would do something to make one of his children happy and to show his love for them that I would forgive him.
Than there is Anne Channing, reporter. She was a bit of a bulldog. Yet, I liked this about her. She made sure she could stand on her own two feet. The sparring that she and Eastman had was great. Eastman is Here is like a diamond..rough around the edges but worth it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alex Gilvarry is the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant,
winner of the Hornblower Award for a First Book, named Best New Voice 2012 by
Bookspan. He has received fellowships
from the Harry Ransom Center and the Norman Mailer Center. He is a professor at
Monmouth University where he teaches fiction.
Named
one of the National Book Foundation’s prestigious 5 Under 35, Alex Gilvarry
turned heads in 2012 when his debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy
Combatant—a beguiling satire chronicling the tribulations of a Filipino
fashion designer’s stint in Guantanamo after getting ensnared in a terrorist
plot—garnered a chorus of critical acclaim. In The Boston Globe, John
Freeman praised it as “lively” and “hilarious,” while Roxane Gay called it
“original, smart, and incisive” on The Rumpus. Among other accolades, it
was a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s
Choice,” named a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and winner of the Hornblower
Award for a First Book. In his extraordinary second novel EASTMAN WAS HERE, Gilvarry, while employing the
same mordant sense of humor for which he was praised in his debut, depicts one
irredeemable man’s search for meaning in the age of the Vietnam War and the
political and artistic culture of 1970s New York City. It’s a bold step forward
in the career of one of our most brilliant emerging writers.
Q&A with Alex Gilvarry author of EASTMAN WAS HERE
Viking; On sale: August
22nd, 2017; 97801101981504; $27.00
Q: EASTMAN WAS
HERE, your second novel, follows Alan Eastman—a washed-up writer, public
intellectual, cultural critic, and philander—whose marriage has just fallen
apart. In part to win back his wife and to revive his writing career, he sets
off to Saigon to cover the end of the Vietnam War. What was the impetus for
writing this particular story?
A: I
was reading Norman Mailer a lot because I was invited to his house in
Provincetown for the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony. Before going, all I knew
about Mailer was that he liked to battle feminists on television and that he
once wrote a very problematic essay I read in college called “The White Negro.”
Doesn’t the title alone just make you shiver? So I started reading him to do my
homework. The Armies of the Night
(very good), The Executioner’s Song
(twice as long as it needs to be, but good), An American Dream (just awful), The
Prisoner of Sex (embarrassingly bad), and Harlot’s Ghost (gave me tennis elbow). It was very hard to find the
sympathetic Mailer, but I was entertained by his transparent feelings in his
work. Just counting all the phallic imagery he uses can entertain you for one
summer. Machismo, envy, homophobia, sexism—he couldn’t mask anything, and
because of the era, why would he?!
In one of his biographies I found
a very interesting tidbit that stuck with me. That the New York Herald Tribune wanted to send Mailer to Vietnam in order
to write dispatches on the ground war. The deal never happened, supposedly
because the Herald’s owner didn’t like his out-spoken attitude against the war.
I imagined Mailer would have turned his dispatches, had he written them, into a
book, like he did with so much of his journalism.
What would that book have been like? I wondered. Perhaps
it’s a book that’s supposed to be about Vietnam, but then it turns out to be
all about its author and his love life. I was going through a really bad break
up when I was thinking about this book and I had my own crazy feelings that I
needed to purge. So that’s how Alan Eastman was born.
Q: The author Liz Moore described EASTMAN WAS HERE as a “wry throwback of
a novel that… [is] in the tradition of satirists like Kurt Vonnegut.” Your
first novel, From the Memoirs of a
Non-Enemy Combatant, was also told through satire. What in particular draws
you to this method of storytelling?
A: My heroes were Woody Allen and
Steve Martin. Then later Gary Shteyngart and Mordecai Richler. Donald
Barthelme, too, a great satirist. You are what you eat. But what draws me is
the emotional state humor, and laughter, can place you in. Especially in the
written form. You are somewhat vulnerable after laughing. Therefore couldn’t I
break your heart, next?
Q: Eastman has
self-aggrandizing and self-crippling notions of masculinity. Can you describe
what it was like to channel such a misogynistic protagonist?
A: Well, a misogynist can never be
funny, himself. Nor does he deserve to be considered interesting. The humor
comes out of watching his ignorance and blindness. He is a fool. We are
laughing at him, not with. And to see
the fool through a certain lens, going about his life, thinking of himself as a
great lover and thinker of his time, I found this to be compelling, and a way
to showcase a certain truth about an era. Certainly the truth of gender
discrimination. In the book, Eastman lectures a central character, Anne
Channing, a war journalist, on masculine writing versus feminine writing. And
on how women are perceived as writers, through the male gaze of a Man author.
Or as Mailer would put it, a “major” writer, which always meant male. And I
find this attitude still exists in our readership and book buying practices. I
found certain prejudices in my own reading habits. This is a point made much
better by Siri Hustvedt in her essay “No Competition” from A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. I’m not going to mansplain
what women have known for ages. Read Siri’s essay.
Q: The female characters
in the novel are arguably more successful, more driven, and certainly more
emotionally mature than Eastman, exposing and threatening his hypermasculinity.
In this way, your novel is a nod to feminism and just one of the ways you
puncture some of the romantic illusions still attached to the 60s and 70s. Can
you elaborate on the role female characters play in EASTMAN WAS HERE?
I found that some of the best
writing on the Vietnam War was done by women, particularly Gloria Emerson and
her book Winners & Losers. A must
read. It won the National Book Award in 1978. It was Emerson who I had in mind
when I was creating the character of Anne Channing in the novel. I wanted to
place Eastman up against great female characters, who are very strong and
together, and Eastman can’t always see this about them because he’s too busy
reducing them to sexual objects. But I do this on purpose to show just how
ridiculous he is, and men of his kind. And the women in his life do threaten
him in a variety of ways. Professionally, personally, romantically. Feminism was Gloria Emerson
Q: Even though the
novel takes place in 1973, it feels completely relevant and in tune with what’s
happening in today’s tumultuous cultural and social landscapes. Let’s face it,
America elected a man who sounds less presidential and more like Alan Eastman
every day. While writing EASTMAN WAS HERE, were you consciously thinking of
what was happening in this country?
A: Not so much with the election. I
set the action at the end of the Vietnam War, where America is withdrawing from
an occupation. So I was very much thinking of the end of our presence in Iraq.
But why Vietnam when there are so many books about it? That answer is more
subliminal. My father was in the Vietnam War and stationed at Than Son Nhut
airbase. Yet he’s a very anti-war individual, an intelligent man when it comes
to world conflict. I grew up with his stories and like many boys of my
generation, a desperate need to please him. Maybe that’s why I engage with this
stuff.
Writing, I thought about how Vietnam very much shifted
into Cambodia with US involvement and the Khmer Rouge, just as the focus in
Iraq has now shifted into Syria with ISIS. I hoped I would learn something from
these parallels. The results have been costly and disastrous now, just as they
were then. But this is only the social milieu, the backdrop, for what is
essentially a love story set in two cities. New York and Saigon. Nothing blows
up in this book. Eastman barely leaves his hotel, the Continental, that
mysterious place where Graham Greene stayed and all the war correspondents in
Vietnam after him.
Q: In
the book, you simultaneously celebrate and dismantle the romance
attached to the 1970s New York and its literary lions, like Mailer, Roth,
Bellow, and their kin. In your opinion, how should we evaluate the legacy of
those writers?
A: Man, I love this period. New York still had Book Row and Elaine’s
and Paris Review parties at George Plimpton’s house. Book deals were made at
parties. Books were sexy, and had plenty of sex in them. You know what else was
sexy? The Upper East Side. Go figure.
I think the writers you mention have all said regrettable things or have had
periods of scandal, and they all lived to publish another book, win a Pulitzer
or National Book Award, no matter how bad their behavior got, personally or
publicly. Of course things turned out fine for them—they were men! I address
this very issue in the novel when Eastman meets Anne Channing, a real war
reporter, good at her job, better than him in every way. She makes him face all
of this male ugliness. But the book isn’t a reprimand or a chastising of WMNs
(“White Male Narcissists” to quote David Foster Wallace). It’s a love story.
Q: When authors like Mailer, Bellow,
or Gore Vidal were at the height of their popularity, they were not only
writers, but public intellectuals, constantly debating the day’s issues—Vietnam,
civil rights, etc.—on TV and through op-eds. For better or worse, we don’t
really have an author today quite like Mailer. As an author, do you feel you have a responsibility to take
up profound social issues? Should authors be more publically outspoken?
A: I think I have a responsibility to capture the time I live in, and many
of our novelists take up social issues. If there’s something that bothers me,
like Guantanamo Bay remaining open, I write about it. Sure, I wish some of our
major novelists would dig in a little more and get dirty. However, Mailer and
Vidal and Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag weren’t only novelists, they also
wrote compelling non-fiction, reportage, social criticism. It was during a time
when magazines would send writers, sometimes novelists, into dangerous places
like Vietnam. Mary McCarthy went to Vietnam for the New York Review of Books. James Jones reported on it for the New York Times Magazine. What they wrote
made them public intellectuals of a certain kind, first. Then came television.
And it wasn’t always very successful. Just take a look on YouTube at Mailer’s
appearance with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show. It was a disaster!
Alex Gilvarry will be appearing in the
following cities in 2017:
New York, NY McNally Jackson w/ Said Sayrafiezadeh August 22 7:00pm
Westerly, RI Savoy Bookshop August 24 6:00pm
Brooklyn, NY Greenlight
w/ Alexandra Kleeman August
29 7:30pm
Chicago, IL American Writers Museum w/ Augustus Rose September 5 TBD
Cambridge, MA Harvard
Book Store September
6 7:00pm
Exton, PA Wellington Square Books w/ Liz Moore September 11 TBD
Philadelphia, PA Head House Books w/ Liz Moore September 12 7:30pm
New York, NY Guerilla Lit Reading Series September 13 7:00pm
Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn Book Festival September 17 TBD
Brooklyn, NY Franklin Park Reading Series October 9 TBD
New York, NY Shakespeare & Co. (UES) October 16 6:30pm
Queens, NY Long Island City
Reading Series at L.I.C. Bar November
14 TBD
New York, NY NYU
Writers in New York Reading Series November
16 7:00pm
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