The Brooklyn Rail

The Uniform, George Guida’s latest imaginative exercise, investigates its fabrics like a crack forensics crew. The fabric of America, no less, both unraveled and patched up: the novel pores over nearly a century of immigrants and their offspring. Italian immigrants, in this case, and even their grandchildren, in greater and upstate New York, struggle to escape the striving class⎯to strip off the uniform of a construction worker or a cop on the beat. They suffer in confinement even during rare moments of bliss, for instance when Guida’s protagonist briefly becomes a guitar god. Even then, Alfie Bagliato is playing the kind of dive where no one can find a microphone, and he’s still caught up in the emotional turmoil of Sunday dinners with the aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Guida’s tenth book is his second full novel, after several fine collections of poems and stories⎯for one of which I wrote a blurb, years ago. His protagonist’s attempts to reach escape velocity go far beyond Alfie’s sweaty night as a proto-punk (set in the 1950s, not CBGB’s era). Nonetheless, even out in San Francisco or over in Siena, the nagging inadequacy never lets up, neither for nim nor the rest of the cast. Yet if the same fatal flaw lurks everywhere, it takes a range of inventive forms. Guida keeps things lively, freely flashing back and forward in time, and comes up with details well-nigh Proustian. I found the whole compelling and profound, a distinctive portrait of what Guida terms “the lingering effects of peasant cultures” in the American project. To a reader who has followed this author as long as I have, the text seems a culmination of his efforts to date, and I was glad the Rail gave me the opportunity to discuss it with him. We exchanged the following emails, lightly edited, while he was on the West Coast for research.

John Domini (Rail): Your novel never lacks for event, but at times it slows down and takes inventory. One character browses through a full collection of the 1952 Outdoor Life (typical article: “Prettying Up Your Guns”), and not much further along, someone proves “an encyclopedia” of Upstate Italians: “the Mugaris, who owned the Uptown Restaurant, and the Pasqualettis, who ran the Roman Pastry Shop….” In so active a narrative, why this impulse to list, to itemize?

George Guida: Cataloging goes back to the Greeks and other ancients, but its purpose varies. It’s always been a hack for retelling history in a hurry. It’s also been a way to recognize and call heroes and gods to one’s side. Alfie, my protagonist and predominant narrative consciousness, is a hurried and harried character. He wants and needs to recite catalogs that either justify his feelings, affirm his beliefs, or place him within a tradition. He feels fiercely, but wavers in his beliefs, and he often wrestles with his heritage and cultural traditions. Like so many of us do, he struggles to understand himself and uses identity as both crutch and inspiration.

His first catalog appears in the second chapter, when he’s sixteen years old. (He ages another forty years within the narrative.) He’s newly in love with his cousin, Adeline, and he’s seeking role models for what he understands to be a taboo love. Those role models include Jefferson, FDR, and Einstein, all of whom, as he notes, married their cousins. He also catalogs songs, night clubs, political buttons, Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals, the Stations of the Cross, bocce tournaments, groups inhabiting the Mohawk Valley, smells of Brooklyn, and places Adeline appears to him. You mentioned the titles of articles he reads in an issue of Outdoor Life. Those titles take him back to the experience of hunting with his father and to all the stories of hunting he’s heard from his Upstate New York family. They return him to a tradition he’s already lost. The encyclopedia of Upstate Italians comes from a story Alfie’s mother tells of a time when she’s trying to adapt and gain acceptance in the society of an Erie Canal town to which she doesn’t belong. She is a New York City girl, and her tenuous connection to this strange place lies in her own Italianness, and of course in her distant relations’ lives there.

Another reason for the catalogs is Alfie’s constant search for answers. Over the course of the narrative, he asks a lot of questions. These questions derive from his confusion and, frankly, his ignorance, which he overcomes in the course of the novel. He is puzzled by his family, by the imperatives of his culture, by race relations, and by the cruelty of fate. Cataloging is one path toward answers, even if it never leads him to their doorstep.

Finally, catalogs can be fun, as long as you allow your narrator to play with them, to go beyond simple recitation, as with the catalog of Stations of the Cross. About the crucifixion scene Alfie remarks, “they nail him to a cross and pierce his side (because… Why? Hanging by spikes through your hands and feet wasn’t bad enough?”) I like to remind myself that writing and reading fiction isn’t just a serious intellectual pursuit, it’s entertainment. At times I let my characters enjoy themselves in thought and action, and I enjoy them enjoying themselves. Even in dark times, theirs or mine. Writing and reading allow us to derive some kind of satisfaction in telling and following even the most painful stories. We can find joy in the process of thinking and feeling deeply, especially when our lives are not actually at stake.

Rail: Speaking of lists, maybe the most complex⎯not to say heartbreaking⎯would tote up your protagonist’s jobs. Alfie Bagliato isn’t an immigrant, he’s second-generation, but he bounces from gig to gig like a man just off the boat. Two vivid early scenes, in fact, put him at opposite poles of the American workforce: now a New York City cop, and now the hottest guitarist on the bar scene. Who is this guy, forever unsettled?

Guida: I think Alfie is a guy whose fortune has unsettled him. He’s the center of a novel that’s not so much about life’s vicissitudes—although it is about those too—but about our response to them, about our ability to live with inequity. To digress a little, I’ll say that one of the most frustrating elements of political life in the US is the tendency of our right and our left to be outraged by what I see as constant features of human life. For the right the primary outrage is change. For the left it’s inequality. What I like about Alfie as a character is his perception, at a relatively young age, that there will always be a power structure and that the best you can do is fight it to a tolerable stasis. You’ll never defeat it. Understanding that sad truth depresses him (as do other realities), but it also allows him to change over time by forcing him to look inward and to gauge what he can and can’t accomplish. It also helps him come to terms with the limits of his dreams. He dreams of being a musician. He dreams of marrying his cousin and living happily ever after. He dreams of confessing his sins against his father. All of these dreams butt up against his internalized obligation to family and order. His life becomes a struggle between his dreams and his sense of duty and propriety. It is also a struggle against fate.

So, Alfie’s story, a story of the self in conflict with the world, suits the classic novel form, and vice-versa. What’s funny, to me at least, about this conclusion is that I see the novel as an essentially satirical form. It takes the self as a subject worthy of exploration. But I think most novelists, and most thoughtful people, get that the self in context of the universe, in context of time as we know it, in context of all we don’t know about the true nature of space and time (a.k.a. faith), is an absurd little creature, an insignificant blip, and that the forces the self struggles against are also fairly insignificant in the grand scheme. This awareness requires at least some considerable degree of satire. The greatest novelists are great satirists. They satirize consciousness. I could offer you my own catalog here, but for me Dostoevsky is the ultimate “serious” novelist who is a brilliant satirist. Every page of his best work reflects a keen awareness of human frailty and the absurdity of human aspiration. My next novel is, in fact, a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov, set in the United States, the locus of unbridled human aspiration for the past 250 years. I see writing that book as a service to people, myself among them, who want more of the marvelous and hugely entertaining story Dostoevsky gifted us. For now I have this book and Alfie, who is a man of great ambition circumscribed by difficult circumstances. In other words, he’s alive.

Rail: Shifting roles, identities in flux, feature especially in the San Francisco chapter. The Uniform visits just before the High Hippie era, and the crowd in that chapter constantly challenges American cultural norms. They kick aside racial and sexual taboos, as well as capitalist values. Yet in the middle of it all, there’s a remarkable declaration from the woman Alfie came to see, his New York cousin Adeline. “You know how we Italians are,” she says, “hard-headed.” Now, Adeline matters a lot in this story, but that line, at that moment, offers a particularly intriguing way into what she’s about. Can you illuminate further?

Guida: As Alfie’s early aspiration gives way first to his sense of obligation and then to despair, Adeline flies the nets of conventional family and social expectations of a young woman living through the 1950s and early 1960s. In contrast to Alfie’s story, hers is a story of freedom and the response to it. She moves across the country, first following her husband to Kansas, then leaving him and moving to California. She settles in San Francisco, if we can call what she does “settling,” and lives a Bohemian lifestyle as an aspiring writer. She is beautiful, talented, and educated. She seems to have the world at her feet. Yet, coming from where she does, from her tight family, from an Italian enclave in Brooklyn, and from the supervision of an Old-World father, an erstwhile Mussolini supporter, she is unprepared for freedom. Like Alfie, she carries her baggage with her. (The working title of the novel was The Carrying Place.) She reaches out to Alfie as a kind of anchor. He is familiar but not stifling. At least not at that point. She is his Beatrice, but instead of dying young, she lives in what is either, depending on the moment, Paradise or Inferno. No matter how Alfie sees or imagines her, Adeline insists upon her independence, which, for him, is a big part of the attraction. America is ostensibly the land of the free, with its mythology of the rugged individual, but anyone who knows anything about Italian culture knows that Italians have traditionally prided themselves on, in Luigi Barzini’s words, being “unique specimens of humanity.” The unspoken distinction for Italians, and possibly one against which Adeline rebels, is that, while Italians have often insisted upon their individuality (manifest in resistance to oppressors and to official rules generally), they have often also accepted the insignificance of nearly all individuals in the grand scheme. Alfie accepts the compromise. Adeline doesn’t. Either attitude has consequences.

Rail: The entire San Francisco experience, though busy and freewheeling, comes down to your central couple, their special relationship. Alfie and Adeline are cousins and more, and while this conversation can’t reveal too much, I’d like to explore how their connection, against such a sweeping American canvas, runs counter to the country’s norms. US culture valorizes reinvention; it’s the stage on which Dylan goes electric and Madonna goes far wilder. Adeline and Alfie, on the other hand, seem throwbacks, forever haunted by the same few players and their dynamics. They had me thinking of protagonists in Elena Ferrante, Neapolitans who, despite the new lives they’ve forged, never seem to escape the shadow of Vesuvius. Does such a shadow haunt Alfie and Adeline? How do you define what they have?

Guida: As both Dylan and Madonna probably know, you can reinvent your disguise and improve your circumstances, but you can’t reinvent yourself. Reinvention in that regard is fiction. Therapy can help, I suppose. In fact a friend of mine recently remarked that Alfie needs therapy. He’s probably right, but it might succeed only in making Alfie a happier and more socially agile Alfie. Adeline could probably stand a little therapy, too. Both of them need to get over their parents. Seriously, I do think that Alfie and Adeline are grounded in Italian American culture with all its supports and constraints. We talk a lot about the lingering effects of slave culture in African American society. Rightly so. I think that, as a country, we haven’t reckoned sufficiently with the lingering effects of peasant cultures on our society, the cultures from which most of our families have come. These cultures were often defensive, formed in response to oppressive forces, animated by fear—fear of poverty, early death, and servitude, joined with fear of being perceived as socially inferior. Their imperatives to conform, as a strategy for unity and survival, still affect Americans’ behavior, and they militate against the sort of American culture you’re describing.

Alfie and Adeline want desperately to let go of their origins and their original relationships, but like most of us they struggle to do so. They both want freedom and they seek a path to it in each other’s company. Of course the irony lies in their seeking freedom in family, the same family that constrains them. Their relationship is central to the novel, but that relationship is, in the course of their lives, more often the absence of a relationship. Their connection lays bare a reality that haunts most relationships and is the reason we give up freedom for obligation: we are, each of us, mostly alone.

Rail: That last point, emphasizing human isolation, strikes me as gloomier than The Uniform deserves. Granted, the novel ends with an image of lives and dreams lost in the wind. Nonetheless, the story’s final turns also take us into sunnier spots. Maybe most heartening, there’s Alfie’s eventual embrace of an artistic calling, followed by his rapprochement with his long-estranged brother Frankie. Getting back together with Frankie even takes the older sibling to Italy, back to his roots. In the final analysis, that is, the novel may offer as much uplift as downer, as much comedy as tragedy. What can you say about the balance the drama ultimately strikes?

Guida: It’s a cliché to say people’s lives are tragicomedies. Alfie’s is something more; it’s memorable, because a number of extraordinary things happen to him and because he filters those through a sardonic sensibility. He experiences terrible violence at a young age; he grows up in two different ethnic enclaves, in a small town and in New York City; he performs on stage; he suffers grievous physical injury; he serves in the Army; he struggles with depression; he has wild sex; he becomes a cop and tangles with protestors; he survives in the wilderness; he falls in love with his cousin; and he becomes an artist. A catalog of trials and small triumphs that unfold over fifty years of a twentieth-century life. His experience felt epic to me, so I gave his narrative an epic arc. I told his story in episodes and dispensed with unities of time, place, and action. I also wanted to redeem Alfie in some way, because I do believe that redemption, if not fundamental change to one’s personality, is possible, even common. I tried to capture gradual shifts in Alfie’s attitude, his perception of the world, and his voice over time. He is loosely based on an uncle of mine, a long-time cop who was also a gifted woodworker and musician, a man who had plenty of personal and professional hardships, but who found peace in his craft. And I had other models. My wife and I work with students at City Tech, a public college in Brooklyn, and we own a coffee house and run an arts series in a small, economically burdened town in Western New York. I know many people who have lived what you might call difficult lives, who have found beauty and redemption in new relationships, new careers, new works of art. 

And then my work has always been both tragic and comic, for good reason. Largely pointless wars keep happening. Political violence keeps happening. Domestic abuse keeps happening. But we human beings have these creative impulses and senses of humor. My sense of humor saves me from despair. As does the impulse to write. The poet William Heyen called one of my poetry collections, Pugilistic, “grievously comic,” which is about right. My first book of fiction, The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times, includes satirical and, I hope, funny stories about a prospective American Pope and his family, and more tragic stories about family dysfunction, isolation, social strife and intellectual corruption. In The Uniform, Alfie and Adeline navigate a landscape of enormous challenges and absurdities, but they manage to keep moving, keep living, keep pursuing what might turn out to be happiness.