Recent History

by Anthony Giardina

In 1962, twelve-year-old Luca Carcera's father suddenly moves out of the house under mysterious circumstances and surfaces across town in a run-down rooming house, living with another man. This event casts a long shadow over Luca's own sexual coming-of-age, calling into dramatic question every relationship he develops--or fails to. Years later, Luca enters his own marriage harboring a sexual secret that, in an earlier era, might have remained a secret, but which now forces him to confront, in the most painful way, the strictly demarcated boundaries of male sexuality.

Genres: LGBT, Gay, Fiction, Gay Fiction

254 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Anthony Giardina is the author of Norumbega Park and White Guys. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and his plays have been widely produced. He is a regular visiting professor at the Michener Center of the University of Texas. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/anthon...

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow to start, this novel evolves into an excellent and honest meditation on male struggles with intimacy and sexuality.

[Virginia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though there is much to appreciate both in content and style, this novel ultimately feels like a short story run astray. Many of the book's thematic elements play critical roles in Giardina's short story collection, The Country of Marriage, which makes them feel repetitious and overplayed here.

The novel raises important questions about the homosexual continuum that is human sexuality (as opposed to the black and white model), but the main character's epiphany/realization/change in thinking that characterizing the arc of most novels, takes much too long in coming. Recent History would've made a great short story (maybe even novella), but the novel is too big a stage.

[Mrs. Adcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought that I wasn't going to enjoy this book after the first few pages, but I kept reading. I admit, I'm pleasantly surprised after getting past the first chapters. The story follows Luca, a 1960's teen who is dealing with his father's mysterious choice to leave his mother and move out. So far, the story seems to suggest that the Luca AND his father are struggling with their sexual identity; a very taboo subject for the time period. I'm curious to see what happens next.

[Elbrozzie]

Almost a good book, but, boy! does it fizzle...

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written story of a man and what turns out to be his search for the meaning of manhood. Poetic and delicate in it's language, this books tackles some very raw and deep subjects. Don't let the blurb on the back of the book fool you, this is not a gay story, it is simply the story of a man. And it's simplicity is it's beauty.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

“So you’re going to be just like him.” And, as if that statement held no greater weight than the pointing out of a bird, she took an accompanying bite of her toast.

“These two looked happy to be with one another; so I just watched them and wondered at my own stupidity, how I carried around a sense that if life was to be lived safely, then it had to be lived marginally.”

[Peter William Warn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Communication and sex can be tricky. Words can fail us but a silence or a gesture can tell everything we need to know. Sex can join physically people who remain stranded on opposite sides of an emotional chasm.

Anyone who has ever tried to make sense of it -- of intimacy and estrangement, friends and family, love and hostility -- can relate to the efforts of Luca Carcera, the central character and narrator of Anthony Giardina's captivating Recent History. Listening to Luca take stock of his life is like listening to a friend. As we hope he arrives at a conclusion of sorts that is satisfying for him, we can learn something about our own lives.

Luca loves his wife, Gina, but he feels removed from her as well. That feeling both upsets and comforts him.

She believed, too, that she knew me. In her mind--I could very nearly imagine that interior region--she viewed our intimacy, the nakedness of two bodies, the throttled cry of a male orgasm, the passing of two arms on a sexless night over the opposite body in a kind of unconscious and casual beseechment, the embarrassing sounds one hears, too, in the course of cohabitation, and then the talks, the speeches of self-representation during meals, during walks, all of this, along with what she'd observed of me over six or seven years, all of it constituted, in her mind, a kind of knowing. And I was glad then of the limits of that knowing.

Luca's contemplations can be illuminating even for those of us who do not share the specifics of his life. That would be most of us. He is married to a woman but his father is homosexual and Luca wonders whether he might be as well. When he was in junior high, he pretended that a male friend from school was his lover. He thought then that he did this to antagonize his father and punish him for leaving Luca and his mother when he went to live with a man. But now Luca wonders whether there was more to it than that.

Perhaps Giardina takes too long to have Luca come to a conclusion. Most readers will know where he is going to end up about 25 pages before he does. Again, it is like listening to a friend. Sometimes they go on too long.

Fortunately, Giardina has Luca reflect on more than his sexual orientation. He is, for example, aware of a generational difference between the men of his father's era and his. They were able to leave their marks on the land, taking forest and farms and making them residential developments. If suburbs were frontiers, his father's contemporaries were pioneers.

Sometimes, looking at [my house], I feel the way I imagine the men who inhabited the Hill in the early days must have felt, those men who stoked themselves by standing in their doorways at night, surveying the cleared forest. I have, at certain times, attempted to replicate such a moment, standing in my own doorway at night, but there is always a hollowness that comes over me. It is just not the same; recent history has moved us all on. I inhabit a house that other families have inhabited before me; mine is more a tenancy than a creation.

For almost all of Recent History, it is possible to be lost in Giardina's elegant prose. He writes with seeming ease, making it feel as if we are listening to the reflections of a real person. There is only one bit in which the writer reveals himself. Giardina contrives for his main characters' paths to have crossed, in a way, before all of them were aware of it. Life can work that way, but it rarely does. The device intrudes, making the reader aware of the novelist, who appears to be trying to tie everything up too neatly.

That small portion aside, Recent History is engaging. It both satisfies on its own and inspires eagerness to read other works by Giardina, including his mostly exceptional short stories in Country of Marriage and his subsequent novel, White Guys. That one is inspired by the racially explosive case in 1989 of a Boston man who claimed that his wife and their unborn child had been murdered by a black man. The accuser jumped to his death when it became clear that police suspected him.


DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

The photograph on the cover of the paperback edition of Recent History is an exceedingly poor choice, both misleading and run-of-the-mill. The only swimming important to the story is done by a woman. Queer bookstores are full of novels about boys wondering whether they might be gay and seemingly all of these books feature black & white cover photos of young men looking thoughtful and lonely. A work as singular as Recent History deserves not to be identified with so generic an image.

The novel gets something better for its hardcover edition. The front cover features a photograph of a man, presumably a father, holding an infant, possibly his son. The man, whom we see in profile over his shoulder, is smiling but he holds the baby at arm's length. There is affection in the image but also distance. It invites a viewer to ponder the picture's many possible suggestions, just as a reader is drawn into fiction as intriguing as Giardina's.

[Jeff]

recommended by Michael Flood, themes include homophobia among the relationships that het men have with each other...

[Kyle Heiner · Rating 3 out of 5]

the main character's name with luca and he ends up with a woman these call me by your name teas.... anyways more gay books gay gay gay that me