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John Delano, hip professor at an effete New England college, is skilled in creating the "History McNuggets" that he is about to purvey via public broadcasting in JOHN DELANO'S COLD WAR --- once he's written the actual book. Which he hasn't. And may not, ever. Because the longer he ponders the Cold War's larger implications, the closer he comes to realizing that it never belonged to him.
What does belong to Delano is the midlife crisis he's experiencing --- 'suffering from' might be more accurate. After his old-school Italian-American father dies, Delano (whose Anglicization of his surname was an early attempt to disconnect from that father) finds himself unable to productively sort through the material for his Big Book. Part of the problem is that subject and self have become hopelessly entangled. Where does the Cold War leave off and Delano's Cold War begin? He can't decide, and won't let us do so, either.
MY COLD WAR opens with a scene both unsettling and totemic: young John's parents receive a visit from an old friend of his mother's who wants them to join the fervently anti-Communist John Birch Society. Piazza's memory and eye for details pin down his parents like half-dead butterfly specimens: "The house was decorated, like most of the houses I remember from that time, in a mix of styles in which the elements had been stirred up but not dissolved . . ." He writes, "The whole postwar Levittown middle-class home-decorating Esperanto that everyone seemed, somehow, to have learned."
As John Delano's youth dissolves into adulthood, the world as his parents understood it devolves into chaos, with a long literary riff on Dylan at Newport symbolizing the shift. Meanwhile, his father's descent into mental illness leaves John and his brother Chris rudderless, despite their mother's attempts to introduce her male friends into their lives. Now, in middle age, John believes that an attempt to reunite with his brother may be the spark that will ignite his comatose muse and bring him literary kudos.
When John arrives in Iowa, carrying his father's violin as a sort of peace offering, he learns that, like him, his brother has created a life for himself. Unfortunately, that life involves the white supremacist movement. In another unsettling and totemic scene, three of his brother's comrades try to intimidate John. Very quickly, the rest of John's life moves out of his control --- and leads him back to where it all began.
Several reviews of Tom Piazza's MY COLD WAR have noted that its conclusion is much deeper than its beginning. I wonder if this wasn't precisely Piazza's intent. Like a New Historicist critic who starts with a scrap of paper and interpolates an entire cultural milieu, Piazza has given us a protagonist whose fragmented life gets its own Kodachrome moment. That moment may not be perfect, but unlike the photographs of icons that Delano has lived with, it belongs to him alone.
--- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick
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