Author Mike Di Leo
The interrelated forty-two stories encompass a wide range of experiences, revisiting
characters, themes, and events from earlier narratives. It is an evocative and inspired tapestry that spans from 1970 to 2089, but not in chronological order. Richly drawn yet wholly recognizable, Di Leo peoples his world with fully realized, flesh-and-blood individuals, usually created in a few simple sentences.
The journey includes a brief tribute to the Moon landing in Howling at the Moon. The Love You Make is a heartbreaking account of a boy returning from Vietnam as told through the neighbor girl who crushed on him since high school. The ex-soldier struggles, as so many did: “I don’t think I’m ever going to get back to normal. I don’t think I know what normal is anymore.” Di Leo proves himself to be a master of detail, whether it is the irony of a street name or the face on a wastebasket: No detail is ever random.
The author celebrates much that is Long Island. The construction of the Smith Haven Mall and its central place in the lives of young people is an ongoing refrain. Riding bikes, listening to music (The Beatles), following baseball (Yankees vs. Mets), and watching James Bond movies (Connery vs. Moore) are the lighter elements in this meditation on American identity.
The Photograph is epic and intimate, tracing a picture of three friends at graduation over a century. It is a fascinating intersection of the celebration of friendship played against the melancholy of time. It is the latter—time passage—that is one of the book’s strongest undercurrents. Di Leo writes with a deep understanding of this fragility, evoking the more introspective writings of Christopher Isherwood.
The Prowler presents a backyard sleepover interrupted by an unfathomable event. “He looked up at the tree, but there were no streaks of light poking through the branches today. The sky had gone gray. He noticed that the bark was starting to peel on parts of the trunk. And some of the green pine needles had turned brown. The tree was decaying, and from the looks of it, it had been for some time. But Robbie hadn’t noticed it until now.” This contemplation of the inner and outer perfectly mirrors the idyllic becoming a nightmare along with a young boy’s struggle to articulate what he has witnessed.
Most often, Di Leo writes without comment, allowing the men, women, and children to
contemplate the world around them. “He drank his beer and sat in silence—a fifty-year-old
divorced man, alone on his couch, alone with his thoughts.” The coda to The Last
Cheeseburger is both specific and universal, Di Leo mixes social and ethical points without succumbing to the political. He addresses everything from weather to a grandfather’s wake to tackling issues of not-so-casual racism. He treats 9/11 and the pandemic with importance and respect. He finds gallows humor in tense situations, as in Night of the Batboy, in which a trio of friends confront extreme bullying as “Anything they might say can and would be used against them in the Court of Evan.”
The Fate of Glass is the longest, with an almost novella-like weight, painting the arc of a
friendship and the ripple effect on the narrator’s life. The author manages to be simultaneously philosophical, nostalgic, and appropriately amusing, building to a unique and honestly earned conclusion.
Di Leo’s constructions possess genuine emotional spontaneity. A college relationship is
explored across two chapters, bookending a mother’s reflection on her daughter’s departure for kindergarten and college. The juxtapositions of the stories transcend the clever to collective enlightenment, offering closure to questions presented in earlier moments. An embittered Wall Street broker looks back on the best summer of his life, and the passion he found and lost. Exquisite, painful, and as vivid a portrait of first love that faces truth three decades later. (Perhaps, love is finding the cool side of the pillow.)
Throughout the theme of “Be here now” remains present as the characters struggle with both Life and life. “No sense playing what-if. You could drive yourself crazy doing that. She had to deal with her actual reality, not any alternatives.” Live in the present—“Be here now”—but embrace the best and sometimes simplest parts of your history. “Robbie closed his eyes. As the car sped away, he thought of his mother and of ice cream cones and pretty girls and carousels.” Whether Di Leo draws from his own personal history, crafts from whole cloth, or an inspiring combination of the two, in the end, it does not matter. There Are Places I Remember is storytelling at its best: from the head and from the heart.
Pick up a copy of the book at Barnes and Noble or on Amazon.
