"Is your novel about you?"
That question has become very familiar, and partly it has to do with the use of first person narration. Besides that, anybody who knows I’m a poet as well as a painter, that I’ve taught at several colleges—one of them reminiscent of the fictional Hudson River College—and that I grew up at an Italian American restaurant and resort during the 1960s, is likely to wonder if the book’s narrator, Guido Diamante, is an alter ego of mine. But the novel isn’t only about Guido: it has quite a cast of characters beginning with his immediate family which is dominated by his grandmother. Among other things, Carnevale is a family saga.
“Nineteen years, you say? It took nineteen years to write it?”
Yeah. It’s a big book. It wouldn’t let me leave it behind, even though I did try to abandon it, and at one point the project lay fallow for six years. (I’m a slow writer, anyway, and a single poem can take me years to finish, and I’ve learned this is good.) My novel ripened at its own rate, sometimes more quickly than at other times. I discovered a healthy distance from the subject matter and characters once I realized how liberating it is to write long form fiction. I also discovered how challenging it is for the narrating voice to manage the individual voices of all the characters, their consciousness and also their unique speech during dialogues. However, once you have the right way of telling a story—voice and tone—things start to clarify of themselves. Different writers have different ways of trying to describe how characters and their stories come to life, but really it’s rather magical.
In one way, I think I could actually say the book is about me, meaning it represents how I learned to write a novel. Indeed, it starts out with the protagonist, Guido, believing he’s writing a memoir, which he abandons for various reasons when he returns to his teaching position at HRC. Other writers will get what I mean about the work being a reflection of yourself over the time you were creating it—not that this meta understanding will be important to most readers, who mainly want a good story and characters they can believe in.
One of the differences from writing poems was in my realization that an early analogy with which I encouraged myself was inexact: I thought that making poems was to cabinet making as writing a novel was to building a house. In terms of attention to craft and the scope of the respective projects this might be fair to say, but a novel needs more horsepower than a poem or short story to propel it. Or I could say, it needs a large enough floor-plan to integrates a lot of different rooms where the action takes place. One advantage for my storytelling in this book is the physical fact of the Villa Giustovera, where Guido’s childhood was lived (and which, yes, I remembered from my own childhood) and where his mother continues to live into the present time of the story. Here’s a partial description:
The Villa was "our house," and I knew how strange a place it was compared to the ordinary houses where other people lived. For one thing, privacy was rare amid the busy, peopled rooms, and the idea of “family” sometimes felt as vague as it did inclusive, because our house was also the Hotel, the Resort, the Restaurant. Although there were three different bars over the years in three different rooms and a cocktail lounge that was continually remodeled, the Villa Giustovera was never called the Bar, except by my father and his pals. To my mother, it was usually referred to simply as the Place or the Business—but it was also, indisputably, her home since childhood.
The Place haunts Guido in several ways, most obviously because of all the memories associated with it. His grandparents’ generation and their stories connect him to events that happened there before he was born, and whether or not a reader believes that Guido is actually psychic, these ghosts speak through him. Tarot cards play an important role in Guido’s life, just as they do in his grandmother’s, and they help Guido to learn more fully about his people and certain events from the long ago past. I myself am a Tarot reader and I relied on the cards as part of my writing process.
I needed to answer an urge to complete the novel, to a great extent because I wanted to preserve certain elements of my own history, but also because I wanted to salvage the memory of a more rural Mid-Hudson Valley that’s now gone. The book does end up in 2008, not so long ago, but even that era, the Great Recession, is already fading from the collective psyche. Beyond this, I wanted to write a coming of age story that would resonate for any reader.
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