A Long Island Story by Rick Gekoski

Published by Canongate Books on July 3, 2018

Rick Gekoski's first novel, Darke, was published when Gekoski was 72 years old, which makes me think there is hope for me yet. A Long Island Story is his second novel.

Is it bad to give up a dream? Or can giving up a dream be an important step toward getting on with life? That’s one of the central questions the reader of A Long Island Story is invited to ponder.

Ben Grossman works for the Department of Justice during the dark days of McCarthy, barely hanging onto his job but living in fear that, like so many of his innocent colleagues, he will be denounced as a Communist. Ben and Addie live in Alexandria and are raising their two children to respect the struggle for civil rights. Their liberal political views make it only a matter of time before Ben is purged from an intolerant government.

Ben and Addie generally agree on political goals, if not strategies, but passion has bled from their marriage. Addie and the kids are spending a seven-week summer vacation with Addie’s parents, Maurice and Pearl, at their Long Island bungalow. Addie’s brother Frankie and Frank’s wife Michelle join them, as does Ben briefly, during his vacation from work. But the stay with Addie’s parents is prefatory to a move to Long Island that Addie dreads: public schools for the kids, a suburban apartment instead of a home in Virginia’s farmlands. Ben plans to open a law practice in Huntington, a stifling place for women. Addie can barely tolerate Long Island for the summer and has no desire to return to the childhood home from which she escaped. The stress is one of many forces that might tear their marriage apart.

Also having an impact on their marriage is the affair Ben is having with a wealthy woman who wants to support him while he pursues his dream of being a writer. Addie is about as unsupportive as a wife could be, choosing her family’s lifestyle over her husband’s happiness. She thinks it is bad enough that he wants to abandon his job before being fired; she views his desire to write, even in his free time, as frivolous and regressive. Ben and Addie spend much of the novel competing to see who can be more selfish, leading to novel’s most confrontational (and strongest) moment.

Maurice has his own problems, giving rise to a subplot that relates to a side business he operates — a legitimate business, but one that leaves him indebted to an Italian with mob connections. Ben and Addie’s children have their own anxieties, the uncertainties and fears that children have when parents aren’t getting along.

Some of the story is taken up by kids building forts and letting the day drift by, which might be a nice way to spend time but dull to read about. More interesting are the typical fears that parents experience: the brief disappearance of a child, the polio epidemic, whether to risk taking the children to a polluted but convenient beach.

Characters are assembled in detail, perhaps excessive detail, not all of it terribly interesting. It is good to know about the family history and the longings and failings and triumphs that shaped their personalities, but their individual reactions to the latest hit song and their meal preferences and the inevitable fights and illnesses among the children who crowd into the back of a car are less enlightening.

The setting is also carefully rendered. Ben’s job sends him to the South and Midwest, where he makes legal arguments in support of rural electrification to local judges who (as Ben imagines it) are put off by the eloquent “Yankee Jewboy bigshot who thought he could hornswoggle a bunch of rednecks.” The country has readily swallowed McCarthyism because the American public “has an insatiable need for someone to blame.” How little the country has changed.

While A Long Island Story did not consistently hold my interest, the novel’s best moments are compelling. The main story could have resolved in many different ways, but Gekoski bucks the modern trend of leaving stories unfinished. Given that the story is set in 1953, following the conventions of less modern novels seems appropriate, but the ending benefits from a modernist realism, shedding light on what a conventional ending to a 1950s story really means. If I didn’t like A Long Island Story as much as I liked Darke, the honesty with which the characters are rendered, the subtlety of the ending, and the theme of pursuing or abandoning dreams combine to earn A Long Island Story an easy recommendation.

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