 | A WRITER'S WIT |  T. Gunn |
MY BOOK WORLD
Zebrun, Gary. Hart Island: A Novel. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 2024.
A finalist for the most recent Ferro-Grumley Award in Fiction, this grisly but redemptive novel is set on the also boot-shaped protrusion (like Italy) known as Hart Island in New York City. Each day, Sal Cusumano travels back and forth from home in Staten Island to Hart, where he, along with Riker’s Island inmates, buries unfortunates: the indigent, the unknown, particularly the unclaimed, the bodies (at one time babies in the arms of their mothers) no one knows is missing. In fact, it is the infants without identities who cause Sal to mourn most grievously, though silently, and usually quite alone.
Sal’s life is complicated. Once a fine specimen and captain for the Coast Guard, he was drummed out during the early days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell for being gay. He has been lovers with an adopted brother (now a priest, go figure) since they were children—a committed and still carnal relationship. Sal’s older brother is a Manhattan homicide detective who hobnobs with the mafia. Their mother suffers dementia and needs round-the-clock attention. What a cheerful life, and what can go wrong!
Father Justin’s simple theory, that “faith and eternal life are all about kindness” (39), exemplifies his quiet manner of pursuing a ministry. How he lives with an unbeliever (or disbeliever) like Sal is at times difficult to understand. Yet a part of Sal is like Justin, caring for others, though they now happen to be dead. A certain foreshadowing exists that Sal is going to die, even that he’s going to die at the hands of his brother the mobster-detective, Antony, but how it plays out is a bitter irony not to be missed.
Following Sal’s death, the Riker’s Island gang perform sort of a secular burial mass, where they lay the unfortunate Sal to rest in this potter’s field known as Hart Island—substituting their oft-consumed Jameson Irish Whiskey for a certain grape drink. They conclude by playing Eric Clapton’s song, “Tears from Heaven” and this apparently literary crowd citing from Derek Walcott’s poem (Sea Canes): Half my friends are dead. / I will make you new ones, said earth. / No, give me them back as they were, instead, / with faults and all, I cried (179). “The dead don’t know how or why Sal has ended up with them, but they welcome him into their earth, someone they know. They can almost taste the whiskey mourners pass around. They see how much the captain was cared for and wonder, if love like this is buried in this earth, can it spread through their graves, too” (180).
A more fitting end this novel could not have.
A finalist for the most recent Ferro-Grumley Award in Fiction, this grisly but redemptive novel is set on the also boot-shaped protrusion (like Italy) known as Hart Island in New York City. Each day, Sal Cusumano travels back and forth from home in Staten Island to Hart, where he, along with Riker’s Island inmates, buries unfortunates: the indigent, the unknown, particularly the unclaimed, the bodies (at one time babies in the arms of their mothers) no one knows is missing. In fact, it is the infants without identities who cause Sal to mourn most grievously, though silently, and usually quite alone.
Sal’s life is complicated. Once a fine specimen and captain for the Coast Guard, he was drummed out during the early days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell for being gay. He has been lovers with an adopted brother (now a priest, go figure) since they were children—a committed and still carnal relationship. Sal’s older brother is a Manhattan homicide detective who hobnobs with the mafia. Their mother suffers dementia and needs round-the-clock attention. What a cheerful life, and what can go wrong!
Father Justin’s simple theory, that “faith and eternal life are all about kindness” (39), exemplifies his quiet manner of pursuing a ministry. How he lives with an unbeliever (or disbeliever) like Sal is at times difficult to understand. Yet a part of Sal is like Justin, caring for others, though they now happen to be dead. A certain foreshadowing exists that Sal is going to die, even that he’s going to die at the hands of his brother the mobster-detective, Antony, but how it plays out is a bitter irony not to be missed.
Following Sal’s death, the Riker’s Island gang perform sort of a secular burial mass, where they lay the unfortunate Sal to rest in this potter’s field known as Hart Island—substituting their oft-consumed Jameson Irish Whiskey for a certain grape drink. They conclude by playing Eric Clapton’s song, “Tears from Heaven” and this apparently literary crowd citing from Derek Walcott’s poem (Sea Canes): Half my friends are dead. / I will make you new ones, said earth. / No, give me them back as they were, instead, / with faults and all, I cried (179). “The dead don’t know how or why Sal has ended up with them, but they welcome him into their earth, someone they know. They can almost taste the whiskey mourners pass around. They see how much the captain was cared for and wonder, if love like this is buried in this earth, can it spread through their graves, too” (180).
A more fitting end this novel could not have.
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