No one
could argue that the Garden State doesn't command its healthy share of
literature. From William Carlos Williams's terse dispatches on Paterson to
Leroi Jones's ragged rages to Philip Roth's rosy 1950s Newark to Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, that
zig-zag outcrop, an afterthought between the mid-Atlantic and New England,
wields in literature the same outsized power it does in life—a crucial density
that belies its actual size.
But
if Jersey has its rightful place, it doesn't mean it gets righteous treatment.
Like the one-liners that plague weary residents—"New Joisey?" "Which
exit?"—the state, thematically speaking, is hopelessly circumscribed. Sam
Lipsyte's losers hole up in childhood bedrooms; Tom Perotta's freshmen, now in
college, gloom about hometown mistakes; chick-lit mothers dream of escape. (TV
dwells gustily on the region's putative violence: Tony Soprano making hits in
his tinted SUV; double-muscled, punch-happy "Jersey Shore"-ers; "Real
Housewives" who pull out each other's extensions and flip tables on a
dime.)
Not
so in Jon Michaud's When Tito Loved Clara, in
which the Jersey suburbs wink like a green light across the Hudson to
second-generation Dominicans in Inwood whose parents brought them over from
Santo Domingo, to dubious benefit, twenty years ago. Now, marooned on one side
of the river or the other, they're constantly drawn back and forth across a
rumbling George Washington Bridge, as if Inwood's Seaman Avenue and Bergen
County's Oradell maintained a collegial tug-of-war.
When
we meet Clara Lugo, she's on one such journey, headed across the bridge to pick
up her niece, Deysei, who'll complete high school in the genteel New Jersey
town of Millwood. Next, Clara will deposit her "ghetto-fabulous"
half-sister Yunis at Newark Airport, en route to Santo Domingo to live with
their mother.
This
practical rearrangement becomes a more potent triangle when Yunis reveals that
Deysei is pregnant (a slight complication for Clara's college plans for the
girl) and then, when, dropping Yunis off at Newark Airport, Clara catches site
of Tito, her partner in a brief, furtive high school love affair. Like Clara
and her white husband Thomas, Tito seems to have a young mixed-race son. But
what Clara doesn't know is that, although Tito's life seems a mirror of her own
(children! Miscegenation! Newark Airport!), he's never moved out of his
parents' basement apartment, and he's never moved on from Clara. Ironically,
he's a mover, but the only passages he takes between NJ and Inwood are to
deposit others into lives he covets.
The
book, at this point, seems poised for a return to the rosy-hued days of their
romance—maybe even a crack at it in the present. But Michaud has far bigger
fish to fry: not only the evolution of Tito and Clara and their respective
families after their emigration from the Dominican Republic, but the evolution
of the entire tri-state area, whose real estate price fluctuations have their
corresponding effects on the region's psychic geography.
Distances
that would seem meaningless to an outsider—Oradell is only a few miles from
Inwood Hill Park, after all—are full of significance to residents. When Thomas
expresses a "passing interest" in moving to Inwood, "among the
mulattoes, the remains of the Irish and Jewish communities of the last century,
to be one of the newly arrived middle-class couples who'd been priced out of
Brooklyn and Astoria," Clara responds, '"Why did I go to college?... Just
so I could live down the street from all the dumbass immigrants I grew up with?
I don't think so.'"
We're
used to seeing such picaresque depictions of culture clashes from the point of
view of the charming outsider (Paul Auster, I'm looking at you), or the
beleaguered inhabitant, who watches time march past (or over) his old bodega.
But where Michaud differs is in his far more precise (and correct, for the record)
depiction of the straddling of cultures by both kinds of inhabitants: the
residents who've brought the farmer's market to Inwood and the Dominicans
who've brought moro to Oradell.
Witness Tito, stalking Clara in Millwood, glancing around a coffeeshop:
A crossing guard, a man in his late sixties, probably a retired police officer,
blew on the steam from a cup of coffee while he read the high-school sports
section of the Star-Ledger. A couple
of mothers sat with their toddlers, whose faces were smeared with cream cheese.
One mother was black and the other was white, but they both had kids with light
brown skin. Maybe the white mother was actually a nanny? He couldn't tell. That's
the kind of place it was.
As
it happens, the simple event that brings Tito and Clara back into each other's
orbit—their old teacher's move from Oradell back to the old neighborhood—could
seem soap-operatic if it weren't the point. In such close quarters, Michaud is
saying, it's easy—even inevitable—for one small shift to bring two folks long
separated back to the same geography.
And
that geography may be coming back into style, as recent novels by Meg Wolitzer
and Francine Prose seem to suggest. Still, Michaud's pitch-perfect depiction of
NJ is singular, if only for the fact that it refuses to let its characters ever
rest there in peace. First generation children, Michaud knows, always have the
hard choice of staying with their parents or forging their new families alone. Clara
chooses the former, Tito eventually chooses the latter, and still, neither
winds up where she or he planned. Go ahead, make a new life, Michaud is saying.
But there's no way to move without breaking, losing, and leaving something
behind.
Lizzie
Skurnick is the author of Shelf Discovery, a
memoir of teen reading. She lives in Jersey City, NJ.
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