Review
Into the Inferno: The Brothers Silver
by MARC JAMPOLE
Owl Canyon PressISBN: 9781952085079
Review by Sparrow
Why read about a family? Why study the story of four individuals you don’t know, who also (in the case of a novel) don’t exist? Jules Silver grows up in Queens with a depressed, suicidal mother and a sullen younger brother. After a precarious childhood and a carefree youth in 1960s San Francisco, he settles down into a successful job and a successful marriage in Midwestern suburbia. After 25 years of stasis, Jules has a crise de foi. What is the meaning of his life – or any life? He decides on a novel plan: to contact everyone he met hitchhiking in the 1960s and ’70s, and learn their fate. This requires extensive research on Facebook and LinkedIn, a month-long road trip, and two-fifths of the book.
Jules rhapsodizes about his improvised journeys of yore. I, too, loved hitchhiking, and hit the road often around the same time as Jules – 1969-1985 – the great era of penniless hippie travel. It’s a very particular kind of loneliness, which at any moment can give way to companionship or even to a certain provisional friendship. You hear the confessions of strangers:
A long car trip facilitates one-way conversations in which drivers, often alone for hours before, purge the accumulated steam of fenced-in complexities slipping and sliding inside them….
For a moment, two lives converge in the intimacy of the true American home: the front seat of an automobile.
Like Jules, I would sing songs to myself at great length – in fact, some of the same songs! – while waiting for a ride, modulating my voice weirdly and inventing new words. Though I didn’t mentally list the 50 greatest movies of all time or the 40 best bands, I did have long, involuted, inner conversations. Possibly I am a writer today because I spent so much time standing next to a highway holding out my right thumb.
But I never learned the last name of anyone who ever picked me up. There would be no way for me to contact them now. I find Jampole’s premise unbelievable.
“Along an Unknown Highway” begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (in Italian) and lives up to that citation. Jules discovers to his horror that the dysfunction has leaked out of his birth family into the entire society.
Del Gatesberg, once an acid dealer, made a fortune in Silicon Valley and is now running for Congress in a self-financed campaign that aims to “lower taxes on job creators.” Vin, who was an activist Vietnam veteran fighting the military establishment, is presently the leader of an Idaho militia group. Jesse Yamana, an innocent, wide-eyed Christian obsessed with St. Thomas, is now co-founder of a Christian Chamber of Commerce, “fighting to overthrow the yoke of Social Security, Medicare, and other Muscovite plots to raise our taxes until we’re broke….” Bea, who picked Jules up hitchhiking and seduced him – in a bedroom she shared with her 10-year-old daughter – is now the coordinator of WAC-WAC-EM-PEA: the Washington State Concerned Women for America’s Chastity ’til Marriage Project.
And so on. Dante had the concept of contrapasso, where all sinners in Hell are punished according to their sin – often by suffering the opposite of their previous excess. Jampole sees present-day America as a brutal right-wing Inferno, where the sufferers become the opposite of their gentle youthful incarnations.
Besides, Jules has a horror of overweight people, which makes life in present-day America difficult. (He also is disgusted by tattoos.) But how much of Jules’s alienation is a Jewish disdain at the crassness of the goyim? (I speak as a Jew, not a professional anti-Semite, incidentally; it’s hard to tell from my name.)
“When half the nation glows with neon paranoia, trouble no doubt is on the way.”
Jules seems much more nostalgic for the ’70s than the ’60s. Looking back, that does seem like an easy decade, when “mellow” was a word – at least among my friends – used with total approval. (“Francis is a very mellow guy.”) Marijuana still seemed somehow daring, and the ultimate goal was to be a rock star. America has changed. Now it’s a place where literally no one is mellow, though some people occasionally “chill” – and where the dreamy half-baked idealism of the past seems as distant as Cinderella’s fairy godmother. The only options for a Baby Boomer today are: 1) McMansion-dweller, and 2) burnout (both gruesome fates).
The recent riot/failed coup/insurrection/tantrum/ragefest at the Capitol in Washington, DC, makes Jampole’s warnings look prescient. When half the nation glows with neon paranoia, trouble no doubt is on the way.
Poets write novels invertedly; the language comes first, then the plot ‒ if there even is a plot. In his Acknowledgments, Jampole mentions a number of poems that have been transformed into prose here. I see a Jack Kerouac influence. The passages involving music are particularly strong:
I remember our last day in New York. We packed up the car and headed onto the Grand Central Parkway. I turned on the car radio to hide myself inside the trebly crackle of pop music. The music went mute, as we entered the Holland Tunnel towards New Jersey, the passageway from the old life to a new one I didn’t want. A birth canal of dingy white tile and small flickering lights, blinding and dull at the same time. As we emerged from the tunnel into the Garden State, the radio signal returned to full blast. The Moody Blues. Since you gotta go, oh you better go now, last song as we motor away from unpaid bills, job firings, suicide attempts, days and nights of pacing and watching television, sinks of dirty dishes, hampers of dirty clothes, dusty furniture, car problems. Wipe the slate clean, Momma said. A fresh start. A new beginning. The first day of the rest of your life. Tell me just what you intend to do now, rows of globular moving lights exploding past standing ones through winter’s early sundown, Go now! Go now!
Yes, go now! But go where? Driving and driving and driving, Jules finds no escape.
About the Author
Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in the snoozy hamlet of Phoenicia, NY. He has published 10 books, the most recent being Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies (Monkfish). Sparrow plays tonette in the postoperative pop group Foamola. FB: Sparrow X. Carter Twitter: @sparrow14 Instagram: sparrowx. carter
