My Cold War

The New York Times

My Cold War works better when it's not in academic satire mode; there's a painful, penetrating authenticity in Delano's memories of growing up in a Long Island suburb during the cold war and in his portraits of his relationships with his volatile, loner father and emotionally fragile brother. It's in these sections that Piazza—whose previous work of fiction was a story collection titled Blues and Trouble—reveals the depth of his perceptiveness and talent.—Sherie Posesorski

USA Today

Layers of delight are to be found in short-story writer Tom Piazza's first novel...Delano may be a confused character, but Piazza is not a confusing writer. My Cold War is written clearly and conversationally.—J. Ford Huffman

The Washington Post

… quietly disarming.

Publishers Weekly

This richly textured but uneven first novel by Piazza (Blues and Trouble) opens with John Delano, a Connecticut college professor of Cold War Studies, trying, unsuccessfully, to pen John Delano's Cold War, an unorthodox opus that looks at events as "pure phenomena." Analyzing surface and image (instead of "boring history stuff," as a former student puts it) has earned John popularity in the classroom, but some disdain in the faculty lounge for his "History McNuggets." When his father, from whom he was estranged, dies, John's concentration fails him; instead of writing, he recollects his turbulent childhood: his father's steady decline into mental illness, his mother's struggles and love affairs, the growing despondency of his brother, Chris. John narrates his youth with spot-on 1960s details-Johnny Carson hosting Don Rickles, the Summer of Love, the pot fumes-and poignant personal memories, from meeting his wife, Val, at a labor conference, to the pain of his mother's death. Struggling to free himself from writer's "limbo," John calls Chris, to whom he has not spoken in years, proposing to visit him in Iowa; he imagines that he will scrap his Cold War book and instead write a memoir about their reunion. Their time together is awkward, poignant-and might have been the start of a renewed relationship. But John's discovery that Chris is involved in a racist group sparks another conflict, and John's subsequent decision to visit the house he grew up in provides the novel's heartbreaking final pages. The academic play of the novel's opening feels flat in comparison to the powerful longing at its end, but this is an incisive portrait of a man, his troubled family and their place in history. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A brooding look back at 1960s suburbia, this first novel from James Michener Award winner Piazza (Blues and Trouble) is told from the perspective of college professor John Delano. Delano's field is history and his specialty the Cold War period, but he is disdained by his fellow academics for his less-than-scholarly approach. His estrangement from his childhood and family is so complete that he doesn't use his birth name and hasn't spoken to his younger brother Chris in eight years. When Delano fails to progress on his latest book, a popular history of the images of the Cold War, he undertakes a journey to reconnect with Chris and the childhood he left behind. The result is not entirely happy-he finds Chris in a rented house in rural Iowa, living a marginal life and hanging out with a radical, racist element-but this dark, personal, sadly introspective work succeeds in bringing to life the troubled main character. Recommended for most collections.-Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Michener Award-winning storywriter author Piazza (Blues and Trouble, 1996) delineates a historian's midlife crisis in his first novel, recipient of the Faulkner Society Medal. Narrator John Delano, a professor at Hollister College in Connecticut, made his reputation with studies of the Cold War focused on imagery rather than content. A former student who's now a hotshot New York editor has given him big bucks for a book to "approach the Cold War strictly from the surface, as you do in class." But Delano can't write it. His father just died, he's had some unpleasant run-ins with fellow professors who disdain his "value-neutral" methodology, even his wife, an earnest labor organizer, is increasingly alienated by his deconstructionist attitude toward life. He's plagued by unwanted memories: of his childhood in Atlanticville, Long Island ("classic Levittown-style suburbia"); of his father's free-floating anger, rabid conservatism, and eventual nervous breakdown; of his sweet younger brother Chris, whom he hasn't spoken to in eight years. Of course he can't get out of his professional bind until he grapples with his personal problems, so the overdetermined plot sends him off to find Chris, who has fallen in with a nasty bunch of white supremacists in Iowa. Our hyper-self-aware protagonist realizes that he may want to reconcile with his brother just so he can use their meeting as fodder for a book to give his editor in place of the one he can't write, and this knowingness is a problem with My Cold War as a whole. Everything is analyzed to death, and the insights are stale. You feel you've heard it all before, right down to the glib finale, in which Delano heads toward his hometown and turns offto visit the Atlanticville Historical Museum, where his past is under glass as an architect's model of the suburban development he grew up in. Intelligent, sharply observed, often very funny-the portraits of various trendy academics are a scream-but never gets beyond generic Baby Boomer angst.

Norman Mailer

"This novel is like a treasure hunt, which is to say it is very well-observed."