CRAZY SORROW
By Vince Passaro
Why is sex so boring?
That is the question that kept running through my mind as I read Vince Passaro’s intelligent, serious and unapologetically explicit new book, “Crazy Sorrow.” Passaro’s second novel (his first, “Violence, Nudity, Adult Content,” was published in 2002), “Crazy Sorrow” follows the on-again-off-again couple George and Anna over the course of decades.
They are college students — he’s at Columbia, she’s at Barnard — when they meet on July 4, 1976. They’ve joined swarms of other New Yorkers to watch the bicentennial fireworks from a litter-strewn landfill jutting off the southern tip of Manhattan, a piece of land that is not yet known as Battery Park City. But in 1976, the world was different: “The country hadn’t yet slow-squeezed the hope out of all but the richest of its citizens,” Passaro writes.
After being introduced by mutual friends, George and Anna banter in the way of bookish young people: “Too bad we’re not in Spain,” George says. “And this isn’t a Hemingway story with a somehow miserable but inconclusive ending.” Apparently Anna is charmed, because within 24 hours they are in bed, where George “stared into her as an explorer would.” They become a couple.
The novel jumps ahead a few months, to an autumn evening in which they drop acid together. A long, meandering scene ensues. They roam the city, having the kind of conversations people have when tripping. (“We cannot walk on water and we cannot walk on air,” George pronounces.) Late that night, when they return to campus, the wind is spoken of a great deal. Also: the impossibility of remembering anything fully. Anna, still tripping and by then also stoned, winds up cheating on George. She confesses the next day. George breaks up with her. In the world of the novel, this is a central event. The question of whether they will reunite in the years to come will hang over much of the rest of the book.
And yet it’s hard to care all that much. “Crazy Sorrow” succeeds at many things — it’s sometimes gorgeously written; it frequently evokes the texture of the city with precision and artfulness; the perspective it brings to bear is both large-minded and discerning. But the one thing it doesn’t quite succeed at is in bringing its main characters to life.
On Page 4, we are told that George is “usually detached, notoriously a cynic.” This passing bit of description is revealing — not about George but about the novel’s primary limitation. “Crazy Sorrow” is short on scenes in which personality traits, like cynicism and detachment, are dramatized through dialogue and action. The meet-cute at the bicentennial, the ensuing sex, the tripping sequence, none of them really do it; at heart these scenes are about a girl and a boy meeting, not about George and Anna as individuals.
After they break up, the two of them finish college, embark on their first jobs, see each other sometimes and sleep together occasionally. Mostly, though, they sleep with other people. Years pass. The reader learns about the traumas they each endured before they met: sexual abuse and an alcoholic mother for George; a missing brother and wounded, emotionally absent parents for Anna.
“Crazy Sorrow” isn’t tightly plotted. It’s composed of scenes that are pointillistic moments in time. And a fair percentage of these moments involve sex. Bodies are described frankly and graphically, and not just female bodies: “Crazy Sorrow” is equal-opportunity in its gaze. Anna describes a man she has a fling with in Europe as having a penis that is small and unyielding, “like a warm stone extrusion.” Orgasms are recounted with the dutifulness of a teenager reporting back to friends. (The reader is usually told who has them, how many and in what order.)
Every once in a while, in one of these sex scenes, Passaro has something genuinely interesting to say. For example, during his only sexual encounter with another man, George thinks while receiving oral sex: “It was more intense somehow. … He was being distinctly served, out of admiration. … He didn’t sleep with women who behaved that way, who were into servicing a man or into the distinct erotic possibilities of his body parts — who were erotically gratified by touching him, or by looking at him, as a body. They were gratified by him socially, emotionally, but not erotically. He was gratified by those aspects of a woman; it was never anything he detected the women feeling.”
This is great: smart, original, full of implication. Unfortunately, much of the sex depicted isn’t nearly so interesting. The grunts, the pinching (even the occasional kicking), the slowing down to put off orgasm and speeding up and slowing down again, the “expressive” mouths that “communicated want” — the whole litany of matter-of-fact detail about mostly fleeting and not particularly memorable erotic encounters begins to feel rather grim.
This may be Passaro’s point — George and Anna are supposed to be emotionally damaged, after all (see list of early traumas) — but that doesn’t make it any less tedious to read. The language in which these acts are described is concrete but flat. Humor, which might leaven the procession of body parts, isn’t absent entirely but is rather scarce, and when it comes to character development, the sex scenes give rise mostly to the kind of canned insights that might feel earned in therapy but don’t tend to come alive on the page. In the course of one fling, Anna realizes “she was no longer seeking love and affection from men, or not at first, not erotically: She wanted selfish desire on their faces, even a trace of contempt.” This, she presumes, has something to do with the fact that the men she loved “had walked away from her.”
What a relief when the book turns its focus from George’s and Anna’s love lives to George’s career. Finally, something interesting. In his early 20s, George was underemployed and apparently without ambition. He wound up helping a guy named Burke to run a coffee truck. Burke is a late-capitalist visionary. With George’s help, he parlays the cart into an East Village cafe called Brown and Co., which eventually becomes a national chain, which becomes an international chain (modeled on Starbucks). During the very decades when New York City itself seemed to undergo a similar transformation, George, without ever having meant to, becomes extremely wealthy.
He has mixed feelings about this, as well as about what Brown and Co. eventually became. “There is,” he thinks, “a difference between serving a real need, based in the habits and desires of a community, a society, a culture, and instead constantly creating needs, deploying vestigial nostalgic notions of community and culture.” Meanwhile, Brown and Co. is obliged to push down labor costs any way it can — it’s the imperative of the market, after all.
Whereas the sex scenes seem rudderless, without either a larger purpose or enough vim to keep them interesting, George’s perceptive, often original reflections on wealth, on the city, on grief and melancholy add up to something bigger, ultimately giving the novel a pull that it lacks in the early going.
Late in the book, George will tell his son Nate that when he was young, in the 1970s, people were free in a way that they might never be again in his lifetime. Nate responds that his father is being ridiculous. Black people weren’t so free, he points out: “Weren’t they still exterminating the Black Panthers at that point?” But we readers also know exactly what George means, because what Passaro has done well in “Crazy Sorrow” is evoke not George and Anna’s attraction to each other, not a romantic hero and heroine, but a vanished time and place — the mood on that gritty landfill off the financial district in 1976.
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