Reviewed by Summer Block
7.31.07

by Anthony Giardina
384pp
Picador, 2007
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Giardini uses a real incident as a starting point for his novel. In 1989, Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, who were white, were supposedly gunned down in Boston by an unknown black criminal. Stuart lived, while his wife and unborn baby died. Three months later, the police unraveled the real story—Stuart had murdered his wife, wounded himself, and concocted the story about a black attacker. This story became a flash-point for Boston’s complicated nest of racial tensions and class lines. Giardini draws on this story as he explores ambition, duty, and manhood in1980s Boston.

His novel follows five Italian- and Irish-American men growing up in Boston’s working-class suburb of Winship. Billy is the undisputed leader, a handsome, fearless troublemaker who compels his meeker friends to join him in acts of increasing recklessness. Tim, in particular, is drawn to Billy with a lure that is almost erotic in its intensity. Even after Billy instigates a violent stunt on prom night, Timmy still clings to him, seemingly hypnotized by Billy’s brutal luminosity.

Billy’s father is a butcher, a quiet, faded man who takes his son and his friends on a series of long walks around the similarly faded town of Winship. Evening after evening, he leads the pack of young boys to the town’s boardwalk, where a once-vibrant amusement park called Fantasia is now slowly rotting in the salt air. Once a neighborhood hot spot, by the late 1960s, Fantasia is a sordid hodgepodge of leftover skee-ball games and dilapidated rides. Yet Billy’s father can’t help but gaze at the glittering theme park that was, and even as a teenager, Tim is haunted by what he can’t see. “Nobody wants to believe that there had once been a world better than the one you were born into,” he concludes, “but if that is the information fed into your young consciousness, it tends to stay there.”

“On these nights,” Tim says, “I’m convinced, something started in Billy, an attitude toward the world essentially hard, as though his father’s dreaminess were a strop he was sharpening his blade on.”

White Guys is about a lot of things, from class warfare to sexual politics, but this is the most compelling idea of all—that nostalgia for a world that Tim and his friends never saw, a world that maybe never existed at all, should poison their lives. This is the sad, inevitable inheritance of their generation, raised on stories of the Greatest Generation, the 1950s forever looming as a stern, masculine contrast to modern weakness and indecision. As Tim ages, he will continue to imagine himself in that imaginary decade, the pure, uncomplicated era of Billy’s father.

Billy serves a short stint in jail for his prom night stunt, and misses his chance to go to college alongside his friends. Tim makes his living as a textbook salesman, and “White Guys” is his private name for the company’s most successful product, an anthology of white, male American writers like John Cheever, whose story “The Country Husband” grips Tim when he’s a rookie salesman. Cheever’s dark portrayal of the American dream challenges Tim’s faith in the world of his father, and moves him to make a vow: “I knew then that I did not merely want the Life—the wife and kids and dog and boat—I wanted it fiercely. I wanted this dream so badly it did not even require individuals to fulfill it: a specific wife, specific kids. I wanted to cling to forms. Almost anything would do, as long as I could prove John Cheever wrong.”

In many ways, Tim is an immature, selfish, and deluded man, but there is something tender in his outsized ambition for certain fragile, half-imagined things. It is heartbreaking to see a man want something so small so fiercely.

When Billy’s wife is shot, Tim gets involved as a way to pledge allegiance to some older idea of manhood and duty, believing that involving himself in this sordid, stupid affair is actually a way to make his life meaningful, an old-fashioned call to action. He mistakes Billy’s menacing virility and adolescent rebelliousness for masculine virtue, and can’t see that he’s been had. His home and family were real after all—but his vision of Billy as a masculine hero is empty as that boardwalk theme park.