Jacket Weather

August 1, 2021
What does love look like when you're not cool anymore? A little older, a little wiser, and just as bewildering and overwhelming. This slice of contemporary life in New York City could have ended poorly, � la movies like (500) Days of Summer or Blue Valentine, but DeCapite clearly has the acumen to make this brittle, sweet fable both romantic and realistic at the same time. The narrator, Mike, is a bit of a nonentity beyond the way we experience the world through his eyes. The big earthquake that begins the book is his meeting with an old acquaintance named June, a survivor of the bygone punk years who still keeps a scrapbook with, for example, a cigarette she bummed from Iggy Pop. Mike becomes consumed by the soon-to-be-divorced June, still a bit gun-shy despite her adventurous nature. "I've always had a thing for you---twenty years ago I had a thing for you," she tells him. "I was nervous to be around you because you're a writer, I just thought you're so smart, you were the coolest thing but you were married. Now I'm getting divorced, I need to be there for my divorce. I need to feel it and go through it, and I need to take my heart back and have my own life again." Honest? Kind of. Heartbreaking? Absolutely. But DeCapite doesn't dwell on the maudlin, instead constructing a narrative composed of equal parts Mike's angst and self-doubt, June's enigmatic behavior, and Mike's exchanges with the old fellas at the 14th Street Y, who share stories of gangsters, God, and other memories. In the meantime, Mike and June hold on for dear life. "Step by step, you go from the inside to the outside," he explains. "Life is a process of being gently shown the door." It's a completely confounding relationship, which makes it feel so very real. A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away.

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August 30, 2021
Themes of love and aging propel DeCapite’s spare and lyrical novel (after Through the Windshield). Mike, a middle-aged man, has been living in New York City since the 1980s. His eye for the rusty, worn-down sheen of the city’s surfaces reflects his own malaise, as do his thoughts while walking around (“How long could I go unnoticed in a guard box on the Manhattan Bridge?”). A chance encounter with June, an old acquaintance, rekindles memories from 20 years earlier. June reveals she is leaving her current husband, which fuels Mike’s obsession (“I’ve always had a thing for you,” he tells her). The feeling, it turns out, is mutual. Yet Mike and June both operate in the past, using their midlife realizations and woe to sound off on their feeling that life didn’t add up the way they expected. DeCapite has a poet’s eye for the city’s majestic details, and illustrates how his characters come to see the same things differently over the years. DaCapite ultimately shows how Mike and June can’t control the forces around them, but they can hold onto the memories that helped shape them, adding up to a worthwhile meditation.

October 1, 2021
DeCapite's (Radiant Fog, 2013) latest is a wistful novel that focuses on the rekindling of a long-dormant relationship between Mike and June, who were previously together in the 1980s. June, recently divorced, was big in the New York music scene of the time, and has seemingly met everyone of note. In clipped, stylized prose, this novel whisks through a decade of Mike's life: His two previous marriages, his love of June, his regrets, his memories, and some long discussions about pasta. While DeCapite's tale is reminiscent of Kate Walbert's Our Kind (2004) in its focus on time, his protagonist Mike feels like a character from Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City who has reached middle age. Effortlessly drifting through the years and narrative forms--one repeated trick is to format June's discussions as a sitcom script--this is almost a sepia-tinted look back at a man's life and a past New York. DeCapite is a phenomenally skilled writer: Little happens here, but the dialogue is rich, believable, and often very funny, and this is a wonderfully unusual meditation on nostalgia and love.

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