Passed Up By His Own Life
Book Review of 'Luncheonette'
Volume 75, Number 33
| August 18 - 24,
2005BOOKSLUNCHEONETTEBy
Steven
SorrentinoReganBooks243
pages $24.95Passed Up
by His Own
LifeSteven
Sorrentino’s “Luncheonette’ serves devotion, depression,
dreams deferred By SETH J.
BOOKEYWhen a crisis strikes, family
members spring into action, but there’s always someone who becomes the
most responsible party, the case manager, or “the good one.” For
Steven
Sorrentino, when his father became mysteriously
paralyzed and put on a respirator on Christmas Eve 1980, he became “the
good son.” Not that he
hadn’t been a good son before, but the Yuletide ER visit became more of a
U-turn than a crossroads for
Steven.Prior to that, with his
father’s encouragement, Steven had moved to New York to pursue a career in
musical theater, a by-product of his father’s love of 1940s crooners. For
a gay, 19-year-old, New York City in 1977 presented a smorgasbord of sexual
opportunities and life experience––way more than he could dreamed of
if he stayed in the New Jersey suburbs. But when his father is stricken, the
older man worries about making sure that his luncheonette, Clint’s Corner,
keeps running almost more than he does about his
health.Dutiful son that he is, Steven
walks into the restaurant early one morning armed with notes and immediately
plunges himself into scoring pork roll, toasting Knipp’s rolls, and
learning the peculiarities of the luncheonette’s regular customers. Brassy
Dolores, the waitress who bellows vital advice in a mix of Polish slang,
malapropisms, and mispronunciations, teaches him
much.Over the months that follow, Steven
winds up giving up his New York apartment, and loses contact with his sole gay
friend, Parris, who wins a role in a theatrical road show. His father meanwhile
achieves a measure of recovery and, with the community’s charitable
assistance, remodels the family home to accommodate his wheelchair and secures a
van outfitted with hand controls. Already a fixture in local politics, the
father moves on to greater civic successes, not letting his paralysis alter his
spirit.It
is Steven who is shackled. Like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful
Life,” he has chosen to stay in his hometown and help out the family. But,
Steven has no life whatsoever outside of the diner and the family. Even after
the luncheonette is sold, he inexplicably remains, his sole downtime pleasure
being an unfulfilling one-sided affair with a married man. Steven remains in
this rut for eight years.There are many
ways in which “Luncheonette” succeeds––as a love letter
to a talented, determined father and also as a slice of local color and family
history. The book also proves that tedious routines can be crazy-making. The
last 40 pages of the book are the best part, as we discover just how depression
and the pressure to be the “good son” are Steven’s chains.
As a memoir, “Luncheonette”
serves up a lot of details, but at first very little of what led Steven to
abruptly lose his motivation while a very young man. The lack of conflict is
remarkable. There are so many daily diner details, you might just as well be
watching a few episodes of “Alice,” except even Linda Lavin’s
character did some cabaret and had an occasional date. Steven seems to be a
bystander in his own life, and we don’t really know
why.Sorrentino paints an icky-sweet
picture of his brief, rosy New York life and how the entire family hung on his
every word when he would visit Jersey. He takes it for granted that readers will
understand that life in New York was clearly more glamorous than in West Long
Branch. We read a bit about friends in the theater and men with whom he dallied
in the city, but learn nothing about his struggles there, even though we know he
was not a smashing success at “that New York thing,” as one aunt
puts it. There’s one failed audition, a post-mortem with other hopefuls at
Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, and one-night stands memorialized in
matchbooks, but that’s all.Any
reader, and especially a gay reader, would have appreciated some insight into
the lost world of pre-AIDS New York—fun, scary, different for a young man
still not out to his Italian-American family a train-ride away, navigating the
choppy waters of sex and drugs. Steven hides in the cocoon of West Long Branch,
just as the AIDS crisis heats up. Oddly, the word AIDS is never mentioned
anywhere in “Luncheonette.” Did this factor into Steven’s
self-imposed exile? Was playing with the big boys in New York, in bed or on
stage, more than he could handle? The twin
plagues of depression and pressure to do what’s expected of him go a long
way to make sense of Steven’s inertia, but in the end cannot fully explain
the despair obviously felt by this young man. Only years later, we learn via the
book, does he manage to put his life and his silent struggles into perspective.
As memoirs go, more self-knowledge and insight and fewer lunch details would
have been more appetizing.
Posted: Thu - August 18, 2005 at 01:29 AM
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Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:03 PM
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