American Dream may be selling experiences, but the mall always was an experience. The shopping was mere pretense; the being-there part was free. Just as Baudelaire’s flâneur roamed the arcades of Paris with his leashed turtle, converting the halls of commerce into a kind of poetry, the American’s eye for sociological observation was forged in the glow of the Orange Julius. The commercial backdrop of the mall provided the uncanny feeling of becoming commodities ourselves, a prospect we could embrace or resist.
Readers know from the outset that none of the trio died in ’Nam, as the lottery scene is a flashback from the summer of 2015, when the men, now 66 and burdened with medical and financial urgencies, reunite for a weekend at a Cape Cod holiday home belonging to Lincoln’s family.
Their survival, though, is the point. Russo, born in 1949, dedicates this book to all those listed on the Vietnam Veterans memorial, and the story feels informed by a strong sense of fortune in having his name on dust-jackets rather than the long granite wall of mourning in Washington DC. The heroes’ professions of real estate, academic publishing and sound engineering – sketched in with small but resonant details – might be thought boring in ordinary times, but for their generation represent a glorious escape. Russo’s subject is the guilt and responsibility of having fallen on the better side of fate.
Here are just a few of the threads braided across the 180 pages of Loop: dwarves, swallows, rubbish trucks, notebooks, the sea, survival, sex, friendship, corruption, the future, longing, Ovid, avian transformation, bad poetry, Coriolanus, power, meaning and triviality in art, fame, significance, gang violence, convalescence, rebirth. All these themes and more are woven into a glorious tapestry of literary enthusiasms.