In the moments before her fall, Quinn Dannies felt weightless. She was finally strong enough to complete the climbing project she’d been working on for years. The afternoon was immaculate—the air cool, the light a soft amber.
Pulling through the crux of the boulder problem, her heel wedged perfectly into position, Dannies reached for the hold above. But, as had happened hundreds of times before, she couldn’t stick it. She fell. Unlike those other times, though, this slip would change the course of her life.
My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.
Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.
“My whole career, that’s what you did,” Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who worked as a maître d’ in the eighties and nineties, told me. Reservationists were trained to pick up the phone within three rings; they’d write the name in a log, underlining V.I.P.s twice. “And you damn well knew every customer,” he said. If a regular or a celebrity showed up without a reservation, Cecchi-Azzolina usually squeezed them in. “There’s some kind of alchemy in the restaurant world,” he said. “Somebody cancels, somebody’s late, and you’re out of the weeds.” One night, when he worked at the River Café, in Brooklyn, a man palmed him six hundred dollars for a table. He said he could tell the denomination of the bills by the feel of the paper in his hand: tens and twenties were worn, hundreds were crisp.
In 2024, plenty of diners are willing to part with six hundred bucks for a table, too, but they are likely paying it to a stranger, via an app.
The other day, a writer interviewed me about female friendship. She wanted to know why some of my friendships had fallen apart. I said it was owing entirely to me. She said why. I said I wasn’t trained to take other people into account, and people get worn out by that aspect of me. She said how, as a woman, did you grow up without being drilled to take other people into account? I said that’s an excellent question, and all I can say is I wasn’t trained to do anything. It was the glory of my growing-up years. Parents let you out to run like a dog, and if you came back, they gave you food. No one cared about me, because they had decided that whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it, and they were right. I have to tell you how much I love my parents for forgetting most of the time to tell me how to live.
Sammartino’s use of third person omniscient narration lets us into his striving protagonists’ heads, if only to see how limited their own omniscience is. Jumbled notions of the American Dream and religious redemption get tangled along dusty desert highways, addiction support group meetings, social media optimization scams, and exurbs bleeding into an unwelcoming wilderness. And above it all—like Fitzgerald’s watchful eyes of T.J. Eckleburg—stands the Eiffel Tower Dealership, the book’s brilliant name for those creepy Carmax Pez Dispensers offering you a salesman-less way to drive to your personal heroic horizon. And of course, Rizzo has flopped as a car salesman.
Open Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Lucky,” and thank God for the internet, because if you’re like me (well, poor you), you will want to look up and listen to song after song. The quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful singer-songwriter in the folk-rock mode of what the narrator, Jodie, calls the “four J’s” — Janis, Joan, Judy and Joni — largely (and minutely) imagines life as itinerary and playlist, with the 20th-century American songbook soundtracking the character’s every painstakingly mapped move.