He sits squarely in front of us on the screen, a full-bodied man with a carefully trimmed white beard and a nearly bald head, his eyes looming behind dark-framed glasses—one eye glaring with cyclopean fury, the other with lid at half-mast, as if signalling a secret of some sort. Behind and around him stand solid walls of CDs—perhaps a hundred thousand disks—and sometimes, depending on where he is sitting in his house, a bronze tam-tam. He speaks rapidly, voluminously, with growling dips into the lower register and high-pitched flights of indignation or rapture. He tends to be smiling, and sings (often) in a scratchy voice redolent of old Yiddish songs and Hebrew chants. He is merry, outraged, laudatory, abusive. If Dickens had set about creating an improbable YouTube star—a classical-music-record critic—even he might not have come up with anyone as vivid as David Hurwitz.
I spent a lot of time at Fenway growing up. There’d be a bustling in the house, and my brother, David, would tell me to get my glove. At first, I’d think the two of us were going to play catch in the street, or our father was going to take us out to practice grounders and flies. But if my father told us to “bring coats ’cause there might be a chill,” I knew we were going to Fenway.
We would drive there in my dad’s Catalina, which was the color of amber ale, with chrome bumpers and door handles. I don’t know what model year, but it had that Pontiac nose and a black vinyl roof that looked like close-cropped hair. My father never seemed to worry about traffic. He’d ease along shoulders or speed down side streets to find a parking spot. If he couldn’t find one, there was always some secret lot he knew of, or an old buddy’s gas station nearby. He always tried to get “closer.”
One beach looks much like any other. Would you agree? In autumn 2019, on a writer’s residency in Cascais, a Portuguese coastal resort, I spent hours on Guincho beach. The summer surfers were gone. The wind kept all but the hardiest walkers away. I would wander from one end of the beach to the other, as fragments of dialogue and glimpses of possible episodes in my novel began to reveal themselves to me. I came to love the beach, to feel myself entirely at home there, at one with the whistling sand, the tireless wind and the grey waves breaking on its shore. I would be lying if I were to say that first glimpse of the beach had given me a Proustian jolt of realisation. And yet, even though it would take me another couple of years to make the connection, I did know this beach. I had seen it before, almost exactly 50 years earlier. And seeing it back then, witnessing the drama that had taken place there, had been one of the most powerful and formative experiences of my young life.