Jacket Weather.
Mike DeCapite.
Soft Skull. 2021. 256 pp.
ISBN 978-1593766931.
There is a plot, roughly speaking. Two old friends, newly single and approaching middle age, reconnect in the city of their shared youth. But what's more important here are the conversations between old Italian and Jewish New Yorkers DeCapite has apparently transcribed from his gym locker room: debates about 1950s crooners, recipes exchanged, whispers of who is sick and what is afflicting them. What's more important are the diary-like scraps of mundane reportage, rendered more poignant by reflections on time and the changing city: "Sun orange below the bridges. That's how you know it's August: sun orange below the bridges at 7:00 AM, the way it lays itself on the streets."
DeCapite is at his best when exploring the bittersweet and inevitable transformation, wherein the city of youthful dreams becomes the city of experience and cynicism. "The year for me is a continual recycling of microseasons and weathers and specificities of light I experienced before I was twenty," he writes. This collision of the past and present is one of the most interesting things about getting older. And Jacket Weather makes clear the parallels between the changes occurring simultaneously within and without us. You never really notice scaffolding in Manhattan until it comes down. And then one day it's gone and in its place is another nondescript glass box looking like it was pulled out of Styrofoam packaging and doesn't seem to house any people or businesses. "I don't know when the world changed," the narrator's love interest says during a discussion about a suddenly ancient iPod. "Because it happens gradually," he answers her. "Step by step, you go from the inside to the outside. Life is a process of being gently shown the door."
New York City is vanishing into thin air, and so are we—isn't it lovely, though, in a way?
Editor Note: Thinking about buying Jacket Weather or another book today? Please click the book cover link above. As an Amazon Associate, Eclectica Magazine earns a small percentage of qualifying purchases made after a reader clicks through to Amazon using any of our book cover links. It's a painless way to contribute to our growth and success. Thanks for the help!
