What is Dreadnought about?
Predictably enough, youth culture: who wins and who loses when a fictional biggest-brand-in-history stalks a planet-wide youth market of a billion souls. You see the workings of it in six tales, like Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views. “Everybody loses, but the party’s fun while it lasts.” I’m quoting jacket copy here.
Sounds interesting. How did the novel do?
You mean how did it sell? Not too badly, thanks. Some parts of it got up into the thousand-most-popular Amazon offerings during the weeks when they launched. I got two film options out of it, too, from an independent producer who found the novel online and liked it. So it was natural for me to do my next novels, The Culling and Other People’s Prayers, through Amazon, too—though for the current one, Now and Yesterday, I wanted to go a more traditional route and give the novel the best possible advantages in design, marketing, distribution, etc.
It sounds like you came to writing relatively late in life.
I started writing fiction only after I was fifty, yes. But between twenty-five and fifty I kept a journal that’s pretty good, I think—you know, hopes and fears, love and loss, thunderingly telling details of life during AIDS and the time leading up to it. Parts of that have been published.
Let’s get back to Now and Yesterday. Am I right to feel the influence of Victorian literature in this work?
Yes, actually. I had Middlemarch quite particularly in mind, in fact: a supposedly little story of people in a little world, embedded in a larger world where society is lurching forward. I wanted the pace of my novel, too, to be stately and Victorian. I thought that would work well for the situation Peter is in—kind of stuck and crawling ever so slowly out of it.
In your novel, what kinds of things in the larger world are “lurching forward”?
Oh, new forms of consciousness and identity; the shift away from those noble, citizenship-driven values of Peter’s father’s generation, toward the consumerist, brand-driven values of today. The latter is what the younger character, Will, grew up with. Seems to me, that shift in values is just as seismic as the one in Middlemarch associated with railways and the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it was all I could do to resist lapsing into long, righteous passages like those in which Eliot halts the narrative in order to lay out another fifty yards of moral vision.
Whom did you have in mind as your reader for Now and Yesterday ?
Well, to quote Richard Howard, who was speaking of poetry, the book is not for everyone, but it’s certainly for anyone. That is, it’s not just for gay readers. I had general readers very much in mind—including fans of what some people call “women’s fiction,” where feelings and emotions and memories really matter.
Do you still work in advertising?
I do. I often consult with major agencies and am also a partner in a media company, in addition to my various writing projects.
Are you working on another novel?
I sure am. After Now and Yesterday I wrote a deliciously dark, noirish science fiction romance set in 1947, a straight love story that I’m very proud of. It turns on a neat idea about World War Two and human evolution. Currently, I’m working on a new novel that takes off from the appalling gap between rich and poor in this country right now. The hard part is to keep the thing from becoming The Grapes of Wrath. I have something funnier and more buoyant in mind, but biting, like a Preston Sturges film. Wish me luck.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
NOW AND YESTERDAY
Stephen Greco
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included
to enhance your group’s reading of
Stephen Greco’s Now and Yesterday.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Peter is fifty-nine and Will is twenty-eight. To what extent does the age gap between them affect the development of their relationship? Are there examples in the book of Peter and Will attending a social event or performance together and experiencing it in different ways, because of their age? What other factors, besides age, prevent Peter and Will from getting together sooner?
How do Peter and Will change over the course of the novel? Does one change more than the other? (Make reference to the decades in which Peter and Will grew up—respectively, the ’50s and ’60s, and the ’80s and ’90s—and the kinds of “programming” they would have received from their parents.) Does Peter learn anything from Will? Does Will learn anything from Peter?
By the end of the novel, Peter has realized he is still wounded by the loss of his first long-term boyfriend to AIDS, and that that wound has kept him from embracing new love, with Will. What does it mean to “heal” from such a wound? How is Peter on his way toward healing, as the novel ends? In what ways, historically, have events like plagues and wars left whole groups of people wounded psychologically, and how do these compare with AIDS?
Some older gay men find they don’t fit comfortably into today’s “post-liberation” gay culture, where issues like AIDS and coming out are less central than they were in past decades. In what ways does Peter fit in and/or not fit in? Does Will, a much younger man, fit in any better?
How does the novel treat the fact that Peter’s friend Jonathan has survived AIDS only to be exposed to another disease associated with men of the age that he and Peter are now? With irony? Sympathy? How do Jonathan’s actions reveal the way he has chosen to embrace his fate? How are other gay men of Peter and Jonathan’s generation depicted in the novel?
Because of AIDS, older single gay men like Peter face an extremely limited dating pool of available men of the same age. What romantic and sexual options are open to Peter, other than dating younger men? How do these compare with the romantic and sexual options for straight men of that generation?
Peter and Will are both affected by their road trip upstate, to visit Jonathan. What happens to them, emotionally, on that trip? How are things different between the two when they return to the city, and why?
Is Peter fooling himself to think that the McCaw assignment is “just another job”? Is he a sellout, by the standards espoused by his upstate friend Arnie? Is Arnie noble for still holding on to his old-school, politically correct standards? Are those standards obsolete? Have they been superseded by newer forms of political correctness?
Discuss the way gay life in New York and life upstate are depicted in this novel. Are Peter and Will typical gay men? Do they, because of their work in the media or other privileges, wield special influence over gay culture and contemporary culture at large?
Peter is a member of the “baby boom” generation. In what ways is he typical of the baby boomers and in what ways not? Historically speaking, how might the expectations of gay baby boomers have helped fuel the Stonewall rebellion and other liberation movements? How have boomer expectations shaped culture at large?
Excerpt from “East Coker” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “The Death of Saint Narcissus” from Poems Written in Early Youth, by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Excerpt from “East Coker” and “The Death of Saint Narcissus” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.
Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59 by Richard Strauss © Copyright 1910, 1911 by Adolph Furstner, U.S. copyright renewed. Copyright 1943 assigned to Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. (a Boosey & Hawkes company) for the world excluding Germany, Italy, Portugal and the formal territories of the USSR (excluding Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Reprinted by permission. Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. English version by Alfred Kalisch.
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ISBN: 978-1-6177-3060-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-061-0
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First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2014
Now and Yesterday Page 49