Knowing an author changes your reading experience, whether it’s reading into certain characters to try to pick out people from real life, or simply knowing something about them that reveals something about the story before the words do.
This was the case with “Last Call in the City of Bridges” by Salvatore Pane, a guy I went to college with at Susquehanna. I’m pretty sure we were also both members of the film club. I’m also pretty sure the film club no longer exists.
Because the novel is written in first-person, it’s impossible not to imagine him as the main character. I’ve read books this year that had already been turned into movies, meaning I knew the actors and actresses who played vital roles and used them to picture the characters in the book. I guess my brain just took the easy way out with this one and went to the most convenient image it could muster.
One thing that is clear about Sal is his reverence for Kanye West. If you follow him on any form of social media, you will see Kanye frequently. He uses a Kanye quote in the beginning of the book. So when he leads off a later chapter with a vague story about an ambitious guy who crashed his car and had to have his jaw wired shut, it took about .0023 seconds to know he was making a point using the one and only Kanye. I wonder how non-acquainted readers experienced not only that section, but the main Michael Bishop character overall.
The story brings up a lot about our society, the influences of our technological culture and how that effects our interpersonal relationships. Anyone born in the 1980s is right at home with the role Nintendo, comic books and the beginning days of Facebook have with the characters.
“Suddenly we were taking pictures with the express intent of posting them on the Internet, to prove our individual self-worth! Because that’s what Facebook does. It makes everyone matter. It gives everyone a voice, albeit a voice contained within the parameters of the Facebook corporate entity. Facebook is reality television for the everyday human.”
As much as we recognize that that’s the case, and no matter how much we decry that behavior, we all do it. If it’s not posted, pinned, Instagrammed or tweeted these days, did it happen? Does your relationship “count” if its every event and evolution isn’t displayed on Facebook for everyone to see?
But beyond the devices, it’s a story about young adults trying to find their way, to figure out how they fit together and into the city and world around them. Anyone can identify with that. Read this book!!
Even before cracking open this story, I had been talking recently with a friend about the whole social media society and the way in which it changes the way people act. I hesitate to share this anecdote because I absolutely cannot think of a way to tell the story without it sounding completely pretentious, but I do think it speaks to this idea.
A few weeks ago I was taking the Metro home from a friend’s birthday celebration in Washington. It was about 1:45 on Sunday morning, so you can imagine that several of my fellow riders were under the influence of something. One poor kid was unable to contain the contents of his night (poor Metro employee who had to clean that up.) But about 10 stations from my destination, a young woman I’ll estimate to be 24 laid down on a seat right next to the door in the middle of the car. She used her purse as a pillow and slept soundly with a hole in the right knee of her stockings. Obviously a rough night in some form.
As we got to one of the last stations on the line, another young woman sitting in front of me pulled out her phone, lined up a perfect shot, and took a picture of the sleeping girl. She got off the train with phone in hand, and no doubt the picture appeared in seconds on Facebook or Twitter with a mocking caption.
I made eye contact with another young woman on the other side of the car who had been glancing over at the sleeping girl from time to time. We pulled into the final stop, and she walked over to the middle door — a foot away from the sleeping girl — she looked at her, then stepped out onto the dark platform and went on with her night. Other people filed out too, leaving just me, a male twice the size of a girl PASSED OUT at the end of a dark platform at nearly 2 a.m. Obviously you know I was no threat, but unless I have the most innocent face in the world, none of those people should have assumed that.
So to recap, we have a girl who clearly needed the tiniest bit of help — a nudge and an “Are you ok?” — and the most anyone else did was take a picture to make fun of her. Is this how we acted before Facebook?
(She assured me she was fine.)